We are thrilled to have been able to finally share Bandit Hill the Movie with the world. Our work on this project began in 2019 but due to the Covid pandemic, release was delayed until 2022. Our Bandit Hill journey began in late 2018 when pro biker Jill Kintner reached out to us to discuss creating a hybrid live action/animation film for Red Bull. When we voiced our excitement to get involved we were introduced to Scotty Carlson and Lacy Kemp from Juicy Studios and found out that alongside her biking career, Jill was also a talented artist and the idea was to bring a few of her favourite character designs to life in this unique and super charming story.
The initial stages were all about character design. Jill was able to provide a huge numbers of sketches and drawings of the characters which we then had to prepare for animation.
Conversations about clothing, facial expressions, poses and even numbers of fingers were vital to arrive at the standardized look of the characters. These character sheets were vital assets for our team of 2D animators who were brought in to bring life to Fox, Squirrel and Snail.
During the animation stage we provided daily rough animations to the client and received regular notes from Jill and Scotty on characteristics and performance.
Once roughs were approved we would clean them up and colour them, before using motion tracking to get the characters to sit in the live action environment. In the creation of the fully animated section, we had to design a cartoon version of Jill that stayed within the design language of the rest of the film. We also created layered environments in 3D space that were then added to by designers working with Juicy Studios. The final touches of rain and lightning effects in the animated section along with motion blur, focus blur and noise in the live action sections completed the project at our end. We were already in love with the film by the time the animation was delivered but couldn’t believe how awesome the final product looked after Juicy Studios added all their final touches throughout.
See the full video here.