Robot Chicken

I'm not a huge fan of Robot Chicken's humor. At times it can be really funny, but it can also be pretty corny, distasteful, or just plain bad. But one thing I've always loved and appreciated about Robot Chicken is the stop motion animation, which is really well done and really creative using the show's vast array of action figures, dolls, and toys. I'm sure most of us have seen Robot Chicken, but here's a couple of funny examples from the show:

I saw it fitting I did something from adult swim seeing as I posted about Too Many Cooks last week. Thinking about it a little more, I realized that adult swim really supports a lot of creative types of animation. Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Harvey Birdman for example all used some unorthodox animation styles, all to the show's benefit and humor. 

The Making of Small Soldiers

So many of us 90s kids know the movie Small Soldiers. Well if you don't I definitely recommend you watch it, its a pretty entertaining movie! After taking this animation class I have really been watching movies in a different way. I now need to watching all the behind the scenes so I can learn how they created what they created. This blog I am going to spend time explaining how they created the Small Soldiers.
Just for the people who haven't seen the movie here is a little back ground information. Small Soldiers revolves around two teenagers, who get caught in the middle of a war between two factions of sentient action figures, the Gorgonites and the Commando Elite.
(Link to more back story)So obviously the creators of the movie had to figure out how to make these action figures move like action figures but also make them seem more alive. Since CG was still in its expensive infancy, Stan Winston Studios was called upon to create puppet versions of the sentient action figures in the film. Controlled by rods and cables that would later be digitally removed in post production, the characters required carefully choreographed performances from the studio's puppeteers to create lifelike motions.
Here is a video that just show you the puppeteers controlling the action figures. It is pretty impressive how life like these characters are created! Check it out!

Gundam Fight

Today I came across this really cool stop motion video and I thought I would share it with the rest of the class. In it there are some shooting effects and also explosion effects. These effects are not stop motion like the rest of the film so it gives them a distinct look. The one effect that I thought worked the best was when he knocks down the bad guy and the dusk gets shot up everywhere. It lingers onscreen and gives it a nice fluidity even though the characters and moving choppy from frame to frame. It always amazes me to see the lengths that some people will go to when it comes to making these types of films. It says that the movie is over 3000 frames and done within 30 days. It is consistently lighted the same and the it seems to flow flawlessly. For some reason Blogger won't let me insert the video into the post so you will just have to copy the link.  

http://vitamincr.com/2012/05/3000-photos-30-days-lots-of-love-epic-stop-motion-gundam-battle/