Kylie Sing & Dance - Nintendo Wii

Role: Art Director
Company: Tubby Games

The second title produced at Tubby Games was an officially licensed Dancing and Singing game to celebrate Kylie Minogue's 25-year anniversary.

With a tight production timeline of just 8-9 months, the project required precise coordination to meet the release date.

We had the privilege of working once again with Bazz Robson, who choreographed the entire project, and enlisted local drama college students as backing dancers. A notable highlight was the late addition of one of Kylie's actual backing dancers, who had performed on many of her tours. Witnessing such a high-level professional in action was truly inspiring.

As part of the project, I was responsible for creating all the graphic backdrops for the dance sets, which I finalized using Adobe After Effects. Drawing inspiration from the original video, I stylized the backdrops to align with the cell-shaded, rotoscoped character designs. This artistic approach required smart, time-efficient solutions due to our small team size.

We filmed the dancers in costume and optimized the footage to achieve a cell-shaded appearance. Achieving the desired flat, graphical style presented unique challenges, especially with lighting. The dancers needed to be evenly lit to ensure clean chroma key results, as even minor shadows would compromise the visual effect.

Additionally, I learned the importance of using alpha PNGs, which allowed us to integrate in-game sprites that appeared when a score was achieved. These sprites were triggered in real-time via the game’s coding system, which was a valuable lesson in sprite management.

I also contributed to the programming of the game data. The developers provided a tool that enabled me to input data for the Wii controls, which rely on accelerometer-based gestures. This required precise programming, often involving mimicking the actual dance movements for accurate control response. Bazz was instrumental in testing and fine-tuning these gestures.

Once the game was approved by Nintendo Japan, we moved on to produce the box art and disc artwork. This part of the project required meticulous attention to detail due to the strict guidelines, with some elements coming down to millimeter precision.