WE DID IT AGAIN. Here's Powerhouse Animation's latest venture into the Sonic-verse! I worked on and supervised boards 'n character designs, and then basked in the talent of our crew.
Celebratory fanart for the release day of our Sonic Superstars prologue! Love the varying shapes of these characters, so it was fun to break them down into the basics.
Our Superstar Boutique team at @powerhouseanim is back, with a NEW short for Team Sonic! I supervised the designs and boards, but I'm most proud of pre-pro's color design on this short. So moody. Go team!
About a year ago, the awesome folks at Devolver Digital had us design and produce a trailer for their game Gunbrella. I helped with the animatic along with director Chris Beaver and animation supervisor Tyler Richlen. If I remember, the animatic had a pretty quick turnaround, which is why we split it between multiple people. Normally one person handles a 30 second animatic just fine.
Added the final for comparison. The whole Boutique team did a bang-up job getting things to final. And even though my design wasn't chosen, I enjoyed playing in the noir style.
How difficult was Miguel to animate? I read somewhere that he is 6’9 and over 300 pounds haha what a beast. Were there any specific things to take note of when it came to animating him? It’s insane how through his movements he just exudes power and strength. Even the way he walks just makes him seem like a guy not to messed with. Did his frame hinder anything in animation that would not occur on the smaller models?
miguel was SUPER FUN i loved animating him!! i feel like a lot of 3D animation defaults to super skinny characters that are basically just tubes, so it's fun to work with a character that lets you design the shapes into something more graphic
we had to think a lot about how someone that big moved, but also how they carry themselves when just standing and talking. we referenced idris elba:
when a person has very well defined and built up chest muscles, their shoulders tend to be pulled forward. i did some posture tests early on to help out with finding a good slumped but still powerful, natural standing pose
a lot of tweaking had to be done too whenever he was doing any kind of dynamic action because of how defined his muscles are, extreme poses tended to get off model pretty quickly. here's an example with one of the shots that i animated, i tried to recreate what his model looked like without any shaping adjustments:
i wanna give a special shout out to eric de carolis, who animated a lot of fantastic miguel swagger, he really helped set the bar for how we should handle miguel's massive everything when walking. he animated this shot:
so, yes! there was a lot that went into finding his character through movement and it's always a challenge to animate subtleties on someone this big while still making them feel heavy
HERE WE GO Y'ALL. My coworkers at Powerhouse are excited to finally share the trailer for Castlevania: Nocturne!!! Everyone has worked incredibly hard on this series, and I hope people enjoy the fruits of their labor on September 28th!!
P.S. - I did not personally work on this project, but am a bouncing cheerleader from our Boutique Dept.
Hey! I know you worked on Across the Spider Verse so I was wondering if you could clear something up for me. Is Gwen trans? There's been a lot of discourse around this and I was wondering if it's true.
i don't have the power to officially confirm or deny that as canon but personally, as a headcanon at least, hell yea gwen is trans
i see it the same way link is trans haha like there's no way nintendo's ever gonna be like "happy trans awareness day to everyone's favourite swordsman link" but we all know it's true
i've seen the discourse and i understand the desire to get something like that officially confirmed, especially in times like these, but i feel like what's cool is how her character arc allowed trans people to relate and feel seen without it needing to be explicitly stated. and, just straight up, there are rules that animated movies have to live by and the crew had to fight to even keep the "protect trans kids" flag in the movie. there are dozens of us (DOZENS!) trans folks that worked on spidey and it was a very heartwarming display of our coworkers coming together to voice their support in keeping the flag. it made me feel very safe and proud to work alongside them every day
so, even though i don't think we'll ever get any kind of official statement saying that gwen is or isn't trans (though that doesn't mean we should stop fighting for it!), just know that her arc in the movie can definitely be read as a metaphor for coming out and i hope that some comfort can at least be found in that. and the crew that worked so hard on this movie are fully in support of and fought for trans rights <3
Stop the presses, a ship that isn't queer!?? I love them so much, that I manipulated a gwen-verse bg so I could finish this thing before I began to hate them. IYKYK.