Hotdog Havoc

A short film by Sarita Lam, Vicky Leung, and Danielle Winkler

Synopsis

A man with no respect for others faces the consequences of his actions in the form of an enraged hotdog.
Kevin is driving down the street, sees no parking, and double-parks.  This causes the drivers behind him to become agitated.  To resolve this, he rams his car into a hotdog cart parked in a restricted area.  Kevin simply doesn't care.  The owner of the cart, a hotdog mascot, comes out of a port-o-potty and sees the carnage.  Enraged, he transforms into a super muscular hotdog beast and pursues Kevin throughout the city.  Kevin is of course no match for a giant hotdog, but the monster makes a mistake when he throws Kevin into a hamburger vendor. This of course turns the hamburger vendor into a giant hamburger monster and the two battle it out on the street.  Once the battle is done and the hotdog is finished, the hamburger man attempts to help Kevin, but Kevin rudely rejects any help and gets dealt with what's been coming to him since the beginning.

Origins of the Story

Hotdog Havoc was not supposed to become a reality, but somehow it ended up coming true. It started out as a one-week storyboarding assignment based on a comedic chase story on Comedy Central. While other storyboards closely resembled the original story, the first step of Hotdog Havoc was born. There’s a lot of pop culture references and other easter eggs embedded into the making of this film.

Story Board

While creating the storyboard, I was well inspired by “Love Advice from the Duke of Hell” and its usage of unsettling facial expressions. I also endorse the action genre for being thrilling and keeping things on the edge. Since it wasn’t officially the thesis story back then, I made this fun and surreal. That meant including tons of memes and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure references.

Concept Art

Made by Danielle Winkler and Sarita Lam

How It’s Made

We used 2D planar images created in Photoshop and rigged them onto our 3D Characters, rigged with advanced skeleton, but weight painted manually. Additional 2D details were added in post-production with Krita. With the help of Mixamo, we created life in the city, the team made additional background characters (npcs as we call them) and set randomizer nodes to mix and match the colors of their appearance.

Extras