How I made the Global Game Jam 2025 theme reveal + keynote video

Throughout my career, a lot of people have asked me how I make my things and I thought it was because what I make doesn't look professional enough or something but I realised that this might be because I may have a rather convoluted workflow for some people. I thought that was normal but considering how I don't have one workflow to do everything (i.e. I change my workflows depending on the project schedule, medium, the look, and generally what's available to me), I came to a conclusion that it might be worth sharing my workflow using one of the projects I've worked on as an example.

1. Getting a brief & providing a quote

After I got an offer to make this video and I said yes, the next thing I needed to do was to get the details (contents, duration of each section) of the video and the expected timeline/deadlines.

This process with GGJ (Jo) was so smooth and efficient and I loved it.

This is basically what they sent me for the possible outline:

- 30 second intro animation (00:30)

- Title screen for sponsor message 1 (00:30 - 01:00)

- Title screen for sponsor message 2 (01:00 - 01:30)

- Title screen for hello/intro from new director and producer (1:30 - 2:00)

- Title screen/animation for keynote speaker 1 (2:00 - 5:00)

- Title screen/animation for keynote speaker 2 (5:00 - 8:00)

- 30 second animation for theme announcement (8:00 - 8:30)

- 90 seconds screens for credits, diversifer reminder, donation screen, thank you (8:30 - 10:00)

And they sent me the video from previous year's GGJ as a reference. (References are always helpful if there's any)

After we agreed on my fee (I suggested a rate per project based on similar projects I have worked on in the past rather than my day rate), I received the possible deadlines and suggestions for the date/time for the briefing video chat session.

The deadlines looked like this:

- 1st week - delivery of concepts/rough storyboards - 50% of payment on acceptance

- 3rd week - delivery of the 15 seconds teaser trailer

- 5th week - delivery of the full video - 50% of payment on acceptance

2. Planning/designing/storyboarding

I love storyboarding. My first job was in webdev as a coder but somehow I was assigned to do storyboards and I wish I had continued doing that instead of starting to do that years later.

Anyway, for this project, I wanted to depict to the participants of the game jam. I also had the idea of mixing simple 3D objects with least 3D animation/minimal rigged animation and 2D scribbles since the schedule seemed rather tight and I didn't think I'd have time to render good full 3D animation but also because I've been experimenting with 2D scribbles on top of 3D and have been having lots of fun. So, I started sketching the ideas in my little portable notepad. I may do this scribbling on my tablet if I were home, but when I started working on this project, I was doing intense hang out sessions with a friend who was in town. So, it was kind of inevitable to be able to work on my little notepad. I actually brainstormed & sketched up most of the core ideas whilst waiting for him at a train station (And being away from the computer for this process actually helps a lot. A few months ago, another friend of mine invited me to roller disco and I solved some of the major problems as I was resting. (I was getting a bit too dizzy from work to skate all night)) After that, I transfer the idea to the storyboards/animatic.

Here's the initial animatic:

View post on imgur.com

As I was making the animatic, I realised that I needed to know what physical tools the potential participants are using to develop games. So I did a little survey on Bluesky:

hey devs, can you tell me what kinds of physical tools you use? i'm looking for like ideas for computer mice, headphones, mics, breadboards, pen and paper, ukulele, op-1, literally all sorts of things!

— Til Nomi 👀 hire me (@thenomi.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 8:20 AM

And I received quite a bit of responses to this. Here are some sketches I made:

I also made some sample illustration to demonstrate how 2D + 3D mix would look:

And here are some sketches for the cartoony shapes and colours. I wanted to make it look very colourful.

And I had most of the 3D assets to show when I delivered the concept

At this point, I didn't have the music but I knew that I wanted to commission my father. So, I sent in the animatic without the sound and those sketches and received the first half of the payment.

3. Commissioning a composer

I have worked with wonderful sound people in the past and they were all absolutely amazing to work with but I'm usually not the one to commission anyone. So it was exciting to have a little bit of budget to do this and start working with the sounds in the early stage of the production.

As I mentioned in step 2, I wanted to work with my father to get some jazzy song. So, I sent him the 30 seconds animatic and told him that this is going to be approximately accurate to what I'm going to have as the final product in terms of the timings. This is the process that I try to do as soon as possible whenever I'm working with audio people so that they have plenty of time to work (or not work) on it. It also helps me when we both have time as I'd need to review the audio and tell them whether it's good or I need some changes.

Here's the clip edited to be 30 seconds and WIP music from my father:

4. 3D modelling, sculpting, retopologising, rigging

I model and sculpt. I love sculpting a lot but this time, since there were lots of non-organic shapes that I wanted to keep non-organic, I modelled most of the assets. Retopology was not so necessary for most of the sculpted models I've made since I was not going to do much rigged animation and I was only making a video and didn't need optimised 3D files. But I needed to do a little bit of hand animation. So, I sculpted the hand and retopologised it. I was not going to make/use any handmade textures and I was not going to render anything in colour (as I wanted to add the colours in the post). So, rendering was quite easy and simple. But because I was relying on the shapes and solid colours, I wanted to add interesting surfaces/materials–and I downloaded a lot of materials such as metals, stones, fabrics, etc. and slapped them on the 3D assets to see which one worked the best.

