This short sequence was created for an old production early in my Film Bachelor. The short film was about a business meeting where two workers have a battle under the desk during the mundane meeting, the fight under the table was in a different style each time we cut back.
One of the styles was in a retro arcade street fighter style, I took direct inspiration from the original street fighter and using some green screen footage we took of legs doing various poses and movements.
I took the assets we filmed, keyed, pixelated and then reduced the movements into stop motion out of freeze frames creating looping assets of each animation similar to how you’d set up a games animation files. I had animations for “Low Attack”, “High Attack”, “Jump”, and even an “Idle” loop.
I linked all of these assets to a null object in my central composition where I could animate the exact position of each “player” with their null objects, whilst keeping the animations starting from the exact same position. This allowed me to move and seamlessly switch between animations.
I then did research into the UI of street fighter slowly recreating it using shapes and motion graphics, teaching myself how to morph text between “Round 1” and “Fight!”. As well as how to keyframe descending numbers for the timer.