- [Crowd] It's "The Infinite Art Hunt!"

(cheerful soul music) (paint whooshing) (paint whooshing) (aerosol can rattling) (aerosol whooshes) (Grandma Tilly gasps) - Hey, Ty.

(inhales) I'm letting two of my friends, Brian and Bren from the PHL Collective, use the studio for work today since their place is being fumigated for toon rat stank.

And let me tell you, child, this is some strong stuff.

(aerosol can rattles) (aerosol whooshes) Woo!

They're not only artists like you; they're also masters at collaboration, learning from and lending to each other to complete their goals.

(paint whooshing) - If you haven't heard from your Grandma Tilly already, we make video games.

Now, I know that's probably not the first thing you think about when you think about art, but it's really a creative job.

See you soon.

(paint whooshing) - Have fun learning about video games today, baby.

Oh, and thank you for making space for them.

Bye, babies.

(chuckles) (minimalistic jazz music) (Grandma Tilly sighs) (aerosol whooshing) - You can't be serious.

I've spent two whole weeks working on this masterpiece.

And all was calm.

But the day of, Freddie wanted to be annoying, and now people are coming to the studio.

Maybe it'll be fine.

They're not coming right now.

(Hildegard speaking indistinctly) Oh.

(Hildegard gasps) - Hello, Ty.

This is Bren and Brian.

They're the ones that make the video games that you and Freddie love so much.

Brian, Bren, this is Ty.

He's Grandma Tilly's grandson, an aspiring artist, and, well, the studio art assistant.

(laughs) - Nice to meet you guys.

- Hey, how's it going?

- [Brian] Hey, Ty.

- Well, wait a minute, Ty.

(gasps) What is this crestfallen mallard?

- This duck is a mistake.

I've worked all day trying to make it the way I wanted it to, but it just isn't working out.

And it's just a painting.

It is not like I can make my own video game like you guys do, not on my own.

- Well, actually, we don't make video games on our own.

It takes a lot of work from a lot of different people to actually make a video game.

If you want, the two of us aren't doing anything today.

We'd be happy to show you how it's done.

- Sure, I guess.

- Oh, yes, please, 'cause then I can be super cool, and I can be able to speak to Freddie about how hip I am about the game.

(gasps) Speaking of, where is Freddie?

I thought she was supposed to be here.

- She's on a hotdog break.

You know how that goes.

- Mm.

Well, I hope when she gets back, she brings those little gummy candies that are shaped like hamburgers.

Oh, I love them.

Okay, well, the studio is yours, boys.

Now, please, show Ty a little thing about some video games.

Thank you!

(transition whooshes) (text whooshes) (text creaks) (upbeat percussive music) (transition whooshes) - Who are you guys, and what do you do for a living?

- My name is Bren, and I am the art director at PHL Collective.

- My name is Brian Gitlin, and I am the lead designer at PHL Collective.

- Where do video games come from?

- So a lot of times, you know, they come from computers.

So it's a really good collaboration between art, tech, and narrative development.

And what really needs to happen is, for individuals have to sit down and kinda come up with an idea.

And once that idea is kind of created, you have to then break it up by the disciplines and create music, create the artwork for it, come up with the story, and then have the design and the programming all come together under one, like, you know, software package to actually be developed.

- How did you come up with the idea for "Goozy?"

- So we wanted to make something that was, like, kind of creepy but still something that younger demographics could find appealing and not be too scared from.

So we wanted something that was not only captivating that younger audience but kinda filled our idea for making something, like, a little bit more spooky.

We're all kinda fans of, like, the Halloween kind of setting, so we went into something that really, like, played into that.

- Very cool, and now, Goozy.

- Yeah.

(laughs) - Goozy.

- Working solo or as part of a team?

- Always a team.

- Always a team.

- Yeah.

- [Ty] Teamwork.

- Always a team.

- Can always get a lot more done, and there's a lot more creative minds coming together to solve a common problem.

- Yeah.

- Mm-hm.

Yeah, being able to, like, get down, part of my favorite thing about game development is the beginning, when you get to sit down with everybody and kind of like come up with the ideas for the game that you're about to make.

It's just a very fun, collaborative process that, like, I dunno, it feels very fulfilling to get and, like, collaborate in one space together.

- Definitely.

(paper rustling) (paper rustling) - Ooh.

Design is one of my passions.

Come, take a look at my costume wardrobe.

