One of the more beautiful loops you will see today (or any other day) – designed and animated by Detroit duo Nick Parente and Billy Chitkin, inspired by “a beautiful train station” in Hakone, Japan.

Nick Parente: “My initial inspiration came from the actual Tonosawa Station in Hakone, Japan. I visited this station on my trip to Japan in 2017 and was taken by how ridiculously picturesque it was.

“For this piece I decided to reinterpret it with a background of the mountains and valleys of Hakone to give the scene some depth.
 

“Early on we came up with the idea of this being a loop of two different sets of characters waiting at the station. I eventually settled on five character setups for each set.

“I started out by sketching a bunch of ideas, then brought the sketches into Photoshop to do cleaned up outlines, then eventually fills.

“Using an early rough render of the station shelter from Billy (in order to keep the correct perspective), I dropped the sketches into Photoshop to do rough outlines, and then final fills.

“Primary animation for a few characters was done in Photoshop, with the rest being done in After Effects.
 

“Billy handled the 3D portion of the piece. This included the train, platform, and tunnel.

“We decided the best course of action was to have Billy render out (the Redshift equivalent of) object buffers for all the differently colored elements, which I would then use to color each individual element using solids and set mattes in AE. (This was of course in addition to the beauty pass and a GI pass).

“The 2D layers were all comped in After Effects.”
 

2D Design, Animation: Nick Parente, Billy Chitkin
Sound Design: Nick Parente
Music: Lullaby by saib