"Shrimp & Cookies," anyone?

Just when it looked like I was going to have a ton of time to work on DREDD MANOR I stumbled upon a Craigslist ad looking for a claymation animator. I answered the ad and had the good fortune to meet Michael Wormser, a great guy and talented director who was in the final stages of creating a video for a song called "SHRIMP & COOKIES" by singer Mooney Starr. The assignment: take two CGI characters that were already created for the video and construct clay versions of them--as fajitas. Yes, fajitas. I've never tried to interpret humans into Mexican cuisine before, so I was all over it.

The puppets themselves were pretty simple, with only eyes and mouths to worry about since fajitas don't do much but lie there and sizzle. My main concern was matching the puppets, which were stop-motion, with the grill they were lying on, which was CGI. The two elements actually looked pretty darn cool together, and I learned tons about greenscreening that I'm now able to put to good use on DREDD MANOR.

Check out the final results here, courtesy of YouTube (PS-My animation comes up at the very end, so no sneaking out early!):

Onward towards the dark

Been having a lot of fun over the last couple of days messing around with cutout animation for DREDD MANOR. A few interesting results, and some shots worth keeping, like the one above.

More to come...