Story

Inspired by Gross independent, punky-rebel essence we wrote this rollercoaster ride of a story, a non stop persecution of this police dog in the endless chase for at least one last drop of this refreshing hazy IPA.
Produced by Niceshit and co-directed with our great friend Leo Campasso we put together a concise yet stellar team that made this possible.

We always try to share some of the behind the scenes, how these shots were made from rough pencil tests to clean up and final look.
Character studies & character sheets are key to any animated production and specially for a frame by frame short film. That's why we did many sketches, key poses and turnarounds of the Blue Dog main cast.

After laying down the ideas on a storyboard, we sketched every layout and camera angle for all the scenes, this gave us a complete and integral understanding of the film structure. So we could steadily work from there.
There is only one shot that we approached differently. We roughly sketched the camera movement and overall action in 3D first, aiming to get the timings right to then move into the initial, rough pencil animation.

Our first animatic is pure gold, it surprises us how similar our first animatic is to the actual final film and it also makes us laugh every time we watch it.
The clean up stage was a complete work of art: each and every frame with the love and detail of editorial illustrations - mixing hard, sharpie-like strokes with a bunch of different textured brushes and noise textures. The dog sniffing the lens and making them foggy was definitely a challenge but it came out amazing! All made frame by frame in Photoshop.

WINKS

Akira homage.
We just couldn’t resist adding our little contribution to the endless Akira bike-slides homages, from The Simpsons, Adventure Time, Batman and Ninja Turtles…now also Blue Dog.