Hijacked

August 2023

Tall cyberpunk buildings with neon lights and a glowing white emblem on a central tower A hijacked service robot walking out of its docking station A flying car passing a massive holographic billboard in a neon-lit cyberpunk city A dark, red-lit underground structure with a large circular machine suspended above a pit
Role
Concept, 3D Modelling, Animation, Lighting, Procedural Systems, Editing, Sound Design
Tools
Blender (EEVEE), Premiere Pro, After Effects
Time Spent
~3 months
Team
Solo

Hijacked is a stylised, full-CG animated music video set in a cyberpunk city. Instead of starting from a script, I built the whole thing around one track, "Sleeptalking (Merchant Remix)" by Just A Gent, and let the music drive the edit and the mood. The brief for this second-semester project was a solo short of at least 90 seconds, modelled and animated from scratch.

A rogue robot sends a scorpion-like henchman to hijack a service robot in the penthouses above the clouds, steal a red energy crystal, and carry it down to power a machine in the lower city layers. The film descends through a strict three-class city, from pristine towers above the clouds, through a smog layer, down to the scrappy undercity.

Art Direction

This was my first go at non-photorealistic rendering: a cel-shaded, anime-inspired look with sharp edge lighting, dark outlines and flat shading, set at night in dark purples, blues and reds.

Toon-shaded sci-fi hallway with glowing cyan floor lines, windows and potted plants lit green and pink
Outline test render of the apartment hallway
Tall cyberpunk buildings with neon lights and a glowing white emblem on a central tower
The mid-level city, between two cloud layers

The City

To keep a solo project manageable, I built the city only for the angles I needed. The vertical layout helped: stylised clouds close off the middle layer, so a handful of signature buildings carry the skyline, with depth fog and a bounding wall standing in for the rest.

Blender viewport of an open-sided penthouse set with neon-patterned walls, a robot and plants, standing on a pink cloud floor among dark towers
Apartment set in Blender with a cloud and building backdrop
Blender viewport looking through a cyan window frame onto the city's purple towers, with the outliner on the right
Blender viewport render of the mid-level city
A dark, red-lit underground structure with a large circular machine suspended above a pit
Final set piece: the machine in the undercity

Technical Setup

The look runs on a toon shader built for EEVEE, with Grease Pencil and Freestyle for the outlines. For the lighting I used three sun lamps, one red, one green and one blue, coloured in the shader rather than through their emission, which splits the light into separate channels for the NPR effect. Glow and the other post effects came straight out of Blender, baked into the rendered frames instead of going through a separate compositing pass.

Character animation and the car the robot rides through the city were animated by hand. Geometry Nodes handled the rest of the detailing: scattering systems fill out the city with lower-detail buildings, and a recursive subdivision pass adds detail to simple building base shapes.

The background traffic is fully automated: eight flying cars with colour variants, from small luxury models to heavy transporters, carried along fixed paths by an animated scattering system.

A tall stepped tower in dark blue with extruded panels and scattered glowing cyan windows
Preview render of the procedural tower detail
Flying car model: large gas transporter Flying car model: large transport car Flying car model: large luxury car Flying car model: large transporter Flying car model: medium container truck Flying car model: medium standard car Flying car model: medium standard car, second variant Flying car model: small luxury car

It was my first big animated project, and it taught me how much time each step of the pipeline can take up. Animation in particular took significantly longer than I initially expected. Building the city environments also showed me how much I enjoy procedural systems, which shaped a lot of my later work.