affinity photo Kraken Squid

[BnBGobo99]

Hello all,

I made a silly little video to make fun of ourselves at work for doing something ridiculous at a ceremony.  It's an inside joke so the video itself won't make much sense, but I wanted to share the artwork part of it.  (backstory: we are the "krakens" and every time a member of our unit won an award we would run this octopus/squid thing across the stage much like a Chinese New Year lion dance.  It didn't go as well as we anticipated and turned to a bit of a joke after a bit, so this was just pointing fun at the whole thing.)

I licensed some animal shapes through Envato (that's why I have the copyright banners on the designs, since I licensed it for the video only) and manipulated a few animals together to make our kraken.  I then took some paper strip images and a stick image (both through Envato as well) and used Affinity Photo to merge it all together to make the sprites.

The biggest challenge was getting the two sides of the paper strips to come together to look like a single ripped piece but still blend into one.  I ended up adjusting the levels and black/white output sliders until the two strips had the same tone/gradient and appeared as one.  All these sprites were then taken into Blender and animated into the video you see attached.

I hope you enjoy it, even if you weren't there to get the full effect of the backstory.