Ring Raiders _ CEL shader animation

This is me paying homage to one of my favorite and probably widely unknown childhood comic book series called Ring Raiders. It was about a group of fighter pilots under the command of Victor Vector who tried to save the world from their evil opponents, the Skull Squadron under the command of Scorch. Obviously they were the best pilots flying the most cutting edge jets from their flying aircraft carrier called „Aircarrier Justice“.

Like most mid 80s comics it was accompanied by whole host of merchandise. There were toys; little aircraft attached to a ring to put on ones finger; cassettes and even a pilot for a tv series. However it flew largely under the radar so to say 😅 For more info I’ll add the wikipedia-link below. There may be some fan-sites providing more in-depth info but I did not scour the web to deeply. However, if you have/know one please let me know.

For my version I did not keep too close to the source material but tried to give it my own spin instead. So after building up the cel-shader in Blender and rendering it with eevee I gave more than a light once-over in AfterEffects. Taking a lot of inspiration from the Spider-verse I wanted it to look like a moving comic strip cheaply printed on low quality paper. I also used different frame rates according to the scene. Most of it is animated on 2s while some sequences are on 1s. I even included some frame-by-frame animation created in Procreate to add a ‚human touch’.

Anyway, I hope you like it. Please feel free to drop me a line.