Studio 2 | The Old AU

Joel Dunn | Doberth Sulat | Kyle Potgieter

Our Project

For our project, We decided to put a wild west spin on the Western Australian outback. Our story takes place in the late 1800s based around the Gold Rush of WA's history. Where a lone bushman down on his luck wandering through the Western Australian outback. He camps out for the night and finds a massive gold nugget in a nearby abandoned mine. He eventually comes across another wanderer offering to help build up a town for a slice of that gold that they found. And after coming across another cowboy, they start building up a new town together as a sign of comradery and establishing a new community.

The message of community is what we trying to achieve with this project. While the gold rush and early mining era of WA's history is reflected as a controversial, harsh, and cruel time for many cultures in Australia. Our project aims to focus on the importance of Gold in our State. It is the essence of 'beginning' in this vast red land, it is what brought people from far lands, created communities and wealth. Yet, as time passes the importance of gold faded. The rush for The Old AU has mitigated, yet we stay. The desire for gold is no longer as we strive for the happiness of our communities, the people, and this land. This is WA, 'The New AU'.

(also fun fact: Au is the periodic table symbol for gold and the first two letters of 'Australia'. We thought we were really clever naming our project 'The Old AU')

The Animation Team

Kyle 'KD' Potgieter

Project Lead

3D Character Designer

Doberth 'Dobbie' Sulat

3D and 2D Asset Designer

After Effects Compositor

Joel Dunn

2D Background and Character Designer

Background Animations and Colour Grading

Joel's work

For this project, Joel's mainly just work on the majority of the 2D assets being the character poses, props, and the outback landscape that wraps around the screen. With the outback environment, we took references from the outback desert up in northern WA and the North Territory. As well as some inspiration for environments from up in quarries in Kalbarri and Wave Rock. Joel also helped Dobbie by creating the animations for the sunrise and sunset and the colour grading to create that change in time and day.

As well as the characters we designed, We wanted to stylize these little cowboy characters to make them look cartoony and comedic. Looking similar to a character out of Kerbal Space Program (2011) or a Pop Vinyl as people have pointed out the similarities. I've nicknamed them Bushman, Round and Tall repectively.

'Bushman'

'Round'

'Tall'

Dobbie's work

Dobbie was responsible for the 3D environmental Hard Surface assets in 'The Old Au'. With his building asset, audiences can have a sense of constructive progression in line with the core premise of the story. Building a community from the foundation of Gold. Dobbie has worked hard on completing these building assets from building the first iterations, to concept designing a new building closer to Western Australian Buildings. He has created multiple assets yet only the one major asset was implemented, this was his main focus of work especially in his specialization production.

Not only has Dobbie been responsible with the 3D hard surface assets, he has also been tasked with helping Joel with any other additional 2D asset creations that was missing. He has mainly focused on the compositing aspect of the entire project, being resposible with the hard technicalities of the scene such as aligning up everything to fit nicely and for the animations to work smoothly and on a good time.

KD's work

With KD as the project lead, he help us to develop the elements of story and helped us in changing the story as we had hit major compromises. He also helped with establishing the art style of the animation. He helped develop 3D models of the characters main characters.