I actually did this a while back but, decided to upload it after looking at the earlier version that I had posted. Below are a couple of video clips, as well. One is a turntable of the model, and the other is an animation/normal map test of the character walking over a BG still from the original film. I really wanted to emulate Harryhausen’s animation style in this test.
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Just fooling around with texture mapping, and posing…
Cyclops Turntable [0:23m]:
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Cyclops Walk [0:05m]:
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Following is a Quicktime file of an animatic that I did of a proposed 30 second spot using the Draggin' Dragon. I was thinking of doing this short-short with 3D BGs and props, and with 2D characters. Just as a sort of proof of concept I built a CG mockup of Dragon's Pagoda Wagon and combined the elements in Photoshop. The BGs in the animatic are just placeholders painted in Photoshop and the characters are really rough.
Draggin' Dragon Animatic [0:33m]:
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This is a show opener that I did for the PBS series "Foto-Novelas" that was produced by ITVS and directed by Carlos Avila. The idea was to emulate the style of Latin American comic magazines. I boarded the concept, laid it out and put it together in Adobe After Effects. I hired an illustrator to do the final artwork, and unfortunately I can't remember his name, but he had a great brush line which gets obliterated in this compressed video.
I scanned the original hand inked artwork, then vectorized it with Adobe Streamline and touched it up in Illustrator. Finally I imported it into After Effects and had a heckuva time plotting out the curves for the camera move. That version of After Effects didn't have 3D space to work in, so it all had to be faked. I envisioned a shot that flowed continuously throughout, but I definitely had to cheat and throw in a couple of dissolves.
One of these days I'll go through my disk archives and see if I can find the original project file and rerender it at web resolution so that I can have a first generation copy up. I'm sure it would take a lot less time to render this time around than it did when I first did the spot. Originally it was done on a 150 mhz PowerMac. I would start the render in mid-afternoon and come back the next day hoping to have a completed shot. It was a sort of cold-sweat flashback to my years of doing motion control effects back when cameras had film.
Fotonovelas Video [0:32m]:
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This is a character that I've had a lot of fun with. Influenced by "Big Daddy" Ed Roth, I created Draggin' Dragon and designed a bunch of images of him in import street racers. The image below is the first one I did of Dragon in a tricked out Integra. When I showed the first draft of the poster to a friend of mine who's worked on race teams he pointed out that Integras are front wheel drive! And that's why I don't have the burnout smoke coming off the rear wheels, (the way I first drew it), as in the classic Ed Roth cartoons.
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DragginTheme.mp3
This is an MP3 file of a bit of music that I put together as a theme for a Draggin' Dragon animatic that I did. I did it in Sonar, mixing loops and sound effects. I'll probably reformat the video and upload as well, since this audio upload seems to be working. Please let me know if you have any problems playing the media files since I'm using plugins that are new to me. Thanks.
Standard Podcast [0:35m]:
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