The Weird Games was created as a miniseries of five chapters that pay homage to the Olympic Games as a parody. For this reason, we have invented absurd sports, with a British touch: Book Club Rowing, Telephone Booth Lifting, Wrestling Gentleman, Pinky and Tickling Lifting Exercise. Later on, with Promineo Studios, we made a great interactive application that you can play with on your iPad and iPhone.
CHARACTER DESIGN
The first stage of the project was to design the characters, our Weird Games athletes.
At the initial stage of the project we had doubts about what type of character would be the right one. On the one hand, we had a more cartoonish model, a little character with big head. And on the other, we had a hulking, tall, muscular one. Both with a huge moustache. To decide the character to use, we made an event on Facebook where our fans and friends voted for one character or another. After several days of voting, the winner was the hulking man.
Now, with the model chosen, we began refining the details. We designed characters of various nationalities, changing their hair colour and skin tone as well as their uniforms. We also began working on the design of objects for each episode: The phone booth, The Cup of tea, The boat and oars, the bell … and of course, the other supporting characters.
THE ANIMATION
After that, we had to animate characters in After effects. We did this step animating each piece of the character separately (arms, legs, moustache…) This technique is known as “cutout” and so we continued with all the characters for each episode. Thereafter , we started the editing work in After effects, adding background editing levels, lights, sounds and music.
You can see all the episodes here.
THE GAME
In the working process, we thought we had material for a game. We contacted “Promineo Studios” so that, from our designs and videos, they could turn our Weird Games into a casual game for iPhone and iPad. They did a great programming job, adapting our videos, and giving them gameplay. In the mean time, we were designing the interface for the game and the opening, ending and score screens.
Together we have made a very funny interactive application for iPhone and iPad, with classic gameplay, suitable for all audiences. You can download it now!
