In May 2014, Radio Design celebrated its 10th birthday. To commemorate 10 years in the industry we revisited a favourite early animation and gave it the full 2014 reboot treatment. Ladies and Gentlemen, may we present the all new Electro Boogie.

Electro Boogie has been screened by onedotzero at the launch of their monthly event #dotdotdot on 24th July 2014, and again at Convergence Sessions on 20th March 2015.

“I created the original Electro Boogie animation back in 2002 to help me get my first job in the industry,” explains creative director Ben Cook. “It felt appropriate to reboot the robot for the Radio Design 10 year anniversary. But it wasn’t a straightforward process, since the original was designed to be a small Flash web animation and wouldn’t upscale well. I needed to figure out the best way to upgrade the robot for the 2014 HD version.

“I tracked down the character animation project files on my vintage iMac G3, created in Poser 3.0. My plan was to import the animation sequence into Cinema 4D to work on the new treatment, but my old iMac software wasn’t letting me get a good 3D sequence exported at all. There was a moment where I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to achieve the results I wanted. In the end the workaround I used was to render multiple video passes of the robot – working with video forced my hand to build everything in After Effects, but it was a happy accident as I’m really pleased with the final aesthetic the process generated.

“Several months later, after some heavy compositing, sound design and a final colour grade – voila! Electro Boogie v2.0”