Captain Manta is a game set in a kind of steampunk theatre, based on Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
The concept I developed uses a pop-up book as the set where most of the action takes place: the story moves through the game's key events by entering and exiting the depths of the book's pages.
This was a slightly different approach in style and execution compared with what we'd done before. Everything, including pre-production, was produced by two illustrators, one 2D animator and one 3D generalist in under four weeks.
As usual, I took my own approach to direction: laying out the key shots in a very rough storyboard on a whiteboard, assisted by one other person, in this case Ryan Markkula. That storyboard is then developed into a cleaner version, either by me or an available artist. On this project, Rasool Ahmadi executed the final storyboard.
A more refined, later stage of the storyboard.
