2018-19 ARENA OPEN
FORT WAYNE KOMETS
ABOUT
The Fort Wayne Komets were looking for a fresh and energetic entrance video to be showcased on their new jumbotron. Tenet crafted a concept that utilized the lore of Komet hockey and brought to life the "Jungle" (the nickname for their arena). Having just over 6 weeks before opening night and a team of one to complete the project, Tenet jumped at the challenge.
CREDITS
Client: Fort Wayne Komets
Campaign: Welcome To The Jungle
Creative Director: Tenet
Animation, Design, Rendering: Jake Thomas
Song: Welcome To The Jungle by Guns 'n Roses
PROJECT STILLS
STYLEFRAMES
Having a limited time to get buy-in on the concept and the visuals we knew locking in the look and feel right from the get-go was necessary. I spent about a day working on the jungle environment and another day working through the character design. The goal for the jungle was to make it dark and moody with volumetric lighting beaming through a foggy environment.
BOARD-O-MATIC
The next step was to roughly draw out the actions to line up with the beats and get rough timings for shots aligned to the song.
CHARACTERS
The trickiest part of this project for me was developing the characters and figuring out how to animate them in a realistic (and fast) manner. This was tackled on several fronts... First off, all characters were initially set in a t-pose and aligned to a Mixamo model's skeleton and the skeleton was shifted to the model's positions. The models were then uploaded to Mixamo and all "pre-created" motions were targetted to their respective skeleton and downloaded. Each animation was ingested into Cinema4D's motion system so things could be easily blended together. For further control, the motion had to be re-targeted from the motion source to an all FK version of the character's rig and then the IK/FK version of the character had its bones set as children of the FK rig. The IK goals could then be controlled further and gave finite control over how things moved. Additional motion capture for complicated skating and stick handling maneuvers had to be captured via an XBOX Kinect.
ANIMATIC
Here's an animatic with shots at various stages of development. This was the first time where pieces felt like they were all coming together. Still a lot to be done at this point, but the structure was there.
COMPOSITING
Over the course of 2 weeks of rendering, finished frames were composited as shots finished rendering.