Franchise Pitch:
City Rangers

Cover illustration by Marianne Abigail Bravo

It was an honour to be invited in 2023 to the Swinburne Games and Animation Japan Study Tour, spending 2 weeks time from 26 November, in collaboration with Digital Hollywood University, DHU. This transmedia franchice pitch is created by our group in response to our learning and experience during the tour.

Inspired by the Super Sentai / Power Rangers series, we designed characters, backgrounds and narratives to dramatizes the production behind the animation industry.

In this project I was one of the mechanical/robot character designers and the logo designer.

Project Structure

Logline: A production crew's mishaps and challenges in making an anime, exaggerated through the lens of a power rangers-like show.

The anime is split into two halves. One is the daily experiences of the crew in the animation studio as they face mundane, real-life problems. The other half comprises of exaggerated, power-rangers-like battles against the problems they face, such as manifestations of crunch or deadlines. The purpose of the two halves is to champion the workers behind such a booming industry - the project is very much a love letter to the artists and animators who often remain uncelebrated.

Logline and project description by Marianne Bravo

Preliminary concepts

Preliminary concepts of the mech designs and the logo designs. As a homage to the Super Sentai genre, we decided to design robots, rides and mechs that each member rides, and ultimately combines into a giant humanoid robot to fight of monsters and the greater evil.

Exploratory Sketches

We designed in total of 5 sets of characters, with colour representing each of them as a homage to the Super Sentai franchise we took inspiration from.

These characters are designed with motifs of landmarks of cities in Tokyo we visited: for example the shape and structure of Tokyo Tower is the main inspiration for Red's design, and Temples representing Asakusa for Green;

The mechs are also designed with clear designated shape language to match the respective human designs our group produced.