Monday, 20 February 2012

OGVTD finished, so what's next? (Quick Review of Finished Animation)

As you probably know One guy vs the dead is now out of the way and fully completed, with this project over it has given me a load of space to think of my next project.

The whole idea behind OGVTD was that it would be a high speed action fight sequence between a bad ass character and a bunch of un dead guys, later i thought it would be even better if the bad ass unleashed hell on the undead creatures via some kind of demonic transformation. So anyway the whole project DID indeed turn out just the way i want it, but nothing is ever perfect. If i was to remake this the first thing i would do is make a load more zombies and increase the length of the animation by at least 3 minutes.
One thing that annoyed me about animating Guy was that he was hard to move around, his arms and head were easy to animate but his legs were a little too thick and chunky, might not have looked like it but newplast gets hard when it's not being played with or under heat so that made it so when i moved his legs there would be a chance the legs will crack, when they get hot they tend to squash down when i move them so you have to be ready to take Guy off the set and fix him up (Thank god for onion skin!).

So basically, whilst Guy was a very simple little character he was actually a pain in the backside to animate, thankfully he kept his upper body shape when animating, which brings me to my next point! Guys upper body was hard to twist around, during some shots i wanted his body to twist around to look towards the zombie but the clay refused to cooperate with me, when i would do this he will lose his shape which means taking him off set to fix up again.

Now for the zombies, which was probably my favourite part to animate. These little guys, believe or not, gave me no trouble to animate at all. They had small stubby feet and thick arms, since zombies are lifeless you wont see them do much beside flail their arms around and move forward and these little guys did this perfectly! They were really fun to animate but it's a shame i didn't get as much gore in as i hoped, and yes that brings me to my next point. Gore. I never knew how animators did all the gore business in their claymations, leehardcastle is a good example of what level of gore i was after but i couldn't actually figure out how to animate it without wasting my valuable clay, i didn't want to use ketchup or fake blood because it would ruin the clay but i had to use the red Sculpey 3 which stains other colours and especially my hands. This would be frustrating because i would get red on my hands and then i would handle Guy without realising i just got a big old red stain on his leg or something, this stuff get's really hard and crusty too so it would crumble when i handle the zombies who have all the blood on them and it left tons of sculpey crumbs on the desk which then get into Guys feet or in his body!

Well I'm going to leave it there for this review type thing so now onto my next project details!

All right so some of you wanted to know what's coming up next, I've talked about this in previous blog posts but this time I'm going to give you even more information! So anyway, OGVTD was an animation to test my ability to animate a high speed fight scene and to animate camera movements and plenty of angles, this next project will be testing my ability to tell an in depth story. Well im not too sure about an IN DEPTH story but we will see, one of my main strengths that I find is story telling.

I also said that very little will be released about this project, it's going to be one of those "You'll have to wait and see!" type things since it's such a story heavy project. I had originally planned to use a set but have decided not to and will save that for my next project. (Phew, im saying project a little too often here) A new thing ill be doing with the characters (Hopefully) is some dialogue, telling a story can be tricky without dialogue but to make things a little challenging there will only be very little dialogue!

For now that's all i want to say, sorry for the essay length blog post so i congratulate you for making it this far!

See you in the next post hopefully with some kind of pictures or maybe even a storyboard?!

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