juicy lengthy happy hammer behind the scenes (&spoilers!)

***edit*** lord i take it back idk why patreon decided to flip all my pictures sideways i promise it does not look like that in the drafts... gna fix that brb****

***edit2*** sorry for the spam... had to fix the image issue but it should be corrected now!***

honestly i sincerely love Patreon bc it gives me this outlet to just share unfiltered behind-the-scenes of projects (so long as there's no NDA) clearly if you're reading this, it's a spoiler bc the video's not officially out yet... but it will be soon!

i've been working on this since february when we first shot kiko in our tiny cramped office in Chinatown on a wrinkly green screen.... and now it's finally done!!! Dom and I wrote up the concept to be pretty loose but it ended up taking a life of its own and I ended up using like 8 different styles/mediums in it

I was so pressed on time in the final days leading up to delivery that I had to take ultra short cuts that actually (imo) made it better than a full 3D photorealistic feel. I even had to do stop-motion for the Clio plush bc there was literally no time left to 3D model him haha and I hand-drew some scenes to keep it fresh :) there's cellshaded 3D, photorealistic 3D, 2D illustrations, stop-motion, live action, even little kid drawings haha

the reference for the 2D kiko expressions was mindgame! there's a scene in there where the artists had hand-traced live action clips of real people and dom and I were just obsessed with that look... I can't say it was easy it was actually suuuuper tedious but the results were amazing!

finally the 3D clothes... yikes. Okay so we shot kiko on a green screen with 2 cameras:

1 regular smegular camera and 1 motion camera. The motion camera we used was the new microsoft Azure (literally it's the Kinect 2.0) and our friend was trying to dive into the developer kit (hint: code) and I tinkered with a liiiittle bit of script to just get the thing to record! the Azure basically shoots out 1000 little lasers and these beams bounce around the room and record the placement of things... so you basically get motion tracking without those funny suits or the ping pong balls all over you! once i had this data as a skeleton rig in .fbx format... I skinned it to a kiko shaped body and then simulated the clothing movement in Marvelous Designer. then I exported the clothes and imported it into C4D... and rendered it without the body! finally I placed it into premiere where I tediously matched up the clothes to the body... which I would never recommend to anyone it was not fun LMAO

i can definitely go more indepth on this process in the future, I have a bit of trauma from it at the moment...

this video project has been killer but it's finally sent off to Shibuya, Tokyo for its premiere at Kiko's event tonight (10/16 Tokyo time)!!! I recorded a process video of how I 3D modelled the happy hammer amusement park so that's coming shortly!