BACKTRACK | 3D Animated Trailer
Mo is a nerdy schoolboy who is constantly bullied by Kelvin, a popular jock. When a running event is announced at school, Mo thinks that he needs to prove himself to get the bullying to stop. BACKTRACK is a 6-week project created by students from Escape Studios.
Introducing... BACKTRACK!
6 students had 6 weeks to do something they'd never done before- make an animated short film or trailer. The result? A fun and fast-paced 3D animated trailer following the story of Mo.
In it, our nerdy protagonist resolves to prove himself by beating his school bully in a race. Check out the trailer below!
The BACK STORY
Everyone loves a training montage, so that was our main inspiration behind BACKTRACK.
Created by combining ideas from directors Pelumi Oykunle and Pip Cowen, the team wanted to showcase overcoming difficult times by being the one to control your own destiny, no matter what anyone else may think.
Our Characters
It was important to us that we cast a diverse range of characters, and finding a cohesive cast of kids was a challenge. We didn't have the time or resources to model and rig 3 children within our short pre-production window. To negate this issue as much as we could, Princess Jimenez was thorough with their requirements and spent time retexturing Kelvin (Escape Studios rig) and Barney (Billy rig - HK Creatives) to better match Mo (Shelltoes - Plazma Studios rig).
Storyboard
Created by Blest Bokuma
Inspirations and Art Style
For the events and cinematography of our trailer, we drew inspiration from iconic films such as Mulan, Rocky and Kung Pao: Enter the Fist.
The art style was led by Yasin Tribak, and we were inspired by the new wave of animation which blends 3D assets with 2D texturing and linework. Films such as Entergalactic and Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse were our main port of call. To reflect this, we chose a Toon shader while Princess and Pip made 2D animated effects and hand-painted assets, like this delicious burger.
Toon Shader Challenges
The main challenge we faced as a group was the shader we used. We tested various types of Toon shaders before settling on AiToon which is compatible with the Arnold renderer.
Unfortunately, we discovered that when we added this shader to our master rigs and assets, the referenced files would break within our animated scenes. To get around this, we imported the Toon shaded rig instead and swapped the textures over onto our animated characters. This was a real spanner in the works just days away from our deadline, which affected our overall render quality.
In the future, we will test our full pipeline much sooner!
The BACKTRACK Poster
Created by Simu Weheliye
Looking BACK
Now that the project is complete, the group is proud of how much they learned throughout the 6-week project. From soft skills like managing our time and communicating well, to hard skills like improving our knowledge of Maya and Substance Painter. When it comes to technical issues, we were able to learn from our mistakes and implement solutions where we can.
The end result isn't perfect, but the process was immensely fun and we are proud of the effort we put in and the skills we honed along the way. This knowledge will undoubtedly serve us well in future group projects and in our personal and professional lives.
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