READY PLAYER ONE
FUI DESIGN & ANIMATION
Creative Direction: Andrew Popplestone
Producers: Alexander Reinach, Genevieve McMahon
Studio: Territory Studio
Fortunate enough to be involved in the creation of several screen graphics for the feature film Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg.
In collaboration with Territory Studio, the role was set to conceptualize, design and animate multiple on-screen assets during the post-production phase of the film.
These UI graphics would then populate both background and main screens and also several character visors throughout the story.
SIXERS VISOR
My animation work on the visor's UI for the IOI players started from early concept through to development phases.
The IOI are corporate, cold and cunning, therefore the motion language seen on the visors is detached of personality, attitude or emotional behavior, the only thing really changing is the player's ID number.
CONCEPT ANIMATION
These concept animations developed early on helped to set the foundations of the IOI "brand" aesthetics - With cyan and light green tones and overall very linear and geometric feel and a lack of personality compared to other avatar players.
IOI LOADING
As an IOI player puts the visor on and prepares to login the Oasis, a loading screen introduces the visor layout and UI.
SIXERS BATTLE MODE
During the battle scenes, several animation states needed to be developed - for background Sixer scenes we'd need shooting states, warning/alert state, damage indicators, item/weapon collection.
For hero shots, Art3mis gets shot by Parzival, through a close-up shot we see her panic and then getting hit. We animated an alert mode to add more thrill to the scene and animated a game-over type of screen as the user is disconnected from the Oasis.
VISOR BATTLE RIG
One technical challenge was the high number of Sixers visors that needed to be animated for both hero shots and background, especially during battle scenes.
We've solved this issue by creating a battle rig in After Effects, this sped up the workflow among the animators in the team and made it easier to diversify the content seen on the visors.
On this specific rig, there is an idle state, shooting state, damage state, and game over state.
As a player is hit in the Oasis, the visor flashes red and depending on the location of the hit, this damage is reflected by glitches that distort the UI in that specific area.
AE RIG TEMPLATE
MICRO GRID
MACRO GRID
DAMAGED MESH
LOYALTY VISOR
The Loyalty Visor are used by players detained on the indentured servitude program.
Although still graphically connected, the Loyalty Visor is a very different strain of the IOI visor. Detached of any color and with a very minimalistic and basic graphic language, this is meant to represent the lowest possible rank of the IOI corporation and reinforce the idea of carelessness for the user.
In this scene, Art3mis is detained and put in a Loyalty Center onto a forced work program in order to pay her debts.
HUD DESIGN | UI ELEMENTS | ICONOGRAPHY
We designed a few iterations of the visor.
Main features required mission objectives, health readings, basic necessities, break time and earned credits.
UI ANIMATION
There are three main story bits we animated:
• Pick and Place Mines - the main objective for the user is to plant mines in the Oasis
• Insubordination Warning - Occurs when the user gets zapped by an IOI guard for wrongdoing
• Unlocking Loyalty Visor - Once the Visor is taken off