Kylie Sing & Dance - Nintendo Wii

Role: Art Director
Company: Tubby Games

The second title that we produced at Tubby Games was this officially licensed Dancing & Singing game. 

The timescale for the project was around 8-9 months until release so it was an extremely tight turnaround. It had to coincide with Kylie Minogue's 25 Year celebration.

We once again had Bazz Robson choreograph the entire project, we also enlisted the help of local drama college students to perform as backing dancers.

As a late addition, we had one of Kylie's actual backing dancers who had performed on many of her tours. This was a real pleasure and proved a real treat to witness such a high-level dancer at peak performance.

I created all the graphic's for the backdrops of the dancing sets and finalised them inside of After Effects. I took influence from the particular video the set was based on. Then stylised it so it would feature the cell-shaded style of the rotoscoped character.

We shot the dancers in costumes and then optimised them and had them appear almost cell-shaded. Due to the tiny team, we had to find smart solutions to get the look we wanted with as little time as possible. This was a particularly tricky stage as the lighting had to be optimal to get a clean chroma key, plus the dancer had to be as brightly lit as possible all over, even small shadows would compromise the flat graphical style.

Another item I wasn't aware of was using alpha PNGs. This was a vital lesson to have sprites pop up in-game when a score was achieved. These sprites were triggered in-game via the coding.

I also had a hand in the programming of the data, the developers created a tool that meant I could help input the data for the controls. This was interesting because the Wii uses controls that react via accelerometers. This means the gestures aren't as straight forward as buttons. Meaning the values had to be programmed in some instances by mimicking the dance. Thankfully Bazz was also on hand for some of the tests.

After the game was approved via Nintendo in Japan we then produced the artwork for the game and Disc art. Once again, due to the strict guidelines in place, this was a very delicate piece of design work that sometimes came down to the Millimetre.