Aisle 99 is a Sci-Fi comedy set in a fulfillment warehouse of a Kardashev 2 future.
It uses Toonboom, After Effects and of course Blender.
It is an attempt to ruthlessly optimize internet animation to tell a big story about BIG things, and that requires playing to the strengths of software.
Why 2D Character Animation?
2D character animation is fast to do and really dynamic and a lot more forgiving. Modern 2D software has a lot of the advantages of 3d rigs, Grease pencil is getting very good and I’m definitely going to use it more in the future for SFX.
Why 3D Backgrounds?
Drawing backgrounds is a linear cost, every new background adds a few hours of work. 3D is a much higher investment, but then I can get every camera angle I want for basically free.
Why Doesn’t it Look Cheap?
The characters are imported as planes into the 3D scene, so they interact and occlude properly in the scene. I can move the camera, or zoom in, or change camera settings quite a lot from from where I animated the characters on the reference render. So it feels a lot more like framing a real object.
The render gets post processing and paint ins.
I really loved the universe and the visual style !
It’s 2D anim but you managed to give it some volume ? This looks super interesting, do you plan to make some kind of making of or share a bit more about the creation process ?
Well done it’s super cool, I have to watch it again later !
Hahaha it’s amazing !
I can’t understand how you go from grease pencil to volume, but it looks super interesting, but maybe I should wait a bit and let you enjoy the release of your short ! It’s super cool and it would be sad to recall only the technical side. I should definitly watch it again, I wasn’t expecting that and that was amazing !
Btw: “Why does it look so cheap”? ===>> Only It DOESN’T. It looks great, other studios (Nickelodeon comes to mind) use this same artistic approach as art directed-choice, so I think it looks fantastic.
