Need For Speed Behind the Scenes

hi  :)

This is just gonna be a sort of informal rant about some of the more interesting aspects of the NFS video. 

there's a lot of quirky stuff I tried with this one, but one of the most ambitious aspects was the 3D animation, which was mostly done by me friend Eli, with me directing the action. It turned out better than I could have hoped, especially looking back on the original storyboard;

https://youtu.be/iGfx7ObFLNg  

Most of the storyboard started with screenshots in BeamNG's photo mode. Here's an especially boring example;

I would share the screenshot with Eli, and together we would try to find an interesting angle inside the 3d car model they tossed into blender (They had also done some really cool node rendering shit which is how we got the black and white look). Once we had something we liked, I would take the finished render and toss it back into the Animate timeline;

Finally, in animate, I would draw over the finished frame to make things more readable and occasionally add a visual gag.

The same applied to scenes with motion; scenes were usually rendered with a static camera in blender, imported into Animate, rotoscoped over, and then tweaked in premiere to feel more shaky/intense.

We really wanted to combine the best of both 2D and 3D wherever possible. Sometimes we combined stuff because it was funny, sometimes because it was faster and easier than hand animating it, sometimes because it just looked cooler, but usually a mix of the three.

I had friend Owen, who had done the bulk of work on backgrounds in the past, redraw the damage we created in blender to add more detail and make the car better fit the rest of the scene so that it's less distracting. I love how these came out, owen is such a good artist

honestly everyone I got to help with this thing did fantastic work, and the video turned out better than I could ever have made it on my own. The only thing I wish we'd done different is try to stay a bit more on model, but a lot of people liked being able to see the differences in style so idk

There is one particular mistake that we made that y'all might find interesting- at one point two animators simultaneously worked on the same file to completion. This led to a painful situation where I had to pick and chose which person's work to cut. Fortunately, we handled it well, and both parties were cool we me showing y'all. 

On the plus side, it's really interesting to see how two very different animators interpret the exact same voice lines. It also accidentally showcases how much freedom animators had to do what they wanted with voice lines, which was a big thing for me.

https://youtu.be/R4_dsJRRwjc 

A few other interesting bits-

I ran the ad read through a real VCR, and I really like how it didn't just destroy the quality, but it also actually made it harder to tell that the background is just a piece of paper with a library printed on it lol

Also lot of people missed some of the quicker visual gags I tossed in

Ok and lastly I asked for some questions abt the vid and I will answer them here and now

Ioannis A.- NFSWM, when you talked about the color scheme, how did you switch from the base color to the yellow-filter, was there a in game slider or through video editing ?

There's actually a setting on the PC version called like "color treatment" or something. If you set it to "low" (gamecube setting), it stops most of the color correction. It's a very dry and flat looking game without any post processing unfortunately

Jadeskye- Did you have a bunch of material for need for speed underground 2 or did it genuinely all boil down to 'this but more'?

Kinda both? There are some interesting things BB did with UG2 but none of it felt interesting enough to warrant talking about at length. A lot of it was just 'imagine UG1 but improved'

Joshua Oddie- How long does it take you to make these big meaty videos in comparison to the cardboard cutout videos?

dude SO much longer. The part a lot of people probably don't realize is that the writing process is what takes up a shitload of time, not just the animation. I'm less sacred with the cardboard vids; they tackle less complicated topics and I spend less time thinking about them/writing jokes for them

DAREKON- Is the outline jitter from your lil man a stylistic choice?

yea it's called 'line boiling', give it a google if you wanna know more abt it in media

ThatRacc- when you make these longer vids, where do you start?

Same place as I do with any other video; find a topic I'm passionate about, start thinking about it a lot, scribble down all my ideas, and format them into something other people can understand. I don't ever plan for video lengths- they're as long as they need to be

ImTheRealSlayer- why does the porche unleashed OST slap so hard

DUDE ITS SO GOOD RIGHT? LIKE ITS THE PERFECT LEVEL OF 90s CAMP, I FEEL LIKE I'M JACKING INTO THE MAINFRAME LISTENING TO IT 

jacdhalina- where is the hotwheels lore video

I have been trying to figure out how to make a video on World Race for literally years now, I'll get back to you on that

clefspere- when part 2

When i figure out how not to make it an incredibly depressing watch 

ok thats all i hope you enjoyed some of this, lemme know if you wanna see more rants like this in the future, bye for now (smiles) (shits)