you are here [x]: Scarlet Star Studios > the Scarlet Letters > mutate
<< before
stopmo in progress: mutate
after >>
mold design (part 1)
June 2, 2010
mutate
by sven at 12:15 pm
Here's the new film: Mutate.
It was intended to be improv... But then the shape of a story emerged and I just had to see it out.
The project took about 75 hours to finish, over two non-consecutive weeks. Roughly:
- 38 hrs animating
- 26 hrs sound + editing
- 11 hrs set-up + clean up + learning Dragon
I prefer the look of puppets to clay — but clay does have its virtues. I had a blast sculpting those tongue and tentacle shapes. :)
posted by sven | June 2, 2010 12:15 PM | comments (10) | categories: stopmo
Comments
hooray! and wow, that took a lot of time. :)
Posted by: gl. at June 2, 2010 2:17 PM
And this was an easy one...??
Anyway, now available on YouTube, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSGjkyPIQgg
Posted by: Sven at June 2, 2010 3:14 PM
Fantastic job, Sven!!! The sound was especially excellent. You say this wasn't clay? latex then? All those tiny tentacles! Yipes!
Posted by: Shelley Noble at June 2, 2010 3:50 PM
Thanks Shells!
Oh — sorry to be unclear... It is, indeed, clay.
I just like puppets better in general.
Posted by: sven at June 2, 2010 4:19 PM
LOL at the (presumably) spam above...
Well done on the short! This makes me want to play around with plastescine... seems like it would be fun! And for me, a good way to practice animating.
BTW glad you made use of the upside-down camera idea. Mounting to a wooden frame is smart -- getting all the gear out of the way...
Posted by: stephanie at June 3, 2010 12:38 PM
Dang man!! you knocked that right out of the park!!!
Freakin awesome.
jriggityPosted by: justin rasch at June 4, 2010 1:22 AM
very nice! lots of good speed variations and fluid motions. i also like how the two characters slowly fall over and break apart. was that a happy accident caught frame by frame? intended or not, i also like that the union of the two characters form the shape of the letter M!
Posted by: grant at June 9, 2010 6:40 PM
Ah, I was wondering if anyone would ask about the stuff that fell over...
I had meant to keep the "M" standing up, just with the "seed pod" portion open. And the structure was solid — until I opened it up.
Then I noticed that it was very, very slowly falling apart. Tried to save it, reinforce it — but it was determined to collapse.
This was at just past midnight. So I decided that I should just keep animating the balls, and let the M fall over as if in time-lapse. It works OK with the "story" — but, man, was it ever nerve-wracking! Trying to pace my shots so that the M didn't wind up moving too jerkily?
I wound up staying up all the way until dawn. That M continued its slow collapse for HOURS!
Posted by: sven at June 10, 2010 10:26 PM
@Justin: Thanks, man! You've always got the most exuberant compliments — I'm tickled!
@Stephanie: Thanks again for the upside-down camera idea! …And congratulations on having just finished shooting your film!
Posted by: sven at June 10, 2010 10:35 PM
Awesome job! It's great to see you animating with clay. If you don't kill yourself to make every texture perfect, it can be a fun medium to animate. A lot of the time you can fix cracks with a spoon tool and an oily brush. You can go as far with clay as you want to, which is what I like about it.
Posted by: Don Carlson at July 18, 2010 2:58 PM