A 20-second, Fargo-style, fast-paced escalating farce where a young character accidentally summons a demon during a magical ritual and then keeps summoning bigger and more powerful demons to try and get rid of the demons he’s already summoned, which just makes matters worse for him until one of them finally eats him. This idea stemmed from my recent, newfound fascination with the occult and mysticism.
This was a very, very fun project. Everything on screen was made by me from scratch, save for the brick/stone textures and a few standard background pieces of furniture. The goblin character and the red demon were sculpted in VR using Adobe Medium and then rigged and animated in Houdini. The blue demon and the dark goat-headed demon were sculpted and animated frame-by-frame in VR using Quill, and then given extra “boiling” and cleaned up in Houdini. Most of the furniture and background assets were either sculpted in VR or modeled in Houdini/Blender, with the exception of the candle flames, which were also animated frame-by-frame in Quill and then instanced and offset in Houdini. The smoke effects that erupt each time the main goblin character is summoning at the altar were done with smoke sims in Houdini, and the little accompanying swirls were done using real-time drawing in Quill. All of the layout, lighting, cameras, texturing, and rendering was done using Blender’s Cycles. Below, I’ll show a bunch of behind-the-scenes clips and pictures.
Credits:
All visual elements: Matt Siegel
Commissioned by: Adult Swim
Produced by: Laura Scott
Music & Sound FX: Bobby Wagner
Adult Swim
“Summoning Ritual” Generic Ident
Behind the Scenes
Goblin Design Iterations
I sculpted a bunch of different goblin characters before eventually settling on a final that was very, very close to the original.
The very first goblin design. I liked it, but wanted to try out some different approaches to the goblin to make him look younger and more naive.
First iteration. Tried to make him look more youthful, but wasn’t really a fan, and didn’t feel like it fit the overall fantasy / mystical aesthetic I was going for.
Tried a similar goblin design outfitted in wizard robes. It’s nice, but felt like he conveyed too much of a wise and authoritative look.
First attempt at a very young, boyish goblin. He definitely looks like a naive wizard that would accidentally summon a demon and make bad decisions, but he’s a little too creepy.
For a while, this was the “final” design. He looks young and naive, and I really like the aesthetic. I used this a bit for storyboarding and animatics, but ultimately ended up going back to the initial goblin design and tweaking it a bit for the final character.
The final design! Funny how it ended up going full-circle. It’s a bit of a tweak on the original, but after many iterations, I ended up with something very similar to my first pass.
Demon #1: “Choronzon”
For the first demon, I wanted to loosely base the design off of “Choronzon”, a demon who Aleister Crowley famously claims to have fought in the Sahara Desert. This one didn’t really take much iterating, I was very happy with the very first sculpt I did.
Demon #2: “Cat Demon”
For the second demon, I really wanted to play around with frame-by-frame animation in Quill. I had an idea to have a somewhat cat head shaped creature that appears less menacing than the demon before it at first, but then it opens its mouth and a mini version of itself emerges and attacks. I also didn’t end up needing to iterate on this design; I was very happy with the first pass. This one was a ton of fun to animate, and the frame-by-frame approach gave me some cool opportunities for smear frames and other things that would have taken much longer to accomplish with traditional rigging and animation pipelines.
Demon #3: “Goat Demon”
For the final demon, I wanted to do something very large, dark, and menacing. I liked the idea of invoking a goat skull as a head, but then having it roll back to reveal a hidden mouth that swallows the character whole. This would have been incredibly difficult and time-consuming to accomplish with a traditional rig, so again I leaned on the frame-by-frame tools in Quill so that I could sculpt in new shapes for each frame of the mouth growing out.
Storyboards, Animatics, & WIPs
These changed a lot as the process went along, especially because this began as a 15-second animation. We didn’t end up adding an extra 5 seconds until well into the project, as we felt like the extra 5 seconds were crucial to properly conveying the story beats and giving some of the scenes a few more frames to breathe.
The very first storyboard. Initially I wanted to reveal the [as] logo with a pentagram chalked into the floor, but S&P wanted to leave satanic symbols away from the branding. Pretty understandable!
As I started iterating on the storyboard, I was also working in posing & animation tests for some of the shots.
A more polished storyboard with some semi-finished shots. Here I was playing with a much more dynamic camera for the shot of the cat demon. Ultimately i settled on more of a side shot that shows every character in frame and didn’t venture too far from the other perspectives the viewer was getting.
A few more weeks in and you can see some of the shots coming together and the final goblin design coming back in.
We actually had a 15-second version that was almost entirely finished. Although I was happy to get the extra 5 seconds and I think it ultimately made the final a lot better, I REALLY loved the music that Bobby made for this 15-second version, and we were both really sad to have to change it up. Unfortunately, the bpm had to change too much to adapt a tune from start-to-finish to fit 20 seconds into 15 seconds. Fortunately, Bobby is an incredible musician, and what he eventually came up with for the final, 20-second version that we sent in is fantastic, and actually elevated the spookiness and mysterious/occult themes.