Mac 'n' Cheese (2011)

Creators: 

Tom Hankins: Art director

Roy Nieterau: Technical director, lead animator and animation supervisor 

Gijs van Kooten: Director(storyboard, background and third animation)

Guido Puijk: Animator and modeler

Concept: 

This title of this motion graphic is “Mac ‘n’ Cheese”. The video shows a story about two guys, one strong named Mac and another one skinny called Cheese, playing a game like cat and mouse. With a series of fight and wrack, Mac finally catch up Cheese then the rules change and the skinny guy become the “cat”. The purpose of this animation is to tell people that someone looks vicious sometimes does not mean he is a bad guy and everything could change.

Design: 

The color of this animation mainly is bright color, such as the bright red and orange for the land, the bright blue for the sky. Then some dark color for the road, cars and characters. Additionally, the designer has a strong sense of color balance, which makes every frame or scenes not too bright or too dark, for instance, if the background color is bright, the foreground color will be dark, if the left side color is bright, the right side color will be dark(1,2,3,4). With these highly contrasty colors, the designer describe a quite intense environment and with exaggerated shape of the environment and motion of the characters(5,6,7), the audiences could easily emerge into the story and follow the story developing.

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Edit/animation:

Tools used:

- Autodesk Maya

- Eyeon Fusion

- Pixologic Zbrush

- Adobe Photoshop

- TVPaint

- Bazillion peanut butter jelly sandwiches

The story is build by 3D model and render in cartoon style, which could easily make the animation convincing and attract the audiences. At the beginning, the director use several short cuts to show that this is a fast pace animation and all the story is about catch and run(8). However, a fast pace does not mean the rhythm is fast all the time. After a intense scene, the pace will slow down and let the audience have a short break and give them time to figure out what is going on, then another fast pace scene will come and bring the audiences into next stage. i.e. when the guys are running in the tunnel, everything is so fast that the director just use fast-changing frames to tell the situation is so dangerous and suddenly they run out of the tunnel then fall down to the cliff, everything just like stopped. When the strong guy find some drug and inject to himself, another fast pace scene comes. Besides, the interest point is that at the end, after all the set up make the audiences believe the strong guy Mac will beat Cheese and all of a sudden, the game end and roles change, which give a funny ending to the audience(9).

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