Playgrounds Blend Titles 2018
The gods are delighted!
We helped with the title sequence that was shown prior to the lectures of the Playgrounds Blend festival, a large yearly digital arts event in Breda and Amsterdam.
Credits:
Yentl van der Voort (producer);
Thomas Fokker (art director);
Sander Wezenbeek (technical director/ lighting & rendering artist);
Luc Petterson (director/ 3D animator);
Job Op de Maan (generalist).
Sounddesign:
The Ambassadors.
Client
Playgrounds
Building the statues one block at a time
The 2019 playgrounds "Blend'' Titles where unique in a way, These where the first titles made by the students of the Masters of Animation program at the St Joost School of Art & Design.
4 groups of 5 students would work on their own part of these titles. For our part we came up with the building of 5 giant statues representing the gods of Playgrounds, each standing for a different department of the festival: animation, games, interactive design, robotics and creative technology. We also had to take into account that ''our'' part of the titles would transition together with the other parts. In the end the statues light up and shoot laser beams to form one point in the sky, as one ‘blended’ force. This in turn shifting towards the next part.
Some initial concept art
It all starts in the morning
Since we're building these statues in a short amount of time we quickly came to the conclusion to show this as a time-lapse. In turn, we also wanted this to happen in a timespan of 1 day. The change from night to day, to night again would add a lot of atmosphere to the animation and allowed us to play with the colors and shadows.
The colorscript we used as a guideline from the start of the building in the morning to finalization in the evening.
Automation is key
The biggest technical problem was building both the statues and scaffolding, each containing multiple different objects. The best way to tackle this problem was to automate it. We spent some time on a couple of rigs that would eventually make the process of animating this a lot easier. Just a couple of keyframes where needed in the final animation. Although sometimes floating geometry occured because of this. Some manual clean-ups where required.
The rig we made for the scaffolding. The same principle was used for building the statues.
