Reading Pierre Perifel’s official account about “The Bad Guys” movie production lets you know how much work went into producing this kids-thriller movie (premieres Friday, April 22 in the United States).
Read that again. Yes, a thriller animated movie with a lot of elements which in the original story writing author, Aaron Blabey’s words “were inspired by Mad Max, anything by Tarantino, Spielberg’s movies from the 1980s, Scorsese and Ford Coppola”.
Aaron started a writing career with different titles aimed at kids before, but “The Bad Guys” was the book that brought success to the table. The book series had CG animation studios’ attention for full licensing and development rights with Aaron, since 2016.
Animation, Character design, Camera action and more!
Dreamworks’s Animation director Pierre Perifel has done an incredible job through the movie with careful stylization: everything from the character’s personality, compositing, action cameras for chase sequences, clothing, and fur, is done like a 2D cartoon in a 3D volume world; taking what the industry loved about previous Stylized movies and games and top it off with this animation movie masterpiece:
Stylization – When is it too much?
Pausing during this movie’s trailer is a delight. You can see the smear lines drawn over the rendered frames, stylized speed lines, “painterly fur”, cloth lines, and character’s smear deformations as well.
If you’re an animator who would like to create such techniques with 3D software, you can try Blender which is open-source software, where you can use tools such as Grease Pencil to draw 2D lines on top of 3D objects (video). Blender also has a StopMagic addon (video), to deformate characters and create smears frame-by-frame while you continue to use your 3D space to animate.
For the production of this movie, Maya, Houdini, Nuke, and other in-house software from Dreamworks were used to bring this 3D CG comedy/adventure story to completion. Check out the full cast and production crew here>>
Overall, if you have the opportunity and the (social distancing precautions) to go back to the theaters, I would recommend checking out this story about redemption, treason, and a lot of smart puns… Wait, I thought it was a kid’s story!?
Just kidding!
You can check the writer’s book series in this link>> if you’d like to know more details about why it has 40+M downloads around the world.
Also, check out the official social media for The Bad Guys (Dreamworks) movie:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebadguysmovie
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dreamworks
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badguysmovie
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dreamworks
Website: http://www.TheBadGuysMovie.com
If you watched the movie, let me know what part did you enjoy the most? And what part do you think was the most difficult one to animate?
Cheers!
