Game Grumps Animated: "The Boys Fumble a Heist"
An animated short made with out-of-context audio for a multi-animator project for the Game Grumps YouTube channel.
Published online as part of “GG Animateds to fill The Void™ || ALL NEW GAME GRUMPS ANIMATEDS”
Created in Adobe Animate; November 1st, 2024; Property of Game Grumps.
I liked using Blender to plot out shots, and made several references for this project.
I'm going to show the breakdown of a single shot on this project, starting with the animatic, which I plotted over the Blender reference. I knew I wanted to do a shot that moves Dan from passenger to driver in a very cartoony motion, so this angle that shows all the seats in frame was useful for that.
I knew the audio for my segment was going to be pretty long, so I went into this project needing to tone down the animation to rely heavily on quick motions and held keys for a majority of the project. You can also see that the Judd head became a locked asset pretty early into a shot, since the visual gag for this character was that it never changed across shots.
Here's the colors pass. I'd been interested in trying to animate a layered paper style (inspired by the work of Jonni Peppers) and Game Grumps Animated projects tend to be a good way for me to experiment. To that end, I used layer effects in Adobe Animate to add an edge light and a drop shadow to layers to approximate layering cutouts.
The final part of the paper cutout effect was to give different color shapes different textures, making sure to have textures shared across similar objects, while offsetting the texture asset in cases where it helped to give a shape depth. The resulting effect is similar to that used in the Cartoon Network show "Chowder", where a lot of clothes are textured using a flat asset masked to the color of the clothing.
