Blackmagic Design today announced Amsterdam based 3D animation studio Colorbleed used Fusion Studio to create trailers for the announcement and launch of the video game 9 Monkeys of Shaolin.
Colorbleed was responsible for directing and producing the trailers for the side scrolling game. The game, developed by Sobaka Studio and published by Buka Entertainment, echos Kung Fu films from the 1970s. You play as Chinese fisherman Wei Cheng who has to avenge the death of his friends and family slaughtered in a pirate raid at his peaceful village.
Colorbleed took the game’s artwork and used Fusion to create the two unique trailers, repurposing and reanimating the original inspiration. The trailers mix narrative sequences with gameplay, superbly capturing the action and excitement of the game, transitioning from epic storytelling to ruthless combat.
“We immediately fell in love with the game's backstory and wanted to take that up another notch by animating it all in 3D. We doubled up on the special effects, creating flames, swirly smoke plumes, and impressive 2D FX that accompany some acrobatic animation,\" said Roy Nieterau, Manager and Technical Director at Colorbleed.
Colorbleed rebuilt scenes in the game in 3D using layering techniques and nodes, allowing it to light and direct the game’s trailers. Fusion Studio proved itself an essential part of the workflow, according to Tom Hankins, art director at Colorbleed.
“Every impact in the game trailer has hand drawn unique FX that carry the action to the next level,” he explains. “We conducted extensive visual research to create a specific style for the SFX, and developed techniques for integrating it with the 3D animated characters and illustrated backgrounds.”
“Art direction and precise timing skills are fundamental in pulling off such complex feats, and there’s also a lot of fun to be had. Getting all of those layers to merge and look right is of course where Fusion comes in.”
“There's a lot of clever blending and grading that goes into matching the look we wanted across the various sequences,\" said Tom. “Some special light effects for instance, are very hard to mimic in 3D and then reassemble in 2D. But Fusion helped to make that transition smoothly”.
Tom went on to conclude, “Using Fusion has helped us save a lot of time in this project as well as others. The learning curve in Fusion is not steep and once you get used to its node functionality you won’t want to go back to anything else.”
