EyeCandy: Dark Riders

By R.E.D. Team | May 17, 2016 at 7:34 am | No comments | Eye Candy | Tags: animated short, animation production bay area, animation production north carolina, animation production sf, animation production winston-salem, animation sound design, character animation, character design, cosmos animation, fantasy animation, illustration, storyboarding, video game cinematics, video game trailer production

One year ago, our team set out on a creative side project. We wanted to slowly develop a concept piece that delved into themes and genres we rarely get to work on with everyday client work. The goal was to create a very short vignette, not a full short, just long enough to explore the concept, but not too long that the quality would suffer in the time we had to produce it.

We were inspired by the 2D animations in the hit TV show Cosmos. Our team has developed many such animations in the past for various client projects. We call this style animated illustrations. They begin as highly detailed illustrations and are then broken down into layered parts for animation. So the animation helps with the narrative but the illustrations capture the essence of each scene and could stand on their own.

It is amazing how much work goes into something so short. But each team member took their time to craft each portion of the production. We are proud of what we produced and excited to share the results. We had a blast working on this and hope you will enjoy! Please share on social media if you like what you see. Let us know in the comments what you’d like to see us produce as our next side project.

Credits

Produced by
Rapid Eye Digital

Directed by
Ben Young

Artwork by
Asif Ali

Animation by
Paula Decanini

Sound Design by
Ken Chow

VFX & Post by
Ben Young

Voice Actors
J.S. Gilbert (Ward)
Ben Young (Squire)

The Making of Dark Riders
Below is a gallery of drawings illustrating some of our evolution of ideas as production continued. There were some pretty cool designs and concepts that unfortunately didn’t work with the overall narrative. Our process began with a series of broad concept sketches. We created the brief scenario then went to work on character and environment design. We scripted out the scenes and developed a storyboard. Our illustrator then roughed out each scene, then revised and developed layered assets in Adobe Photoshop. The animator then brought these assets into Adobe Aftereffects where the characters were rigged for animation. An animatic, or moving storyboard, was created for review. Then each shot was fully animated, critiqued, and refined. Voice actors recorded numerous takes of each line and the animation timed out to match. The fully animated piece was sent for sound design while final post work got underway. Particle animation was added for snow, fog, fire, and other debris. Finally, color correction, polishing of the edit, and layering in the sound files, rounded out the production.