Dig!Dig!Dig! Arcade Game - Cartuna Exquisite Corpse
Dig!Dig!Dig! The Arcade Game!
A clip I made as part of a collaboration by Cartuna for Giphy Arts. The project involved numerous animators interpreting the given theme of 'Dig! Dig! Dig!', wherein a character is digging toward to centre of the Earth. We were given the protagonist's character design/colour scheme and free reign to reimagine their journey as we pleased. I decided to go with an arcade game interpretation.
To accomplish this, I converted the character design into an 8-bit pixel art form, taking heavy inspiration from Super Mario Bros. (1985), then converted my pixel art into voxels using MagicaVoxel. It took some experimentation to land on a form I was happy with. I created a blocky environment in Blender, where I then animated and rendered the 'in-game' footage out. I treated this footage in after-effects to give it an old arcade screen feel, then re-exported it as an image sequence, which I applied to a plane behind the arcade cabinet screen glass in Maya. The arcade cabinet scene itself was created in Maya and rendered in Arnold using Fox Render Farm.
A final render of the scene. The sound design is my unofficial version, created by experimenting in BeepBox and PixiTracker.
Initial character design ideation (before being presented with the base character)
Interpreting the given character design.
Various assets created for the project, including a logo, fake promotional materials, pixel art sprites and arcade game HUD elements.
Various logo design attempts, created in Illustrator.
Arcade Screen treatment example using an earlier design of the 'in-game' footage.
The initial animatic I made during the ideation phase.
Early 'in-game' footage animatic
WIP version of the scene #1
WIP version of the scene #2
A Still from the final render.
Wireframe of the 'in-game' scene.
Wireframe of the arcade cabinet scene.