Rumpus Animation's Marta Dias gets metal with DOOM

From Rock & Rule to music videos, animators have looked to the world of rock and heavy metal to inspire hair-raising storytelling. Pyromaniacal stage setups, high-tempo soundtracks and larger-than-life personas — and hairstyles — make for great source material. DOOM, by 2D animator Marta Dias, is one of Rumpus Animation's series of incredible idents which shows off the talent at the Bristol-based studio.

DOOM ties together some of our favorite metal themes into one animated ident packed with attitude. The short features a rockstar character that looks the part down to the small details; from the leather pants to spiked cuffs. It takes references from heavy metal shows like Hellfest and live-streamed events that Marta studied during the pandemic. The end result we see contains the energy and showmanship of a heavy metal concert, packed into an impactful short.

We caught up with Martha to find out why heavy metal struck the right chord for her and how she captured its essence through stylish hand-drawn character design and retro effects. She comments on what inspired the short, as well as talking us through some of the techniques she used to achieve her show-stealing style, such as multi-layered hand drawn animation with Toon Boom Harmony's brush tool. Interested in creating animated shorts or want insight into life as an animator? Mosh through our interview with Marta below.

We enjoyed your hell-raising ident, DOOM. Please introduce the short film and what it means to you…

Glad you guys liked it. This is a very short film about a simple guitar session gone mad. The intense riffs built up to the point of combustion and our guitarist became one with the music. I really enjoy metal as well as going to gigs and this was a way of expressing that. It also came about after having lots of talks about both this music genre and swirly type of animations with Joe Wood from Rumpus during work breaks.

What musical universe does DOOM take inspiration from and what about it attracted you as an animator?

Metal! With the guitar skills of Adam Ringo Lowe, friend of the Rumpus family, who was very happy to re-awaken his teenage shredder for the project. Us animators are always looking for things to listen to while we work, be it music, podcasts, etc. I myself am quite an introverted person and often don’t find it easy to express certain difficult emotions. Like a lot of people, I find metal quite cathartic as it serves as a way to process said emotions. And I find it quite nice to have someone scream for me when I am working in a quiet studio with other people around me. I am not even able to scream when I am by myself, to be honest.

I could give many other reasons why I love this genre. But in short, our emotional state can sometimes get in the way of animating well and listening to this music genre helps me carry on with my day.

Tell us about your rockstar approach to character design…

The process of designing my character started in my sketchbook. I drew a couple of key poses that I ended up bringing into the animation file to use as reference for keyframes. From then on I carried on sketching some ideas until I settled on one that felt right, in terms of shapes and proportions. I brought the final sketch into Procreate and made the final design with some extra adjustments. The whole process was quite intuitive, as well as the choice of colours. At the time I was also into drawing characters with skull masks, and this is how the main character evolved to having a ‘skull head' in the second half of the ident.

I tried to keep simple shapes, with a naturalistic feel. At the time I was very inspired by the character illustrations of Ree A., and I followed that inspiration for the guitarist. 

How did you capture the amazing sense of movement in the musicians?

Because of COVID, a lot of music festivals were canceled. To make up for it a couple of them made online events where they streamed past festival concerts. At the time I started animating DOOM, I was actually watching the Hellfest online stream, so I had a lot of reference material then. 

What tools or techniques did you use in Toon Boom Harmony to create DOOM?

Only the brush tool, as this short was completely hand drawn.

Talk us through the colour palette you used in DOOM?

I am definitely not an expert with colour. So much so that 99% of my personal projects are done in black and white. For the character and props I simply picked colours that seemed pleasant and appealing to me. The background colours were later picked to create a stronger statement, specially the strong purple in the first half to give it a punk-ish vibe. 

What other effects and gradients are in use to give DOOM its retro feel?

The effects on this are quite simple: grain and chromatic aberration to give the animation a retro feel. The chromatic aberration was created in compositing software by Jack Churchill, who also works at Rumpus. Rumpus is a fan of the grainy look, and since the lines in the ident were very clean and tidy we thought it could do with some grittiness.

What one tool could you not have done without when making the short?

The lovely brush tool! And also the one mode that allows you to select multiple layers at once [Apply to Visible Drawing Layers], as this one was particularly useful in the clean up process

Tell us about a day in the life as an animator at Rumpus Animation.

The Rumpus studio has a friendly atmosphere. There is space to learn, explore your own creativity, be serious about animation and have a little beer on Fridays by the end of the day, with everyone at the studio! I consider myself very lucky to have Rumpus as my first ever experience at working in the animation industry.

What advice do you have for fellow animators looking to make a short film of their own?

I would say make some meaningful connections with people who share similar passions as yours; they don’t even necessarily have to be animators, just someone who can inspire you to pursue a challenging project and could potentially collaborate with; be it a musician, storyboard artist, script writer, etc.

Any interesting future projects coming up that you can share?

I am working on my first ever comic during my spare time, something that I would like to eventually use as a short animated film in the future. The story is inspired by my personal experience dealing with difficult emotions.

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• Want to see more of the Rumpus Idents? Be sure to visit Rumpus Animation’s website to watch the full series.
• Interested in using Harmony for your next animated project? Artists can try our software free during the 21-day trial, with no credit card required.