SSOT reached out to have a promotional video produced for their upcoming Osu! tournament. Knowing how absolutely wild and amazing the game is, I had to jump on the opportunity!
You can probably tell this video was largely inspired by anime. I've always wanted to create a video which involved action and movement reminiscent to japanese animation. Even though there aren't any humanoid characters, animating pens and mouses were a lot easier since they only have that physical restraint, and I could be a little more creative with the way they moved.
You can probably tell this video was largely inspired by anime. I've always wanted to create a video which involved action and movement reminiscent to japanese animation. Even though there aren't any humanoid characters, animating pens and mouses were a lot easier since they only have that physical restraint, and I could be a little more creative with the way they moved.
The shader was a fun experiment. This was the first time I used blender on a major project. I was inspired by CRTV lines and felt that it worked with the theme on a digital level. It gave the objects more form than the traditional "cel" look. However, the crosshairs had no intention behind them, I just thought they looked cool.
Since I'm not actually cel animating, and only mimicking the anime look, I had to deep dive into different techniques using after effects and reproduce the look I was going for. Some of them were automated, like the streaks which were primarily done with strokes, and some were hand drawn, like the smears and impact frames.
Speaking of, here are some smears and impact frames in all their glory. I actually used them quite sparingly, since I wanted the arcs and the composition to really shine. The smears took the attention away from them, and so I only used them when I absolutely needed to (there are still a lot, but I could've added wayyy more).
And finally, best for last, here are some references that I took from anime as inspiration. Most people recognised the akira slide, which felt really good.
Hope you enjoyed the breakdowns! Thanks for watching all the way till the end. This was a special project to date and I'm glad a lot of you liked it :)
