Hey all!
Hope you're doing well! How have the past few weeks been? Good? Can you tell I'm not actually responding to you because this is kind of a one way channel for communication and not a real time conversation?
As I'm sure you're aware, Cricket: Jae's Really Peculiar Game's animations were all done by hand. In order to do so, we often had to gather reference material in order to communicate to the art team exactly what we wanted certain characters to do for animation. This often meant some searches on the internet.
Sometimes, however, you can't find what you want on the internet, sometimes you gotta BE the reference.
Jimmy ended up being that reference. This post is a behind the scenes look at his attempt to get the creative juices flowing for the art team.
Be the change you wanna see. (This is sarcasm, this was embarrassing.)
The Panda Stan attacks were interesting: we wanted to capture the cynicism and cringe of the fandom communities, having been in them ourselves, while also paying homage to our real life friends. Ultimately, we aimed to hit the core message of "let people like what they like, and let them be themselves." We did that by showing what can happen when things go too far, with gatekeeping and all that.
With this pose, I wanted to specifically show the Naruto community, which is a show I enjoyed a ton. Maybe not the last arc, whatever.
With the Twila holograms, we wanted to showcase that Twila finds people on both sides of her heritage to be a bit frightening. The hands suggest an almost scary or threatening aspect, like they're out to get her.
This was Jimmy being self indulgent: Twila is expressing herself and wants to look cool to the rest of Operation My Cat, this is how she does it. Doesn't she look cool casting her magic and using her Drive?
Jimmy? Less so.
Prepare for scary shadow puppets! Since we were inspired by the Wizard of Oz, we thought it would be funny if the Dean practiced his stand-up routine on the students while also trying to strike fear in them via a shadow puppet.
The shadow puppet just seemed to capture the zaniness that we wanted while also showing how things have gotten out of hand.
It's a dog! Probably.
Taking another look, the reference kinda looks like Donkey Kong... What do you see?
And that's it for now! Did you like what you saw? Let us know in the comments or on our Discord!
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