- So Brian, what exactly is character design?

- So for character design, we're gonna work through a whole bunch of different iterations of the character in order to try and figure out exactly what design is gonna work best for our game, such as the proportions of him, his size, his arm length, and everything else about him.

- And you do all that with highly advanced, technical computer software?

- Well, sometimes we do.

But sometimes we like to do it the good old-fashioned way with paper and pencil.

- Hm.

Can you show me?

- Yeah, definitely.

(pencil scratching) (dreamy hip-hop music) All right, so to start off, we're gonna try drawing a front view of Goozy.

- [Ty] What's a front view?

- So just thinking about him being drawn from straight on, like this.

And then, after that, we'll move to a side view, where we see kinda the the profile of him.

- Got it.

- All right, so we know he's supposed to be very gooey, so I'm thinking we want a very round form for him overall.

So maybe we'll give him a big belly to start out, move our way up to the head, kinda like a big teardrop shape.

And we think maybe he wants, like, a big eye here.

And then, I think Bren said he wanted one arm for him.

- [Ty] Mm-hm, a squiggly arm.

- So maybe we'll give a big, squiggly arm here.

Thinking about how he would move, since he's really gooey, I think he would drag along the ground.

So maybe we'll give him, like, this little wiggly bottom here, make it all lumpy, and same with his body.

We'll kinda make him big and lumpy here.

So at the side view, we're gonna know that this goo is dragging behind him.

So we're gonna have kinda this long tail of goo that's drooping off of him, going up to his head here, and then a big, gooey bottom.

- And after you draw these, do you use these exact copies for the image?

Or do you end up redrawing them to make them look cleaner?

- Typically, we will end up redrawing 'em digitally, just refining the shapes a little bit and polishing 'em up before handing 'em off to be 3D modeled.

(pencil scratching) (dreamy synth music) (pencil scratching) All right, Ty, so now that we're done the drawings, we're gonna hop into the 3D modeling process of the project.

- [Ty] Sounds good.

- So we have these awesome concept art that our concept artist Xiang Yu has made for us, for the project.

And generally, the way that we start 3D modeling anything is all with primitive shapes.

So I've got this reference image here that I'm gonna work off of, but I'm actually gonna start 3D modeling this with a cube.

So I'm gonna drop just one little cube into the scene, and this is gonna be the base of our character.

- Okay.

(bright electronic music) - And then I've got a bunch of tools here to begin adding more and more geometry to this cube and slowly shape and morph it into the shape of our character.

- So you make a bunch of shapes to make one character?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- It's all starting from a cube.

- Okay.

(electronic music continues) So it's kinda like clay-making, in a way- - [Brian] Yeah, you just- - [Ty] But just computers.

- [Brian] Yeah, exactly.

- [Ty] Okay.

- [Brian] You're slowly taking this cube and sculpting it.

- [Ty] And molding it into, like, a shape, a gooey shape.

- [Brian] Yep, yeah.

- [Ty] Okay, wow.

- Until we round out all the edges and get the exact shape that we're looking for.

All right, so now that you see we have a a pretty good base model going here, typically, we'd spend another couple hours cleaning this up, adding in all the extra detail, and make sure that it's ready to go.

And then we'll go into the rigging phase of the project.

- Ooh, what's that?

- So that's where we actually add the skeleton or the bones of the character so that we can animate them.

- Animations have bones?

- Yeah.

(laughs) Just like human beings or puppets, if you think about the way that you control a puppet, you need to have an armature going through them, the skeleton of it, so that you know where they move and bend.

- Okay.

- And then you can animate them.

So here's our finished rig.

And you can see all these extra controls that we've added.

So now we can get in here, start moving the arms around- - [Ty] Wow.

- Move his head around.

- Hey.

- And then, here's some of our cool controls, where we've gone in and programmed some interesting functionality to give us some extra wiggle on these arms.

- Okay, he's doing the worm.

(Brian laughs) - So this makes it really easy for our animators to get in, hit a couple controls, and all of a sudden, the character's moving.

- Wow.

So what makes you wanna do this with a team rather than just do it by yourself?

- (exhales) If I were to try and do this all myself, it'd take years, maybe decades.

(both chuckle) - Goodness.

- Games are very involved.

There's so many different pieces, so many different aspects to it that I can't do all myself.

- Even if you try really hard?

- You could, but again, it would take you very long.

