Promoting Good Animation: Battleborn Prologue Cinematic
A few years ago the Game studio Gearbox teamed up with Secret Sauce Studio to create an introduction to their game so they could set the mood for their story. I am always incredibly impressed with their scope and ability of their animation especially because of the difficulty of animating by hand. I chose this animation of their specifically because its purpose and nature coincides with my personal goal in my ability to animate.
The overall design of both the environment and characters is fantastic as each character reads totally differently from one another. Their shape, movement, weight, fluidity, and possibly silhouette are all completely unique and well established artistically. The varying heights and shapes that make up these characters help expand the diversity of the subject in the animation.
Not only does it look extremely good, it also lends itself fairly nicely to the aesthetics of animation in general. The fact that it seems to not take itself too seriously allows for some wiggle room in exaggerating those qualities that make make the animation fit the design of the game. There are plenty of seemingly unnatural moments and poses each character. I think the most impressive piece of this animation is the obvious command of the space created for this animation. It seems as if every action, secondary, and/or tertiary action is well thought out on the 2D plane in an implied 3D space. The way characters and object seem to move in and out of the foreground and background is alluring.
When it comes to things to be desired, there are a few. First and foremost is the sound design in the animation. While in my opinion it is very compelling and engaging, it also serves as mild distraction taking away from the video as music at times seems to overpower the sound effects or vice versa. The result is that in many instances the viewer could be taken out of the immersiveness of the animation as a whole. Secondly when it comes to character design I can see where it can seem too disorganized as the characters are so vastly different that they seem as if they belong in completely different stories of their own. Looking at the characters side by side they seemingly appear as if they have completely different designers.
The third minor problem is the story of this animation. It really doesn’t have one. This is an animation just as I stated before is purely a precursor for the content of the game. As a standalone animation the story doesn’t quite hold up while the main aesthetics do.
