The Afterdeath trailer is now online!

Just a quick update to say we are progressing with the Afterdeath project.

Check out some of the character screens below or visit the Afterdeath development blog to see where we are at.

Sometimes you have such a crazy idea that you just have to make it happen. Presenting … Borg Queen Barbie

For those non Star Trek geekers who don’t know what ‘Borg’ are – read this now!

Following on from my previous toy Borg shenanigans…

Making Of

As with almost all these projects first step is research and here Mr Google rains supreme – especially for two such well known and beloved franchises.
The Borg Queen has to be one of the best sci-fi villains of all time!

Next was sourcing the second hand Barbie doll from an op shop (Kudos and thanks to RedMonkey! )
She came sans-clothes, and with both hands/fingers gnawed upon. There where also what looked like stab wounds from what I would guess would be a compass or some such stabby implement.

First working step involved a quick hair cut (Sporty!) removal of giant, pink ear rings (Although tempting as it was to give the Borg Queen such extravagant bling – these too had been gnawed upon and were beyond saving) The final step here was to score out with a craft knife where I wanted her head to come off - after all, have to get inside to do a proper assimilation job

Originally I had hoped to be able to cleanly slice through the plastic with brand new scalp blades but the plastic proved to be Tonka tough. This required some serious dremeling (Of course only after some scalp-blade-snapping swearing. The good news been there was no blood drawn! )

Decapitating just wasn’t bad enough – next step … lobotomy!

Back inside the body it was time to remove the arms. I wanted to retain the shoulder articulation and luckily some careful scalpling, dremeling, and filing gave me this result.

Now we are getting somewhere – with all the parts separated it is back to the reference material to draw out the shapes that I will be sculpting next.
(It was disturbing that even in this dissected form Barbie still looks happy!)

Preparing the skull with a wire armature.
The Sculpey skull piece. I made the above wire armature hook into the plastic so I could easily sculpt and then remove it for baking.

Next up, I began work on the arms and hands reconstruction. Here I used Sculpey with the boiling method.

… and then continued to the body. I had to be very careful with the legs since they are made of rubber instead of plastic, so there where a few times , through handling, the Sculpey would crack and fall off.

To help with the above ‘rubber leg’ problem I ended up coating some areas in polyurethane. Unfortunately this meant loosing some detail but at least she didn’t have bits falling off! ;D

Base paint layer.

Some paint detailing.

At this point I took a break to design up and build some packaging.
Had a lot of fun with this!

Test prints to make sure everything is going to line up ok.

Building the box.
 

And here she is – ready for posting to RedMonkey!

… and on the other end RedMonkey was kind enough to take some awesome photos (** Check out more of her work HERE)

Overall this was a really fun project and opens up the doors to all sorts of other crazy ideas!! … who knows what toys will be assimilated next?

Resistance is futile!

… and there is a ‘Making Of’ blog post about it here.

I usually don’t post tests here but I have been getting bored recently waiting to find out if several of our projects are getting funded or not. So in the meantime I have put together this technical test using Unity3d. Basically this is to trial a production pipeline testing the software and tools we will be using in our projects. *Note: the character is just a game guy knocked up for the test and isn’t a part of any project.

You will need to get the Unity3d plugin to view this online (It is a great plugin and there is a lot of wonderful Unity3d projects available online to check out – so well worth the download!)

The shots I worked on include:

Crashed alien ship. This involved tracking footage, building the 3D space ship, and compositing the final shot.

Digital wall blood. Here I tracked the footage, added digital blood splatters to the walls, and masked the main actress (For areas where she passes in front of the digital blood elements)

CG alien eye. Again, tracked reference footage, built 3D alien eye, and composited final shot. I also had to do some tracking and stabilization on the nurse’s reflection footage.

Truck back. This shot has several tasks. First was to track the very shaky shot, second was to add a digital double (Nurse on floor in bottom right), third was to add digital blood to the walls, and finally to stabilize the shot into a smoother move.

Alien tentacle on monitor. A simple shot adding a 3D, alien tentacle element to the monitor footage.

Digital blood spurt. Created a digital blood spurt element for a post head exploding shot

Overall these were all pretty fun shots to work on!

An animation I did for the 123klan / bandit-1sm Fellastar video contest (http://fellastar.bandit-1sm.com/)
Unfortunately I only found out about the competition 4 days before the closing date so there isn’t as much animation as I had hoped and no sweet 8bit soundtrack

Without much time for planning I just started off with a page of quick sketches.

I then used Paint.NET to draw out Fellastar’s poses and run animation (I really wanted to do more animation but just didn’t end up having time)

Grabbing a few ‘bad guys’ from older sketches and worked them up in Paint.NET along with the evil Dr. Squidbrains and the Squidlings

The final animation, shots, and effects were completed in After Effects in a couple of hours.

All up it was a pretty fun 4 days of putting something together and a real joy to work with such an awesome looking character. A big thanks to 123klan and bandit-1sm!