Surge (War of the worlds)

The last project I have been helping out on for my assistant animator brief is a stop motion trailer for ‘The War of the Worlds’ by Zeke Ares, but due to copyright it was changed to the new title of ‘Surge’. I have been very excited about this project for a long time. Zeke told me he wanted me to be working on this way back in 2011 as I am a big fan of War of the Worlds and I jumped on the chance to work on it. I was made the lead animator right away, so I knew I would not be doing much on this project until we came to animating, but as things were being built I could not keep way and helped.
 

As soon as Zeke had the first small tripod (core pod) puppet test made he handed it over to me so I could do a walking test and show how a stop motion tripod would move. I spent the rest of that day animating the test, taking my time so I could get the motion right. The end result was that the core pod did move very slowly but I was happy to get the motion of three legs right. And for the final animation we would speed up the moment of the legs.

Happy with the test, I wanted to do more tests as we had this idea of making the core pods jump and land on people. To make this jump test look more like a shot from the film I took Zeke's old War of the Worlds inspired diorama he made back in 2011. I spent two days animating this test as I had to work around the limitations of the set, mostly waiting for the glue and paint to dry. The puppet also had to be screwed to the sets and attached to a jumping rigged which was painted out in the editing.

When I showed Zeke the test he was over the moon with the test shots he turned round and told me he wanted to make me the Co-Director of the project. This would give me more of a creative input as to how some shots would look, as well as sharing story ideas, and to help out when doing the after FX and editing. I jumped at this chance and was so pleased that he had let me be such big part of his final film. 

I won’t go into too many details on how the shoot went as the film will not be released online until 2013, and there will be a more detailed post on the animating and editing side of the production then. But what I will tell you is that Zeke and I did the entire Stop motion shoot and we had a brilliant 2D and after FX team. There was also so one big shot that we shot using 3 cameras from 3 different angels all at the same time.

For more info Check out Zeke’s production blog here 

www.zekeares-animationcreation.blogspot.co.uk/

If you can’t Waite until 2013 here are the two test animations I did to give you guys a tees of what to expect. And as always your comments and feedback are welcome.

Conflict of Self Part 4:

It’s being a long time sins I last posted anything on here as I have been very busy with all my university work. But I believe now is the time for updates, but before I can tell you about the new projects I have been working on I think I should finish off the news on how my conflict of self project went.

In my last post on this project I was at the stage where my bad-side puppet had just been completed and I had shot an animation test. The next step for me was to make a start on the good-side puppet, the original idea for this puppet was to make it the same way as I did the bad-guy puppet but with a wire armature instead of a ball and socket one. As the deadline date for this project was getting closer i would not have the time to do it that way. So my back up plan was to make the puppet using a wire armature with clay over it for the body a real fabric outfit and super sculpey head.

As I was pressed for time when making this puppet I did not take all that many photos of the making progress. Here are the only photos I got of the super sculpey head that got burnt in the oven that I then covered in clay, the body of the puppet with a rough outfit design on and the final puppet on the set.

When i came to animating i started on the shots were you see the bad-guy on his own, like getting out the suite case. I did these first so i could get a head start on the animating as i knew how this puppet acts and the way it moves when I’m working with it from doing the test.

By doing the single shots first it gave me more time to work with the new good-guy puppet and find out the best way to work with it. In some of the earlier shots i spotted the puppets had a problem with keeping its balance and wobbling when moving him. As i did not have time to go back in and fix the armature i used my set of help full hands as a rig to support it and did my best to keep it out of shot.

The animation took around a week and a half to do and was all shot on ones. The last shots were close ups on the good-guy and animated on the morning of hand in. I then exported all the shots and did a very ruff edit and sound mix for the hand in. I then took the Christmas holidays off from doing uni work, when I got back to uni went over all my sound file and recorded new dialogue for the final sound mix and edit for this animation.

There is the final animation i hope you enjoy it and as always your feedback is welcome.