When the Barbarian group came to us, they already had a concept in place, they asked us to expand it and create a storyboard based on it.

We created character concepts for our protagonist, his tribe and their nemesis the laziness monster. The tribe originated from an urban environment but had been in the jungle for a long time. Their clothes would reflect this with a blend of urban street and Mayan tribal wear.

Their nemesis was a giant dim-witted jungle monster that represented laziness, (something you can overcome by drinking Brisk Mate). We created various interesting concepts and eventually it was simplified down to general urban street wear, and the monster was toned down to a menacing twine arm.

The production process went something like this; we created a storyboard, then an animatic to show timing to the client. Our lead illustrator would then create beautiful, super-vibrant key frames based on the storyboard. These would then get split up in After Effects with a camera move to give depth. All of the elements in the jungle, like bushes and grass would then be animated to make the jungle feel alive. Most of the character animation was done frame by frame by frame, we had a pipeline where one person would do the main animation then another person would clean up and colour.

Some of the character animation was done by myself, including all of the hand shots, as the hand was too detailed to animate frame by frame. One rig, which was particularly complicated, can be seen below, this one took a lot of thinking, layers and my favourite script; Puppet tools.