This time the animation required as the final project had to be a re-interpretation of an existing script. We were given three possible scripts chosen by the module leader to pick from, or we could’ve chosen our own. I went for the latter option.
I decided to re-interpret a story taken from a Marvel comic from the late 70s. It’s about the death of Gwen Stacey, Peter Parker’s (Spiderman) first girlfriend, by the hand of the Green Goblin. If you’ve seen the first Spiderman movie (first of the new millennium, NOT the 70s trilogy of movies, a true abomination…) you probably remember the scene where Mary Jane is thrown into the emptiness by her captor, the Green Goblin, only to be saved by Spiderman’s web-slinging skills. All good, people cheered. But in the comic book things went a little differently: It was Gwen, not MJ to be captured by the Goblin, and most importantly, she doesn’t survive the fall. Spiderman did manage to catch her in time, but sadly the whiplash snaps her neck.
So, this was going to be the core scene of my animation, but what about the re-interpretation part? I simply thought: If the original story is about a man with spider like powers, why not twisting the subject the other way around? Why not making it about a spider with human sensibility? So off I went…
The whole story is set in a kid’s bedroom. A brother and sister bedroom, which gave me the opportunity to fill it with whatever props and toys I would’ve found useful for the animation. To ease the characters into the story, I started from the typical boy-meet-girl situation. Considering the average size of a bedroom that supposed to accommodate two young kids (and their stuff), that’s a large environment from a spider’s perspective.
Both spiders are in fact virtually free to roam around the room and entertain themselves with whatever they find lying around. They can use a plant pot as a park, they can use toys from a farm set to pretend they are at a petting zoo: they can ride a wind up scooter on a bunch of comic books scattered around the floor like on a speed track, using other toys as obstacles. An I-Pod provides the background music to all these shenanigans.
In particular, a Hot-Wheels type bridge set and a bunch of Lego models and bricks turned out to be very useful for two key moments of the animation. I also scattered a few Spiderman and Marvel clues around: Comic books, action figures, blankets and pillow covers for the boy’s bed… I almost forgot: The Green Goblin! What could I use to represent the Green Goblin on an insect scale? It obviously has to fly… but not a fly, too small. Not a bee, too yellow. Not a butterfly, too pretty (or so they say)… a dragonfly? They certainly have a certain mystique about them.
Before starting to model an animate I had to consider the storyboard and how to fit the various scenes together (and in what order). Unlike the project on our previous term, this time I kept the storyboard pretty open to last minute changes (I learned from my mistakes).
Overall, the most important thing I learned while working on this animation is this: Never, ever again I’m going to use the ‘hair and fur’ effect of 3Ds Max unless I’m working on an industry standard machine. It takes too long to render frames that would’ve taken much less time. You could almost grow a real beard while you wait…
P.S. You can check the video out on my site, just click on the above link and go to the 'Animation' section.