Around this time, I was also thinking of how to show the diversity using the same hand asset (Had I had more time, I would've made different hand models. But I enjoyed working with constraints.) and decided to accessorise it. Thank you Vince Noir for teaching me to accessorise.

I don't wear hand accessories myself and I'm a little too financially struggling to think about them. So, it was fun to use this opportunity to browse and brainstorm about all sorts of possibilities.

In addition to hand accessories, hardware options, etc., I also did an extensive research on the candies and learnt a little too much about svensk fisk. I ended up going to a pick and mix to buy a Malaco Salta Fiskar after this and I’m a big fan of that.

5. Rendering

Back in 2021, I found a trick to use one 3D asset like multiple 2D assets for videos whilst making the awards show videos for A MAZE. / Berlin. The trick is to render a spinning animation of the 3D object and hold frames at various spots to create still images of the same object from different angles. I found a few more tricks in that production and I want to reuse them sometime but this one felt like a very versatile trick that I could potentially use in any projects. I didn’t really have the chance for 3? 4? years but I thought this could be my chance as it’s perfect for the artstyle I was going for and the time I had. So, I made spinning animations of many objects. For some objects such as eyes and mouths, I was going to animate them in full 2D. So, I only rendered them as still images.

6. 2D drawing, animating

I have been trying out digital glazing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaze_(painting_technique)) for my illustrations for sometime and I wanted to use that practice for this video. Basically, that means that I’d render 3D objects, turn the footage into black and white images, then apply layers in colours. I also recently started drawing 2D hand drawn animation with simple lines and wanted to incorporate that. So, I made a lot of action lines.

7. Compositing

Since 2019, I have been able to use animatic to really speed up the process as I got a tablet to draw things and I can export my animatic directly as an mp4 file. So, when compositing, I’d put my animatic as the base layer and put assets on top of it to complete pictures. So that’s what I did for this project too.

For this project, I didn’t need any extra editing for the animation part. So, I did most of the editing in one programme.

8. Teaser

Since I had to deliver the teaser first, once I had some of the visuals sorted, I had to focus on polishing what can go into the teaser and also to get the music presentable. I made some special pictures (frames for the videos that I already received and the animation to reveal the jam dates) and called my father to make a track that fits 15 seconds. I also requested some other changes in the mix and did quick demos during our call.

Here's the teaser:

9. Theme reveal video

I think I received the theme after the teaser submission. The GGJ theme committee suggested some ideas but I also did some brainstorming whilst waiting for their message. For this, I wanted to use found footage partly because there was no time for me to make anything look very polished from scratch. So I used several creative commons/public domain footage websites to find videos that demonstrate some ideas for the theme, bubble and edited it to the 1919 recording of a 1918 song I found, I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles. Then I wanted to make a title card to show the theme. So, I quickly modelled a bubble gun and a hand bubble maker.

10. Getting logos and credits

This is the step that you may not leave as a last minute task as it may require some communication and that could take some time. Oftentimes, the logos on websites might be a little too small for videos which are usually 1920x1080 (I have never edited a 4K video. I think that’s a little too big for anyone when the storage is not paid for maybe). So, I often need to ask for logos in higher resolution when they seem too small. For credits, it may take a while since that can change. But having a solid framework (how many people and which names would go in which section) helps a lot. (Note: I have been making credits videos every year for nearly 10 years now)

11. Checking the quality of the live action footage, fixing the audio

Since I had the live action footage from different sources, I had to make sure that they all looked well. It could be some visual problems but it’s mostly the audio that matters the most. I made some adjustments to some of the footage before editing them. (or during the editing process as I can swap files)

12. Editing live action footage in

For adding live action footage (keynotes and sponsor messages), I used a video editing software. I also added stingers (the clips used for transitions of one video to another) and that required more sound effects.

13. Sound design

I forgot to mention this before the step 8 Teaser but I needed to work on sound effects. Since I did not have an extra budget for this, I was going to do everything myself but I struggled to create the sound for candies and asked my peer if anyone would be willing to record a sound for that.Thankfully, Laura Ryder helped me with that and she even offered me additional help on the overall sound design. So, in the end I had a lot of help from her on many sounds and she was so delightful to work with. I hope to work with her on something again and I need to get a budget for sound design.

14. Final check and delivery

I just checked my calendar and I know that I started working on this project on 23-27 November. I did deliver the concept/initial storyboards/animatic that was much shorter as it was not edited to be a 30 seconds footage, and some of the 3D assets I was going to use. (Note I did make many assets at this point but I also reused some assets I had already made for other things) Then I polished my ideas on 10 December (I know this because I was waiting for a friend to go to another friend’s place with to watch a film and had that written down on my calendar).I think it took roughly 8 weeks or less to make everything.

Here’s a comparison video of what the first intro animation looked like on 22 December and what it looked like when it was finished.

And here’s the final video including everything from the intro animation to the credits.

Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in working with me, please don’t hesitate to contact me.