What happens when two marshmallow buddies go camping to enjoy the dark temptation of toasting other marshmallows? Enjoy a fun loving digital short, created by the Monster Truck Ninja team, about the delicious origin of s’mores.
Forgive us for sounding overly confident, but we just wanted to show off our character animation talent!
The S’mores Story was born as a result of a creative exercise we ran internally, for our talented team of illustrators and animators. The project has also given us a chance to show off our working process to our clients and partners.
We wanted to see what would happen when we put our team together and let them run free, with the goal of creating an entire story and its characters from scratch. The end result was, well, weirdly delicious!
We started with simple character development, and gave creative birth to two main characters, Marsh and Mallo. We started out with a blank slate, creating the first round of 3D character models in a blank environment.
First we spent time developing the story and came up with the idea of putting Marsh and Mallow on a camping adventure. The next step was to begin creating the backgrounds and environments that the characters would find themselves in. For S’mores Story we modeled the 3D environment and applied unique textures to the 3D maps, to give the video a “storybook” look and feel.
Once the 3D modeling was complete, we started blocking, a process of setting up each character’s movements at various angles, so their movements will look smooth. After that we began animating and blocking for additional key movements in various scenes. After refining the animations, we applied textures and lighting and started to render the video in several layers.
This internal project allowed us to accomplish several things. First it allowed us to see how our entire team would come together to complete a full project that combines our individual creative DNA together. And, apparently, our babies look like cannibalistic marshmallows.
It also gave us the opportunity to continue refining our technical skills in 3D animation. We do internal exercises like this to stay on top of professional development… and, ok, we just love creating!
Finally, it has allowed us to demonstrate that we are not afraid to inject a little bit of creativity, quirkiness and humor when creating animated stories for our clients.
Take a journey behind the scenes and into the process of creating S’mores S’tory.
