Untitled IP – Portfolio of Eric Thelander

Position: Senior animator at Hello There.

Sadly, this one hasn’t been released due to unforeseen circumstances, but it was a blast working on the myriad of projects tied to that IP.
The initial concept was a linear experience, a fully animated music video. I worked on VXF, rendering and compositing of the shots. Early, I saw the problem of handling the vast amount of frames needed to be rendered, so I set up a small render farm at the office. The whole music video was first rendered in proxy resolution to work out all the compositing kinks and style needed for the vision. A typical shot could consist of between 10 and 20 layers of footage, mixing 3D renders with 2D matte paintings.
As the music video took place deep underwater, the tricky part was to make the environment look like that without using the obvious caustic effects visible closer to the surface. The visual distance needed to be long but still feel like water.
For the game, I prototyped environments and deep ocean effects. I started off with huge underwater mountains; the initial levels were actually 10 km across. It wasn’t long until we had to abandon the concept of huge underwater worlds in favour of making the game playable on mobile devices. I also rigged and animated different submarines and effects to go with their different states, like for instance, getting hit or launching torpedoes.
Towards the end of the development, I was given the task to create the intro and outro cut scenes for the game. My idea was to tie the ending of the music video to the introduction of the game, where we watch Hero sink to the bottom after the fight with the mechanical octopus.
Another big task was the creation of the different trailers for the upcoming release. Three trailers were done and they each had a different purpose.