Side Quest

SIDE QUEST

Side Quest is a short story of a trapped princess, vicious dragon and a distracted knight. The knight must pull through and save the day but will he fall victim to the worlds of many Side Quests? 

The film was made entirely under remote working with 8 animation students from Escape Studios, London. We thought of creating a little fun piece by adding a gaming aspect of this film as we used Unreal Engine and RPG maker to render our short film!

The concept was inspired by Wreck-It-Ralph to make a film by adding a gaming aspect. The idea behind it was through playing a lot of video games. We would be playing 'Side Quests' but we tend to forget the main quests while playing video games. The Disney film Rapunzel and Onward were other inspirations used to build upon our own concept of the knight and princess. 

Both Characters were modelling using Maya and Zbrush. The textures were painted using Substance Painter. These were than rigged using joint chains in Maya. 

Character Sheets were created to help animators understand the style we were going for and the expressions we would be using. We decided to go for a semi-realistic style. 

We used our own life references to create our main poses for our shots. We focused on exaggerating our poses using hand gestures and really getting dominant and confident poses.

This was then used to develop our animation. We had one month to animate 42 shots. We used Maya to animate our shots. 

For our 2D animation using After Effects, we created our own pixel art that represents our characters. We used RPG maker to help create a map and create the gaming aspect we were going for. 

We had a total of 9 different environments and 12 different lighting set-ups in Unreal Engine. With the small team, we manage to accomplish an ambitious project. 

Credits:

Directed By:

Jess Hiles

Written By:

Jess Hiles

Jordan Coles

Produced By:

Priya Shah

Video & Sound Editing:

Jack Devereux

Pipeline TD:

Jordan Coles

3D Lead:

Konrad Peczkowicz

3D Artists:

Jess Hiles

Jordan Coles

Priya Shah

Mahamud Usman

Michael Davies

Animation Lead:

Priya Shah

Animation:

Morgan Mda

Jordan Coles

Jack Devereux

Flynn Smith

Jess Hiles

Karla Rojas Tarazon

Konrad Peczkowicz

Derek Fead

Natalia Lichanska

Paolo Amadini

Aaron Hopwood

Ross Green

Voice Overs:

Marisa Laraine

Michael Bonardi

Storyboard Artists:

Austin Hill

Anastasia Gurova

Concept Artists:

Jessamy Martin

Morgan Mda

Anastasia Gurova

Priya Shah

Lighting:

Jess Hiles

FX Artist:

Jordan Coles

Rendering:

Jordan Coles

Jess Hiles

Special Thanks To:

Michael Davies

Joshua Steyn

Niki Varela

George Morris

Aaron Hopwood

Josh Sobel