“This is essentially an action car film as seen through the eyes of an animator. It not only speaks to the very core principles of animation to first of all achieve the effect in camera, but, once we nailed the technique the animations themselves needed to be amazing. Mighty Nice added an amazing technical and creative craft to this film”
Toby Pike
Director at Scoundrel Films
ON TRACK AND
IN CAMERA
So when long-time collaborator and Scoundrel director, Toby Pike, asked us to help turn Melbourne’s Calder Park Thunderdome into a zoetrope with Toyota’s new GR Corolla becoming the camera we jumped at the chance.
With the racetrack as our peg-board, we created hundreds of animation cels which were then pasted along the 1200m span of barriers, tunnels and track. Cameras mounted both inside and out of the car then captured the static artwork at speed creating all the animation “in-camera”.
Driving the creative
We used a combination of animation techniques so we could take the initial art and then find the most exciting ways to transform the vibrant, detailed design into action-packed motion sequences. By the nature of needing to print all the final frames we animated each shot at higher resolutions than usual.
The final animation leveraged a mixture of cel animation on 1’s, After Effects and 2.5D techniques as we found the best solution for each shot whilst still keeping a consistent organic flow across each scene.
A Mighty Crew with Nice Talent
and the most decent human beings you’ll probably ever meet…
