Hit the lanes UGG-and-AMBUSH-style with bowling-themed titles and tons of supers, chyrons, and AE Colorama
Twin Brains Films
Year:
2025Role(s):
Art direction, graphic design, motion design
UGGS x AMBUSH, Alley of Youth
For the second UGG/AMBUSH collaboration, the gang reconvened and got permission to wear non-regulation footwear on the lane to make a promo film inspired by the year 2000 Ikebukuro West Gate Park TV (live-action) series.
For me, this was great as the original IWGP was famed for groundbreaking (excessive? Not to me) use of onscreen graphics, effects, and sound to create a kinetic, frantic, annotated visual field.
And it was also great because I had been wanting to do something in the style of the routed/monoline illustration style of bowling ball logos for a really long time, but as you might imagine the number of opportunities where it feels motivated and relevant is…few.
The working title was “Gutter Angels” and while I loved the cartoon band-aid treatment (you’ll see it again someday, I assure you), Alley of Youth needed a little more setting, in the form of walls and a bowling ball moon.
One of the signature animated touches of the very Y2Kcore graphics package of the original IWGP was a fruit/veg motif as the main character’s mom owned a fruit and veg stand. In tribute, I added a bowling pin “animation” of flashing randomly through a few still angles, simulating (kind of) rotation. It’s not 1:1, but you get the idea!
Since we didn’t have a multi-episode series to develop/ease the viewer into multiple graphic/VFX treatments, we kept everything in the same palette, but I used different motion effects and transitions for different moments, and the extra layers really bring the story into its own world. Xavier made my dreams come true by asking for and suggesting MORE graphic moments, and fun ones to do, so who am I to say no?
I pulled some stills from the original series of the bowling lanes’ TV scoreboard system, and the pixel font for everything bowling-score related is a nod to that.
The giant “X” at the end is one of my favorite moments, as it officially but slyly places all the action of the film inside a larger bowling tourney metagame. Of course, this was hinted by the bowling conversation dialogue also being scorekept…Graphics at work, people!
In case you missed it, this is the second UGG/AMBUSH collaboration I worked on, you can see the first here.