We partnered with Earthborne Games and Half Giant directing duo, Bill Northcott & David Smith, to create a visually striking animated short film celebrating the release of 'Earthborne Trailblazer,' a new cooperative adventure board game. The film is also being used as a proof of concept for an animated series.

Set 2,000 years after humanity nearly destroyed the Earth and then rebuilt it at tremendous cost, the game invites players into a cooperative adventure filled with mystery, exploration, and action in a reformed world where humanity strives to live in harmony with nature instead of dominating it. Blending breathtaking animation with the game’s rich worldbuilding, Earthborne Rangers: Journey to the Source captures the spirit of the Earthborne world. A bold, optimistic vision of the future that stands apart from the grim dystopias dominating modern science fiction.

To build the world, we looked to the locations on some of the game cards and selected elements that we wanted to carry forward into the places the Rangers travel to in the film, factoring these into the story and look development process. Our R&D began with the fountain scene where the characters meet the Hydraworm. We wanted to design something visually interesting as well as functional, arriving at the idea of a monolithic giant face that is built into the dam infrastructure. The face would be crumbling with age and layered with a dystopian energy from the past. A beautiful, sombre relic from an age of greed.

Our design team had a lot of fun exploring how to reinterpret the characters from the Earthborne world for animation. Drawing on the original game cards, we tried to keep the essence of the characters and creatures intact while pulling their forms closer to the shape language of our desired animation style.

The Rangers have slightly altered proportions, with areas of dense detailing contrasted against some cleaner areas of negative space, making them very animatable and appealing to the eye. Our character designer, David Orellana, began with some rough sketches, feeling through potential shapes to represent the energy of each character, as well as trialling a few ways to approach the face styles.

From the initial sketches, we honed in on what we felt represented the character best, and settled on a way to approach the face. We also started to explore how they might feel from various angles and in an action pose. Once we had a clean line pass to work with, we began to play around with colour. The base colours were pulled mostly from existing art, with a few changes applied to get a different effect.