During the “HELP US” moment I increased the number of friends being emitted so it would look like the shaking of the boat caused even more friends to be thrown overboard.Pit People (previously known as Game 4) is a Turn-Based Strategy game developed by The Behemoth (the indie game team behind Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers, and BattleBlock Theater). For that section, Dan drew a few friends that I then fed into the particle generator and adjusted the settings to change the direction they fell out of the boat, how much they’d spin, how much gravity there was and the rate that they’d be emitted. For example, the “…carelessly sprinkling friend after friend into the deep dark ocean…!” moment. I also used the particle system plugin Particular by Red Giant when a cutscene called for a lot of objects that would be far too difficult to animate one by one. I used this all over the place to really make the animation pop. The expression lets you adjust aspects of the animation like how much the object overshoots your keyframe before bouncing back, how long it takes for the animation to come to a stop, how wide the bounces are etc. Same for the top part of his head.Īnother trick I used to make the animation look better was this inertial bounce expression for After Effects which gives that bounciness to the animation when objects pop into the screen. The “balls” for Reginald’s hat have large sockets so that there’s plenty of room for the hat to flop, but still stay attached. After the boat animation was done, the friends were “attached” to the boat and the physics engine plugin Newton was used to animate the friends. So this was perfect for creating the natural movement the game’s narrator would be using if he had actual stick figure puppets. The motion sketch tools lets you literally sketch out the motion you want either with your mouse or tablet. Most of the animation was done using the motion sketch tool for the puppets’ motions and manual keyframing for the rotation. The final product that shipped with the game. Fortunately throughout the entire process Dan usually liked what I did and if he ever had a major criticism it was usually about something that I wasn’t completely satisfied with anyway.īattleBlockTheater Intro Cutscene from Derek Lieu on Vimeo. I used the original cutscene as a cheat sheet as much as I could, but otherwise tried ideas and hoped Dan would approve of them. The parts that weren’t in the animatic, Dan either described to me or left up to my own judgment for what I thought would be funny. Each cutscene started with his rough sketches which I would use to animate and then swap out later with the final pieces with full details and colors. For the opening cutscene, Dan made a rough animatic to give me an idea of what he wanted, so it was my job to recreate and/or refine his animation in After Effects. After the narration was recorded, it was handed off to Dan who planned out the visuals for each cutscene. Also particle systems and physics plugins helped create even more effects to bring life to the crazy story of BBT.īefore production started on animation, Dan and Will Stamper came up with the story beats for each cutscene. Several features such as 3D layering, lighting and shadows could help enhance the mood and make the puppet scenes look more realistic. There were many benefits to animating the cutscenes in After Effects instead of Flash. After seeing the test, the development team felt that using this software would work well with the game’s look and would be very efficient, so I was offered the job to animate all nine of the game’s cutscenes, which I gladly accepted! In 2012, Dan saw my use of After Effects for one version of the Necromancer Kickstarter video I worked on so he asked me to make an animation test because he felt BBT’s cutscenes should be animated in After Effects. Later, the story was reworked and new narration was written/recorded to clarify the plight of Hatty Hattington, the friends, the history of the hat and BattleBlock Theater itself. In 2011, The Behemoth released their first opening and prologue cinematics for BattleBlock Theater with art and animation by Dan Paladin using Flash and narrated by Will Stamper (video below). Hi there! This is Derek Lieu the cutscene animator for BattleBlock Theater here to talk about, well, cutscenes!
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