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Behind the Scenes: Stylized Car Animation
🕑 Added 2024-06-26 13:09:42 +0000 UTC
Yeah, summer! Temperatures rise, you can sit on the patio in the evenings, or enjoy a countryside drive with a rolled down window. Instead, I'm sitting here in front of my PC pushing polygons. So I can at least enjoy some of that vibe and get it on the screen.
And speaking of rolled down windows, I'm a bit short on vehicle models lately, so I thought I would explore the summer car adventure idea. And additionally, I was planning to do some more grease pencil in Blender, so why not join the two.
Visit the full Pinboard here
I started exploring different car adventure ideas out there, mostly looking for a vehicle driving through a forest scenery. Fun fact, a lot of these scenes include a yellow car, but taken the yellow works really well with green and blue of the forest landscape, it's not really that surprising.
But I really liked the ideas of a small car packed through the roof riding on a dirt road so that's what I focused on. I wanted a cool vintage small car, but I have already done a beetle, so my next obvious was the old Mini. Aside from Mr. Bean jokes, the car really is iconic and recognizable and fits right into the adventure theme.
The layout was a bit more forgiving, because this wasn't supposed to be isolated diorama, but rather full screen animation. But still, I made sure I liked the idea on the sketch first. Also, I wanted to do some animated lettering, so exploring the lettering style was part of the sketch too.
After a rough car and environment sketch, I started to think about letters and explore some ideas. The word adventure took me on interesting journey when one of the search result showed an old paperback of adventure pulp. And I love this stuff! In case you are not familiar with the term, it's all that good stuff that Indiana Jones and other 20's to 40's aesthetic adventure franchises are inspired by. And lot of times, typography style draws inspiration from the adventure pulp paperbacks.
So I thought it would be a lot of fun to create a title inspired by the letter styling of this genre, so I played around this idea while sketching. To make things easier, I brought the sketch into Blender for the grease pencil lettering as a reference.
You can watch the full process video on Youtube.
