The Making of Roadkill Redemption

SO much went into making RR, I thought I’d do a little behind-the-scenes treatment.  There’s easily enough content to fill up several posts, but I’m stuffing it all into one big fat one.  Now you can binge through a year of my work in one fell swoop.   Yeh.

Before going any further, please watch the actual final film.  This is SPOILER territory and you don’t want your first impressions besmirched by all the raw source material.  

Story:

You can see the full animatic in my latest story reel.  It’s patched together pretty roughly but it served as a very helpful roadmap.

Story Reel Spring 2013 from Karl Hadrika on Vimeo.

Vis Dev:

Never ended up making trees... telephone poles work just as well

The first rendered model profiles

Animation:

I knew I REALLY wanted to make a hybrid for my thesis film.  I designed the story to lend itself to multiple animation mediums.  The mix of 2D and 3D metaphysically separates the characters and displaces their existential realities.  The mortal realm is grounded in CG- while the raccoon ghost defies the constraints of this dimension and flows ever-freely in his own 2D ghosty world.  He is a pure-energy embodiment, the soul of a no-longer-living-thing, and shouldn’t be confined to a “rig” in any sense anyway.   

So that’s basically my rationale for the whole 2D/3D thing.  It was very difficult to pull off but also a lot more fun. 

Anyhow, here’s all the embarrassing video reference I could find (the rarely seen but all-too necessary part of every animated film- lovingly recorded on my cruddy macbook cam... with catchy music thrown in...)

Video Reference for Roadkill Redemption from Karl Hadrika on Vimeo.

I like animating things that perpetuate between normality and going stylistically off model.  Too much of this can be poison, but just enough of it is the REASON I love the animation medium.  In real life, you can’t break the face of a live actor to get that panicked, open-mouthed expression that pulls the jaw a foot out of it’s hinges.  I wanted Leah to be as expressive as my actual drawings.  This meant extra blendshapes and the utilization of those sweet, sweet nonlinear deformers.  (God bless em’)

Here are some expressions that go by really fast in the film- nonlinear deformers and excessive blend shaping all up in here: 

And a bunch of random screen grabs for scrapbook filler:

         

Good times.

my dorm in the heat of crunchtime (not too bad actually)

unused spoof movie poster idea: Rosemary's Baby (ROADmary's baby?)

Ya'll drive safely now.