I had the chance to work on a title sequence for Phantom Pups. A Netflix Series, produced by the great folks at Air Bud Entertainment. Yep, you read that right! The same folks that made the classic 90’s movie about a basketball-playing golden retriever! It was quite fun to see John Oliver’s rant as I was working on this project.

The story focuses on Freddy, a young boy, and his family who move into a haunted home, where they meet three adorable ghost pups and try to help them turn back into real dogs.

The creative team really wanted to have a lot more action in the title sequence. Something reminiscent of Scooby-doo’s chase sequences. In order to achieve that, I had to assemble a team of illustrators and character designers and set out to recreate some of the series’ iconic scenes and locations.

I drafted some rough sketches of each scene based on the series’ locations and sets. Syd Weiler, with the help of Fe Riberio made them into amazing paintings for our characters to act in. Each element of the background had to be on a separate layer for it to be animated later in After Effects.

With a total of ten animated characters, I knew I needed to call for some help. Eduardo Casian lead the character design with a bit of help from Diana Santos for Jinx and Syd Weiler for Grim.

Our three phantom pups: Booey, Lewey and Chewy.

Freddy (Jett Klyne), Piper (Thalia Campbell) and Mimi (Eva Brooke Baker)

Cleo (Kelli Ogmundson) and Edwyn (Evan Marsh)

I had a lot of fun getting my hands dirty and designing the vehicles and props.

The character rigs are done in DUIK Bassel.2 by Anne Saint Louis and myself. The characters all have a set of facial expressions as well as the ability to look both ways while accommodating the asymmetric design. Cleo and Edwyn also have a skeleton version for their electrocution scene as well as a post-electrocution hair.

The animation was done at 12 FPS. Some of the moves were so tight that it was done only on key poses, without any need for in-betweens. I worked with Anne Saint Louis to animate all these

In order to catch the attention of the viewer in this wild title sequence, I knew the font had to be very eye-catching. I played around with a lot of options and settled on LOKI. A very bold, playful, display font with two typefaces designed by Mehmet Reha Tuğcu.

To add life to it, I played with some jumpy, jittery motion, a ghostly glow as well as a lot of anticipation, overshoot and follow-through to get the titles in and out of frame.

Credits:

Environments designed by Syd Weiler

Character designed by Eduardo Casian

Character rigging and animation by Anne Saint Louis

Additional environments designed by Fe Riberio

Additional character designed by Diana Santos

More process on instagram/vivianmotion