Knuckles - Promotional VFX

With the new spin off series in the Sonic The Hedgehog universe now streaming, the lovely team at Paramount+ got back in touch with team Grizzle to create some promotional content for the launch of Knuckles. And so we did, and at the time of writing it has accumulated over 6.7M views on TikTok and almost 4,000 likes on Instagram! Suffice to say this is a very popular red echidna.

Paramount initially proposed multiple location oriented concepts for shots around London featuring Knuckles in the real world. These initial concepts were narrowed down to two final ideas, the first a shoot in Leicester Square of Knuckles ascending the Odeon Cinema (soon to host the Knuckles premiere), and the second, Knuckles scaling the London Eye. As it turned out, since the Odeon in Leicester Square regularly hosts other red carpet events there would have been an impossible amount of painting out to do given the timeframe so the London eye it was!

Following some great collaborations on jobs for Football Manager (another SEGA related project) and EA, we brought back on board the amazing guys at 2 Player Studio for a guerilla style shoot around the London eye. The evolving nature of the project involved having to shoot as many angles as possible to cover all the plausible options whilst simultaneously conferring with the team at Paramount and Grizzle HQ for some live testing with the assets.
Another key consideration at the shooting stage was the assets we had for Knuckles himself. All we had access to was a graphics pack supplied by the US team of prerendered CG clips of Knuckles featuring a variety of activities, almost none of which were specific to the concept. However, with some strategic editing in After Effects, we were able to extract snippets from a few of the sequences which we could repurpose for our narrative. We interspersed these with these with some flashy lightning effects created using Video Copilot’s Saber effect which carried him from pose to pose.

The edit had two tricky problems to solve. The first was that we wanted the video to have a candid feel, somebody filming London on their phone at night happens to spot Knuckles whizzing around causing a scene. However, the combination of low light and phone footage would have meant a nightmare for tracking and rotoscoping. This meant we really needed our key shots to be locked off with no camera movement. Luckily, After Effects‘s 3D cameras allowed for a lot of digital camera moves to be added in post, so we could pan around the eye following Knuckles on his journey. Combined with a little camera shake, we managed a pretty convincing simulacrum of candid phone footage.
The second problem was one of angles. We really needed to start with a side on view of the Eye so that we could see Knuckles climbing the rim and then landing on top of a pod. However, once he starts looping around inside the Eye itself, the client was keen to have a more frontal view so we could more approximate one of Sonic’s iconic rings. If you’ve been to the London Eye, you can already probably see the issue! In order to move far enough you’d need to travel a good 30 or 40 metres, very tricky to do while keeping the key shots locked off and the length of the clip below 30 seconds.
So it was splicing time, we shot two filler clips, one to start off the video, looking idly over the Thames before swinging over to the Eye, then one running along looking at the ground before quickly panning back up to the Eye. Then, again using After Effect’s 3D layers and cameras alongside some tactical motion blur, we stitched all the clips together to make one long (hopefully) seamless shot.
All in all a successful project and a happy team over at Paramount+, with hopefully more to come given the Paramount Pictures’ ambitions to have an all out live action Sonic Universe!