Stuntboat Willie is a small-scale investigation of the rigging tools in Unreal 5 disguised as a video game. I thought it might be fun to create a series of vignettes that show the genius of the physical comedy that Buster Keaton and his contemporaries demonstrated in the height of silent film.
Participation
Animation - Providing a structural backbone for the rig designed and implemented in Unreal 5 by Mattia Sicuro, I keyframed several animations for the character inside of Unreal 5
Level Design - We added some Keaton-esque nonsense to contain the animations for Steamboat Willie
Audio - I processed several audio tracks to mimic the tinny, thin speakers of the 1920s
Shaders - To tie the vision together, I created a screen space shader using a combination of Cascade and post-processing to harken back to the hard-boiled frames of film memorial
Stuntboat Willie happened when my good friend and contemporary, Mattia Sicuro, said that he was interested in learning how to rig inside of Unreal Engine. It's a small thing, but in a weekend, for 3 people in arguably the most difficult roles that exist for a 48-hour game jam, I am excited to show the results.
I really like animating. I miss it a lot, since I don't get to do it very often anymore.
