Restoration Games has a track record of getting licenses to beloved board game classics and restoring them for today's discerning board game audiences. In the past few years they brought back the often sought-after Fireball Island and Return to Dark Tower and this year they ran down the Road Warrior style classic Thunder Road. The new implementation, Thunder Road: Vendetta has all the grit and style of a dystopian wasteland and I was extremely excited when they asked if I could work on the new video to promote the Kickstarter. 

Restoration sent me a rough storyboard and after seeing it I knew I wanted to do some classic hand-drawn animation. It's something I've always wanted to do, but never had a project that I felt would really benefit from it, until now. I knew this was going to be a lot of work, so I called up my friend and fellow mograph designer, JC Trombley to help out. We set out to create this ambitious project on a short timeline and although it was a lot of work, we're really happy with the outcome.

Seeing as we both aren't really seasoned traditional animators I set my sights to Cinema 4D to block out the storyboards sent to us in an animatic. This allowed us to feel confident with any camera moves we decided to throw in and gave us reference for timing and where things should be placed on each frame. It took a few evenings to get the animation down, but I feel it saved us many evenings of time not having to tweak the animation.

We also used some reference footage for the woman in the mirror and the head turn in the window.

We were also asked to create a series of looping animated GIFs for the Kickstarter page showing some of the game play. We used the graphics from the game to create 3D game components inside of C4D and animated the action. We then took the files into AE to add some of the grunge and 2D cell animation effects. We created eight in total.