This is it

Well, I didn't get everything done in time. My reasoning for this is that although I am a very fast animator, I have a habit of rushing scenes under a deadline and most of it ends up looking like crap. Instead I opted for my final film to only complete each shot to the point where I was totally happy with it before moving on. This resulted in about 60 - 70% of the movie being completed, but considering it's a six minute film made by one person doing a one hundred credit point year (while my peers only did eighty), I did pretty well. Not to mention Okki the Octopus blew totally out of proportion and ended up dominating my first semester with twenty one minutes of animation to complete - fast, budget symbol-based animation as opposed to my more careful, considered, thorough approach to Wünderkind.

At the end of the day, all I could do was my best and this is it. This film may be incomplete but I'm damn proud of it. The story is perfect. Four redrafts have rendered the original script practically unreadable as this film has evolved from a flight of fancy to a considered piece of speculative fiction. I decided to take a leaf out of my hero Peter Chung's book and flick the 'V' to conventional Hollywood scriptwriting by writing a film where the protagonist is the villain, a vile maniac to be sympathised with, and though he eliminates his adversary, he is defeated, not victorious. I wish to carry this odd storytelling methodology into all my future works.


You don't mess with killer ten-foot Russian robots.


Victor, the eponymous Wünderkind, who appears as much as a villain as a victim.


Lajos Farenczy has gone between scripts from a one-shot nobody, to a weaselly scapegoat, to a valiant antagonist to the evil Kaiser.


Hatticus is technically the true villain of the piece, and yet it is never revealed whether the character truly exists. Is it an alien? An apparition? Or a mere figment of Victor's tortured imagination?


Poor Victor is so disturbed, even his imaginary friend is a predatory bully.


This scene was improved drastically by the addition of a painted background.


The credits sequence is by far my favourite part of the film. It is a bizarre send-up of patriotism; an American war chant and patriotic icon played out by German cyborgs.



The support everyone has given to me in the making of this film has been nothing short of breath-taking.

Thank you to everyone who believed in me and wanted me to succeed. I am utterly grateful.

Just around the corner!

When the hell did I get six followers?? That is definitely a recent development.

Anyway, I have six days to complete my final film, and it's going to be a mad rush but I am determined to finish this. I'm actually quite thankful most of the five minutes is just talking.

I decided to take a more serious version of the "Ren and Stimpy", "Spongebob Squarepants" approach, wherein an emphasis shot is in fact, a rendered painting rather than a flat-shaded cell.

Although I am still using gradients to shade the frame-by-frame/tween combo animation:



...whenever there is a static shot without lots of movement, I have taken the liberty of rendering the components in Photoshop for extra impact.





On the sound front, Kuba Komorowski has completed his part of the score, I have nearly completed mine, and David Williams has made excellent progress with the sound design. In my humble opinion, everything is sounding great.

Hatticus scene and March sound

I am currently in the process of attacking the Hatticus 'spider crawl' scene and intend to have it finished by about Sunday.

In the meantime David Williams has completed the sound for the marching robots.

More Vïshnegradsky!

http://www.sendspace.com/file/wejblj

Ow my brain hurts. I did this in one day.

Ah, the fruits of intensive labour!

Vïshnegradsky

The design of Vïshnegradsky has gone through a few designs now but I have settled more or less on a gorilla-like body structure with medium-sized legs and big arms.
He is a mobile weapons platform, and so stands at about eleven feet in height.



I have kept the design loose and rough for the sake of freedom, and have nailed down a look and feel in Flash that I am happy with. I intend to have this shot finished by tomorrow.



The Vïshnegradsky unit (there will be about seven or eight of them in shot) will be the force that brings down the Parliamentary Building at the end of the film.

SO YEAH ABOUT THAT FINAL FILM

Ahem. I should probably update.

Hit a few snags with my film but I am still intent on getting it finished in time for the screening.

This has mostly manifested itself in a complete reallocation of time and resources, i.e. rescheduling.

Objective is to have a good few 'money shots' that people will remember and link them up as best as I can with limited animation.

A more refined sketch of Lajos Ferency. I'm still yet to finalise his design, but I think I'm onto something here.