Global Game Jam Next

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This is what happens during a Global Game Jam Next event!

We had the opportunity to work on Art direction, Illustration and Motion Design for the official Global Game Jam Next 2020 keynote video and theme reveal!

According to the their official website:
"GGJ NEXT® is an annual event operated by the Global Game Jam® to serve younger people (12-17 years old) who are interested in learning the creation of video games."

As the target of the video were mainly youngsters, we went for a playful narrative and style, that captures the joy of gamemaking and learning new stuff with your friends.

✖ Go make some games and watch cartoons at randobando.tv ✖

Blocking the story

Storyboarding helps us visualise the overall video, as well as predict any surprises during the production. We have worked on a couple of drafts, and this is the one we and the GGJ board comittee chose to move forward with the animation!

Basically it tells a story of a process of making a game from start to finish: getting in contact with the global game jam, coding, drawing, music, making the game and making friends - not particularly in this order :)

With the boards ready, we distributed every panel in a video timeline with some audio to check the animation flow, if their order makes sense, and maybe if there are more panels needed.

Blending ideas together

We went crazy with possibilities and just let our RANDO part of the brain do the work. A lot of them end up not making it to the final cut, but since they were all part of the process to the final video - and we love them all too much - here is a tribute to their beauty.

Casting our actors

Sometimes we end up finding the art direction for the video or the character straight away, sometimes it needs a little bit of work.

Here you can find the characters we created for an early version of the storyboard, a couple of colour and design studies and the end result we end up using as a model sheet for our actors in this animated movie.

First pass

While the designs still needed some final touches, we wanted to create some animated tests with what we had so far. We ended up creating these GIF stickers that were done using the mighty Photoshop + Animdessin 2 workflow.

Animate away!

Since there are many game art styles in the wild, and specially during a Global Game Jam Next event, we wanted to translate it into our animation using some mixed media.

The final animation process was a mix of Cinema 4D for the main GGJ Next title, and After Effects shape animations and transform magic. Here is some process of we having the best time of our lives experimenting and working on every animation detail

The Final Cut.

We also had to compile every keynote from the GGJ guests and comittee in this video, taking care of animating every title and transition in a way that would harmonize well with their brand! You can check the whole keynote, filled with awesome talks like the one from Celia Hodent, who worked on the team responsible for creating Fortnite!