Announcing "The Monsters"- My Upcoming Animated Short Film!

I'm happy to announce that "The Monsters," a CG short film I've been working on for over over a month now, is going to be coming out sometime this month! I say "sometime" because I'm still working on it. I'm in the latter stages of animation, but still have plenty of work to do, never mind the lighting and rendering (I'm using image based lighting and final gather with Mental Ray, so each frame takes a decent amount of time). Anyway, here's the first promo poster!

It'll be about 2 and a half minutes to 3 minutes long and, as the poster says, is an action-comedy. I can't really say too much without giving it all away (3 minutes takes a long time to animate, but a short time to watch). However, I will say that the possible subtitle for the film is "The Bottle Battle." It should be fun! There's no dialogue, just a lot of physical humor due to some conflict between the characters. It's kind of like one of the old Road Runner or Sylvester and Tweety cartoons.

Work in Progress Screenshot from Maya

I'm not doing it for Animation Mentor or anything (though the characters are the AM rigs Monster Ball, Bird Ball, and Twig). It's a personal challenge I've set myself to see if (A) I can make a short all on my own, and (B) how fast I can do it. Which is why I'm using pre-existing rigs and several free props, along with the props and set that I made, to help speed it all up.

Work in Progress Screenshot from Maya

It's been quite a challenge so far, but I've learned/improved a lot at so many different things that it's been worth it. I've gotten a lot faster at animating, which is good since my last class gave us 11 weeks to make a 15 second 2 character dialogue. That's fine for school (and actually really good since you have the time to slow down and learn) but in a real production environment you have to work a lot faster than that, which is what I'm trying to train myself for here. And on top of that, it's just fun to be able to produce animation faster because you get it out of your head and onto the screen quicker.

Anyway, I'll keep this blog updated about the film's progress through the last few weeks. When it's finally released, you'll be able to find it on my YouTube channel.

Until next time!