Parody is the imitation of the style of a
particular writer, artist, or genre used to create a more comical and
exaggerated way of effect. Parody isn't something new, as it's been around for
a fair amount of time and with the rise of social media and other sites like YouTube
this has become part of culture and is seen practically all the time and is
very well dug into pop-culture as a whole. Parody can be done in almost any way
and can completely even change situations or even change a genre to a
completely new one like Sci-Fi to western, love to comedy parody can completely
change it. This is where my work falls into this situation with a really
heavily angered and rage fuelled soldier joins the fight.
My early brainstorming and developments
was focusing on what I should chose as my genre to parody first as this was
going to end up being what I would stick with for the next full semester. After
a short time of picking my top few favourite scenes I finally settled upon the Scarface’s
“say hello to my little friend” scene, and soon quickly settled on a soldier in
a sci-fi settling which I felt was working very well as a whole.
Overall throughout the designing phase
and towards animation I always focused on a more semi-realistic look to what I
was doing. As I mainly focused on the soldiers look to make him feel like a
real person in a piece of Armor that makes sense when worn and applied to real
life conditions to an extent, making the movements much more relatable while
making him feel mobile. A lot of his mesh shapes are separate parts like upper
and lower arms and legs and his body from waist to chest. This was made to
allow movements to be made with ease and different areas showed different
amounts of success. As an example the legs had the highest amount of movement
with little stress on the mesh. Honestly as
I came to the point of the UV texturing I knew what was needed and the two
types of materials to be used. It gave the character what it needed to look
like a soldier at the end.
During
creation of the props, the gun was the first thing needed as the scene required
some form of heavy weaponry to its real counterpart. As the use of a grenade
launcher from Scarface inspired me to make several designs for heavy weapons
and after several designs I settled with a rocket launcher, as this was very simple
but an excellent way of showing off the explosive power from the movie. The
area where the scene was going to be created was fairly simple from the
beginning and didn’t require a lot of planning. As this was going to hold two
areas. A large square room where the character would be situated and the
corridor with a door where it would be needed in case I had planned anything
else. Lighting didn’t come without its own problems. Yet however this was
successfully overcome in a way that allowed the room to be fully illuminated
from all corners of the room while keeping the lighting dark enough. This kept
the rooms nicely lit to create a mood shift when being looked at. Finally the boxes
and ammunitions were added as a last minute addition as I finally decided what the
location was and it was a small ammo storage unit. The ammo was placed into the
open crate being amazingly easy to make and came out very nicely at the end and
even used it as the shell fired from the gun in the scene. Meanwhile for the
boxes only three types where made all keeping the same textures in general, and
ended up being a fairly nice addition.
The
animation was planned originally to be very close to the story board but I
personally found out through that this wasn’t going to happen with the props
keeping most of the areas where the camera would be out of view and making it difficult.
So my solution was to make the camera like actual security cameras and the well
placed angling worked very well in my favour as it gave it an appeal to feeling
you were actually a guard watching through the cameras and gave the soldier the
perfect angles he needed to look appealing. The animation itself required the
soldier to show expression through movement and to fire the gun at the door and
this was the only thing kept on from the storyboard. After many words of advice
from Keat I finally got the soldiers body to be moving in an effective and also
slower pace, as originally the character was moving fairly fast in general with
way too much movement.
With
this all fully done it was finally time to do audio in After Effects. I kept
the original audio and it was perfectly synced up to the clip. A very clean fit
with little to no editing in general. A feature to make it feel like this was like
looking out of a camera that was the use of TV static. Although this worked in
the beginning it caused issues with the video but was quickly fixed by reducing
the use and time of the static inference. Overall I’m very proud of how the
animation went out, after all this being my first 3D film piece makes me feel
proud of what I’ve achieved in the end.
By Zack Karai
