National “Get Gnarly” Day

The Brief

Throughout my summer internship at Aligned, we were tasked with creating posts every Friday to help grow their Instagram following. We really enjoyed creating posts based on national days. We thought “Get Gnarly Day” was intriguing.

Get Gnarly Day is all about taking risks, and bringing life to the mundane. This could be something as simple as riding your dusty bike to work for the first time in too long, or trying some activity you’ve always wanted to do. The point is to break out of your comfort zone and do something that is gnarly, whatever it might be!

Concept

 Our concept was to literally bring life to the mundane. This short follows a girl and her pet dog, who do a gnarly kickflip together. This kickfilp triggers the old, industrial environment around them to come to life with animation.

Process

Marco Cheatham came to us with some fantastic character designs for the girl and her dog. After figuring out the series of shots we wanted, it was time to go location scouting! We found this nice stretch near the studio that was perfect. I particularly liked the “cube” glass door. I took a photo, whipped up a quick styleframe, and put Marco’s character in.

To film these shots, we had the help of Scott Smith. We used a Red camera and attached it to a Ronin stabilizer. We shot in 8k to have flexibility in post. To get the tracking shot, our team got in the car and handed the Ronin to Scott, who held it outside of the car while we drove.

Animation

One of my biggest roles on this project was animating the girl character. Because of the character’s design and the overall style, we decided to do cel animation. One huge challenge was our time constraint. We took some measures to make sure we were animating her correctly the first time. Below is a series of process that starts off with a live action reference we got of Marco in the studio. This was integral because we were able to see that the “kick-push” of his leg actually has a bit of recoil, creating a figure-8 motion. It also helped me understand the motion of the leg planted on the skateboard. I then took Marco’s character into After Effects and set up a quick Duik structure, making sure to align the joints and make each limb proportionate to the design. This ended up being a huge time-saver because I was able to quickly do the roughs in Adobe Animate over the structure, then bring it in to Photoshop for the cleanup and details. This way, I already knew that the proportions and movement looked good.

To do the cleanup and finishing touches, I added her knee details, socks, shoelaces, shirt pattern, fingers, and dog leash wrap. In After Effects, I added her head, animated her ponytail, put her on the skateboard, and pushed her back and fourth. The dog leash itself is animated with Duik. I used two puppet pin bone nulls: on each end of the leash. This way, all I needed to do was use hold keyframes to match the leash ends to both her hand and the dog. Because of Duik magic, the leash stretched and loosened on its own.

We were extremely happy with how it performed on Instagram. It was featured on #BuckUBack, Buck Design’s series where they feature artists’ work. It was also featured on the Motion Lovers Instagram page, where it gained +40,000 views and +7,000 likes.

Credits

Creative Lead: Marco Cheatham

Design: Marco Cheatham, Nicole Pappas, James Ortwerth

Animation: Nicole Pappas, Marco Cheatham, James Ortwerth

Cinematography: Scott Smith

Compositing: James Ortwerth, Nicole Pappas