And certain people are a lot better at certain aspects of a game than you might be.

You might be really talented at the art or the animation or even the music of the game.

And you want some other people who are more talented at the other aspects to round it out and bring the vision all together.

- Wow, okay.

So now that Goozy is all rigged up, how do we animate it?

- Well, that's something that I prefer to pass off to Bren 'cause he's a lot better at doing this than I am.

I wish he were here.

(Ty gasps) - Hey, guys.

How's it going?

I don't know what happened, but I was checking out Hildegard's fashion design, and all of a sudden, I got dragged into her show.

She has some really good tea, though.

- Wow, Bren, you look great.

- Thank you.

- And you're here just in time.

Do you think you could help explain animation to us?

- For sure.

I would be happy to.

- [Hildegard] Brian, you have to try some of this tea.

It's artisan.

- You really have to.

It's quite good.

- All right, well, I'll be back.

- Awesome.

(paper rustling) (upbeat jazz music) (paper rustling) - Cool.

So now that we have the character all rigged up, it's really time to animate.

So some of the things that we need to do is think about what animations we need for the game.

You know, when you're running, you wanna have that nice forward momentum.

So you wanna look like you're actually kind of moving through space and having a lot of wind going through your hair.

- [Ty] Mm-hm.

- Goozy, unfortunately, doesn't have any hair.

- Or any arms.

- Or any arms, but has a giant tentacle up at the top.

So a thing to do to make this look like Goozy's moving really forward is if I rotate this back.

So I can move back his tentacle and get it into a nice position here to make it look like he's moving through space.

- Oh, like the wind is blowing in his hair.

- Exactly, exactly.

- Or I guess, slime tentacle thing.

- Slime tentacle thing, exactly.

That's the technical term.

- That's the technical thing.

- So as we go through and grab some of these other joints, we can really kinda push Goozy, you know, forward here.

And you can see that this is one of those FK joints because the rest of the bones here followed as I moved this joint forward.

So now that we have this in a pretty good spot, let me load up one of the actual animations of Goozy here running forward.

So as you can see here, since we had this animation already ready to go, we can kinda show off what a final, polished animation would be for Goozy when he's running forward.

- Awesome.

(gasps) Whoa!

- I know, right?

- It doesn't really look like he's running, though.

It looks like he's just doing a little jig dance.

- And that's because a lot of the times in 3D packages, you don't want the character to actually move away from the pivot, because since these animations are looping, you want the character to naturally look like it's traversing through an environment.

So even though it looks like Goozy is staying in place, if we were to put this inside of, you know, the game engine, Goozy would actually naturally look like he's slugging along as he's making his way through the environment.

- So you need the surroundings of the environment to really show that he's running.

- Exactly, and that way, you'll actually see Goozy passing by a bunch of, you know, things in the living room or the bedroom or wherever he's going to, you know, scare the family around the house.

- So do you do all this animation by yourself?

- No, I don't.

I have a lot of help from other animators, a part of the PHL Collective team.

The great thing about collaboration is you can really learn from other people during the process.

And in video games, like Brian mentioned earlier, you really can't do it alone.

So the best part is being able to take bits of information and bits of people's ideas and be able to come together for something bigger and better.

And at the end of the day, that's really what art is, is a nice, collaborative medium.

(paint whooshes) (upbeat funk music) (paint whooshing) - Brian, Bren, all the rats are gone, and your studio is back up and running.

You're good to come back.

(paint whooshing) (paint whooshes) - Well, I guess it's time for y'all to go now.

(Hildegard gasps) Thanks for coming.

- Oh, going so soon?

But who's gonna be the peanut butter to my jelly?

(chuckles) - I'm sorry, Hildegard.

Now that our studio's open, the team needs us.

- Oh.

Well, maybe next time, we can run some games PvP.

But until then, keep it Goozy.

- Sure thing, Hildegard.

Ty, thank you so much for letting us use your grandma's studio.

- Yeah, it was so much fun.

And you guys look great in your outfits.

- Thank you.

I think they're in great taste.

(Hildegard chuckles) (Hildegard laughing) (Ty laughs) (Hildegard laughing) (Bren laughs) (Ty laughs) (Hildegard laughing) (Hildegard chortling) (Hildegard laughing) (Hildegard chortling) (Hildegard cackling) (Hildegard laughing) (Hildegard chortles) (Hildegard weezing) (pencil scratching)