One of the biggest lies in skateboarding is saying you’ll give a trick attempt ‘one more try.’ Inevitably it never is just ‘one more try’ and thus the Halloween skateboarders curse was born… this spooky story tells why you should never skateboard on Halloween!
Obviously this animated short was created for Halloween, based on an original script by me, and once again featuring the characters, props, and backgrounds from many Reallusion Developers in the Reallusion Marketplace.
Watch the full animated short below, then read on to see how it all came together.
Behind the Animation
Inspiration and Characters
Any die-hard skater knows the phrase, “I’ll give this trick one more try,” right before quitting a session because they’re so close. It’s not a big stretch to see this as a potential curse: ‘one more try for eternity’ if muttered after nightfall on Halloween.
Script
The story isn’t complex; it’s based on skateboarders climbing walls to skate unauthorized spots. This wall climb gave me natural space for conversational exposition before the characters actually see the Ghost Skater.
Then it was just following through, with Josh helping the Ghost skater land his triple flip.
Note: The final lightning flash and Tara’s commentary on its randomness were ideas I came up with later, not in the original script.
Storyboard
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| Firoona Storyboard App. Even though the storyboard is complete a bug appears to be preventing my thumbnails from displaying across the bottom. |
Unlike my previous short, “Trash Panda,” I did a full storyboard, choosing Firoona over Mooltik to avoid corruption risk.
Firoona is fine, though the drawing implementation is poor, and a bug hides the scene thumbnails. It’s only good if you view the storyboard in-app to read the frame text. Unfortunately, exporting is limited to images for an animatic (which I made), so you can’t create a functional storyboard document for production staff.
Scene Design
Technically, this animation has only one location; the two other scenes are just variations, achieved by moving the same props around.
Mixing props from different developers can create an uncoordinated mess. To get around this, I use Render Styles in Cartoon Animator. It’s a legacy tool, originally for Flash vector props, but it also recolors bitmap images, making everything look like it belongs together.
My video tutorial below shows how I coordinated the colors for the park wall scene.
Animation
All animation was done in Cartoon Animator 5. I manually keyframed major sequences because I had no suitable pre-made clips and didn’t want to spend hours searching the marketplace for something close.
Thankfully, DexArt’s prop skateboards included pre-made animations, like the triple flip I used. The script originally called for a tre-flip (360 kickflip), but when I saw DexArt had already animated a triple flip, I used it to save time. A triple flip seemed equally difficult enough to struggle with.
Animated Effects
There are two major animated effects in the finished short, the ghost skater disappearing, and the lightening strike at the end. Both were done entirely in Cartoon Animator making use of Render Styles to recolor characters and props, and the Opacity timeline to fade things in and out.
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| The disappearing effect was created by duplicating the character. Using Render Styles to recolor the duplicate green. Then changing the opacity of the green character to create the glow effect. On top of that I added a recolored fire orb, animated prop by DexArt. |
Video Editing and Post Effects
Other than standard editing, sound, and titles, the only post-effect I did was merge two scenes. At 50 seconds, you see the ghost skater attempting his trick in the background as the main cast talks.
This was a new project file, and I didn’t want to re-animate the ghost skater or try transferring the animation.
Instead, I animated the foreground characters talking with a transparent background, then overlaid that over the original clip of the ghost skater used in the earlier scene.
Audio Design
Audio design was very minimal with just the ambient sounds of birds in an Australian suburban park playing throughout.
The skateboard sounds were a combination of ElevenLabs AI sounds (skateboard rolling along) and me trying to land a kickflip in my own driveway (lifted from one of my own skateboard videos). My thunderclap was also an ElevenLab AI sound effect too.
The Final Cut
This animation took about three and a half weeks from script to release, just hitting the Halloween deadline. It wasn’t full-time; I averaged 3-4 hours a day, with some days off.
It mostly came out exactly as storyboarded, including Josh’s superhero landing. I’m most proud of the manual keyframing for the wall climb in the first scene. Better animators might find fault, but it looks relatively natural.
If I had more time, I’d fix how the characters hold their skateboards—they look “stuck” to their hands, but it was a choice to save time.
I’m happy with how this animation turned out. The final cut flows well, and you don’t really bump on the ghost landing the trick on the first try.
I don’t know if it could become a series. I like the characters, but they don’t feel like skaters. Even more so if you see the other DexArt skater characters in the series; honestly, they look more like ‘poser’ skaters to me.
However, you never know.
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