Destony Opening Animation

I believe that every great game takes full advantage of it's immersion abilities. Other than reading a book or reading text, to actually visualize and understand the characters and their roles within a game help the user to connect. In order for Destony to stand out from the crowd of games and to increase it's value and immersion, I wanted to have an opening animation to create more polish. Luckily help was at hand, as my family is from an enthusiastically creative background and both of my two brothers animate fora living.

Kensei Thomas 

Kensei, my brother was the perfect person to ask for something to be animated. He lives sleep and breathes animation and I told him about the opportunity to create something for my game early on and he was keen to help out, he was placed 2nd place within the famous red bull Canimation competition  losing out by a hair to a university graduate and he was only 18 back then.

You can see the entries here: http://canimation.redbull.co.uk/index.php/gallery

His Canimation animation is bellow: 

It was hard to convey the story of my game exactly as I wanted it as it is quite a unique concept having a ghost person jump into the mind of others. How that would go about happening and other things were unclear at first, although after meeting up with him in London (my home) and explaining it to him face to face and directing the process, he got the idea.


The above video is the final version that my brother sent me, the guitar music in the background he actually played himself as he plays the guitar as often if not more than he animates, which is a lot. In being critical about the video, my only main gripe was that the ghost could have been made slightly more transparent at the start. Also there were no sound effects which I thought would have really brought the animation to life. So I decided to add some:

UPDATE: video with added sound effects.


I feel that watching these two videos, with and without the sound effects show the power of audio and it's impact on the visual significance. In conclusion, I am very grateful and happy that he could contribute to my game and I think the opening animation explains the story in less than a minute in a creative and playful way.