Animation Final: B-Movie

ANIMATION FINAL:

"ATTACK OF THE 100 FT. DUDE"

By Drew McCall

Well, this is it. The project. 

The BIG project.

It's the final animation of the school year.

I'm not happy that it's the last one, I love this class and am sad that I'm leaving. But I thought I should end the school year with a bang. That's right. A special effects kind of bang.

Our prompt for the final was to create a video that includes 3D animation, special effects and green screen elements. My group, which includes myself, Graham Petter and Valhalla Cartwright, decided to create a film in the style of a 1950's Sci-Fi B-movie. 1950's Science fiction movies are renowned for their horrible quality special effects, poor acting, and low budgets, all of which we had plenty of. We thought it only natural for this to be our final project. Eventually, we settled on creating a film about a man that drinks a growth serum created by a mad scientist and then becomes 100 feet tall. This is a parody of ALL B-Movies from the 1950's, but we also stole the title from "Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman". We called ours, "Attack of the 100 ft. Dude".

This project was LOADS of fun to make from start to finish. However, it was not without its fair share of difficulty. One of the harder things that we encountered when making this project was designing it to be as close to an actual 1950's B-Movie as possible. To do this visually, we made all of the clips black and white, added a grainy effect to them in After Effects, and added the hum of a projector in the background.

The good thing about making a B-Movie like ours is that you can make it as terrible as you want it to be, since its poor quality is specific to the genre. We purposefully tried to make it as cheesy and bad as possible (which, I'm not gonna lie, helped us out due to time constraints). Our storyline was very rough and had many plots holes but we did this on purpose to make as awful as we possibly could. We still put in a lot of work in despite our film's bad quality; we had to plan out what shots we wanted and still had tell a story, even though it was all a parody. Graham helped a lot in the creation of our story and pre-production, and he also served as the star of our film. We put a lot of time and energy into making this whole film. We worked especially hard on the opening sequence, which included several detail-oriented tasks.

The title sequence is made up of several different parts: first we made the MGM studio title, then we had a film countdown, then we finally had the actual title sequence. The MGM studio title was created as a joke since I played the lion in our school's production of "The Wizard of Oz", so I made myself the "MGM" lion. I began in Photoshop by taking the original MGM logo and adding a black and white effect and erasing the original Lion and making the inside of the circle transparent. I then changed "Metro Goldwyn Mayer" to "Valtro Grahamwyn Maycall", as a parody of MGM using the names of everyone in our group. I then imported the footage of me as the lion and layered it beneath the now, "VGM" layer in After effects. Ta-da! Instant studio title card.


We then created the actual title sequence in photoshop and After Effects. The background of the title sequence was stock footage of a skyscraper that we found online, but everything else was made by us in photoshop and animated in After effects. We tried to make this title card as close to a 1950's title card as well, complete with a roman numeral date at the bottom of the screen alongside various other notes and disclaimers and a little E-Comm title and logo. These details really helped make the beginning pop.

We spent a couple days filming all of the footage we needed for the various scenes like the lab, Graham as a giant, and the tank/ missile. We really had to plan out what shots we needed to get, and had to keep in mind what we would have to do in post-production to get the intended effect as well. The lab scene was fairly straightforward, but the scenes we filmed on a green screen had to be really thought out. We captured a lot of footage but ended up using only a little bit of it to create the final product. To make Graham appear to be as tall as a skyscraper, we had to film him against the green screen pretending to ravage the city. Then, we pulled the footage into after effects and used the "Keylight 1.2" tool to key out the green parts and make the background transparent. We added a black and white effect to the footage of Graham and layered the background footage into our composition. The final product made it appear as though Graham was towering over the school building.

Val created the tank and the missile in Maya, and we pulled the rendered footage from Maya into After effects. We then added the black and white effect (again) and made it look like a tank fired a missile at Graham to shrink him down to a normal size.

When we were editing it all together in After effects, we really had to search for music and sound effects. A simple search in youtube for "1950's B-Movie Soundtrack" sufficed, and after a short period of searching I found everything I needed. We did the same with sound effects, and we even included Godzilla's roar and the "Wilhelm Scream" in parts of the film.

In all, this project was all about the details. Even though the quality decreases as the film goes on, the details that really make a good parody were the priority overall. The one thing that I would do differently in this project is I would apply one filter for the black and white/ grain effects to overlay across the entire project instead of adding these effects to each clip one at a time. I really loved this project, though, and I think we did a pretty good job capturing the whole idea of a B-Movie. I want to add some changes to the original file to make the audio better towards the end, but like most animations, it's never truly complete. It can always be changed to be made better.

I learned a lot though this project and experienced first-hand one of the most important aspects of animation as mentioned earlier: the details are important. Never be afraid to look for something that seems off in an animation, no matter how small, and go about fixing it. It will make the final product far better, and your perfectionism will be rewarded. I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone that helped me with this project and to you, the reader, for appreciating all my hard work over the year(s). Thank you for everything, it's been an amazing ride.

Now, without further ado, here's Grahamzilla destroying the city.