FredEx

My Firstist ever post.

We (Seed) were asked to come up with a 10 seconder for Channel Frederator. The brief was loose (yay!):

What would be the pros/cons of being a robot at a robot reunion?

After 5 minutes in the pub we came up with a cracker. We stayed in there all night to celebrate. The next day we went down to London to chat to peeps about mofone content etc., but this gave me some quality drawing time on the train. I liked the idea of really shit robots- dated, box like, tin toy types from the 70's; the beginning of the computer age. You know the sort. Anyway, here's some of what I came up with...


For some reason, I like drawing loads of ideas ontop of each other. Wierd. Anyway, now that we had the story and the characters (top left), I started to build them in 3D...


Nearly- I thought they looked too innocent for what they were going to do to each other. So I gave them more chunky teeth to make them look more menacing. I also started to fool with After Effects to get that dated 70's toy box feel...


The next stage was to get them moving. I really wanted them to move like proper idiots. We make robots move; they have no control! So i gave them erratic, random, out of control and exaggerated linear movement. Here's a slowed down walk cycle (I deleted all of the later ones and its a bad example really).

I used the animation mixer in XSI to organise the animation, and it seems to speed up the process if you're using walk cycles etc. Once I'd finished the animation (it took me about a week) I rendered off the characters, volumic and shadow passes. I made a basic office background in 3D, but it was always my intention to give it detail in After Effects, cos you can get much better non-computerised looking elements using merged photo layers etc. It's also much faster to make than if you were to do it in 3D. Anyway, after alot of layering and re-rendering I got the look I was after; a sort of dated retro archive cartoon feel.

I visit Cartoon Brew regularly and I love all that old cartoony stuff, so this was my attempt at recognising the style and recreating/adapting it using 3D.

Once I had the animation and the look sorted I started on the sound effects. The first clip that I listened to was of gorillas making that "oo oo oo oo" sound. I'm not sure it is gorillas, it could be apes, chimps or monkeys. Anyway, I thought that it would worked perfectly sped up a bit and added other ambient sounds to the mix, and hey freaking presto, job done.

I would go into detail about the very brief 'storyline' but it would probably ruin it, so I won't. Click here for the finished thing. Hope y'all like it.

Here endeth my first post.

Morgn.