by Kirk Wallace & Latham Arnott
client - Psyonix & Bento gg
The ask was to create a ~90 second credit roll for the The Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS) 2021-22 season event. This event is streamed to millions, with a prize pool of millions.
For those who don't know, Rocket League is a competitive soccer video game featuring supersonic acrobatic cars that can fly. A game Latham and I have played 100+ hours of.
90 second animation
I immediately thought of the Pixar and Marvel movie credit rolls as the client (Bento) was explaining the scope and knew I wanted to play with a lo-fi art style and low frame rate. Characterizing these cars as much as possible would have fantastic results.
Test Animation
We got to work on ideas, pulling from memes around the competitive game culture as well as what we thought would work well for the playful style. This game has a lot of esoteric little jokes and ways of playing we thought the fans would appreciate as a nod. For instance, hopping on top of one another after a goal is scored.
Design Systems
In Rocket League, players can customize their cars based on the base body, wheels, antennas, hats (topper) paint jobs, colors, etc. We knew that'd be a fun and important feature to draw.
Designs all based off the game's car designs.
Because of the nature of deadlines and asynchronous workflows across US and NZ timezones, we knew that we could animate base cars while we developed the paint jobs, wheels, etc. Later, we could swap things out in animation without disturbing much of the base keyframes we'd done. We also wanted to be able to create some 20+ cars without going crazy drawing.
Various paint jobs based off the game's car designs that Latham could apply to car bases
Car Results
Swapping out toppers, boosts, wheels, etc.
Backgrounds
At first we were just going to stay on black a la WALL•E and Monsters Inc, but we thought it'd be cool if we made some simple backgrounds to rotate around with some parallax.
Fortunately the game also features a lot of different highly identifiable and unique worlds the games are played in. It was a great challenge to try and push the backgrounds stylistically as far as we could, cashing in on the familiarity fans have for the world.
Animation
We already set a solid foundation with the low-fi illustration style, so going with 12fps really helped to enhance that. Being such a low frame rate, movements had to be well defined and snappy to ensure that they could be easily understood. At times, cars flip over within a single frame. By contrast, the backgrounds were intentionally slow to ensure they didn't distract from the animation of the cars.
