Jump!

Hello! we are 1brencell, a group of illustrators and animators from The One Academy who collaborated on this film together, here is our journey through it.

The Story

Jump! is a story about Max Choi, a parkour champion who has to face his fears to outrun a mysterious hooded figure in a race. His fears got the better of him and he could not make his last jump, causing him to relive a traumatic fall that lost him his leg. The Hooded figure is revealed to be an previous version of himself, cocky and confident before the accident happen.

Max had to reconnect with himself and remember why he loves parkour so much. This love ultimately brought him back and helped him embrace his leg

The Character

Max is an athletic-looking guy, we wanted a street-wear/ tech-wear outfits for him to fit with the setting of the futuristic city he's in. As Max is the only character in the story, we needed to make sure his outfits are distinctive enough based on each point in the story. Blue, Black and White colors for 'present Max'. Red and black for 'past Max.' And White for 'rehab Max.'

Our 2d artist then created exploration sketches. 

We proceeded to do material and color explorations to the characters to really create a distinctive identity for them.

We narrowed in on a design,created call outs for the props, and finally, create a fully rendered version of the characters

Our 3D artist proceeded with character and prop models. We had a challenging time with this process, which makes the production quite hard as the entire course needed the character model to create a believable scale. Our 3D modelers eventually got to a model that made sense for our film.

Creating The Course

With the challenge we faced in the modeling stage, we needed a way to move forward with the production even though we didn't have a fixed model yet. Here, we faced another challenge.

Creating an obstacle course proved to be a little bit of a chicken or the egg situation for us. Do we create the buildings first? or do we create the action? It was difficult to imagine an interesting parkour action without having the obstacle course ready.

Our eventual approach to this was, to create an action beat, to have an idea of how the action would flow in the film. From our 2D side, we created an early story beat

From our 3D team, as an effort to also collect animation reference and to get a sense of the timing, we created a proxy obstacle course montage consisting of different film/animation/game shots. These are the early building blocks and a starting point from which we develop the action

And from these we developed an animatic of the film. In this animatic, we are still using a proxy rig to keep the production going despite the challenges we faced in the character models

Building The World

Another challenge we faced was to create an entire city for the course. We wanted to build a futuristic city that looks realistically messy and crowded, without being too taxing on our modelers. We opted to go for a modular design, reusing a lot of pieces and props mixed and matched in different ways to create a believable cityscape.

We start by doing exploration sketches and establishing the technological limits in the city. We decided to go for a relatively close future, where we still see elements from the present like pipes, stairs, and antennaes, but mix a few futuristic elements like floating billboards, drones and holographic materials.

Our 2D Artists created a proxy model for the city buildings, and designed what the props would look like in context to the building

To create a different feeling between the VR world and the Real World, we chose to color the real world with a duller, more realistic colors compared to the neon, bright, colorful props the VR world has.

Hero Buildings

Hero buildings are the path that our characters took in the race. These buildings are designed to look different from the rest of the buildings, with more details and extra props relating to the race itself.

Our 3D environment artist then modelled the city, and we worked on a layout to start out the animation

Clutter and VFX

To develop the city more, we created multiple background buildings as well as the props we will be cluttering them with.

We designed drones, antennas, electrical boxes, multiple versions of pipes and billboards to enhance the city look.

On the billboards and screens we wanted to create the idea of a living city, with advertisements around the city, as well as announcement boards and updates for the race.

We proceeded to take these design and did an effects test, on the screens and the VR glasses display

VR Room

The VR room is another element of the story, we opted for a big screen that will surround Max. We designed a gray VR platform to enhance the screen effects.

We also created illustrations of Max at various stages of his life, his early start at parkour, his success and championship wins, as well as everything that lead him to his fall. 

Lighting and Compositing

Finally, we are at the end stages of our production, our 2D Artists created this color script for us as a guide for us during the lighting stages.

The VR world is colored in pinks and yellows, a sunset time for them during the race. the VR Room is colored in dark greens and blues to match Max's emotional state. And finally, the real world shows a more realistic sky and city colors.

Using the color scripts above, our lead lighter created a lighting test for our film, that eventually guides us through the composition process!

We have learned a lot of things throughout the entire project. Learning to keep navigating and adjusting and to keep moving forward despite the challenges has been the best lesson for us. Thank you for reading through our submission, we hope you enjoyed the ride!