Army of Darkness MagFed Paintball

The video gamer in me could not resit experiencing a first person shooter in real life, with the AOD (army of Darkness) Mag-Fed Paintball team I was able to do just that! This was an incredible experience for me personally because I had never done it before, and also it really put me in the place of a player to experience everything first hand.

After an entire day of shooting and getting shot at in the middle of the jungle, I was able to get a really good idea of the style of animation that would best fit the team; As well as a color palette that matched everything we did on the day we went out to play. During the discovery process for this project, Chris Scotts (team captain), The Studio Lux, and I all were actively talking about both imagery and animation all the way from concept to delivery. This active collaboration really helped me realize the specific constraints for this particular project. The shapes had to be clean, and use simple colors for when the new badge would be printed in the thick rubber material. Vector Graphics fit the needs for the project for both static and animated shapes well, so we decided to go with the custom route.

As it is normal during my discovery process, I first began my conceptualization with sketches for the team to approve. Secondly I created all the custom shapes using Adobe Illustrator. The main rifle was actually Scott’s custom rifle taken from a photograph, and then vectorized down to the serial number. After I created all the vector shapes, I then key-framed and animated everything using custom paths in Adobe After Effects, as well as optimized using the Media Encoder for fast Web Delivery.