Cloverfield….in Hobart…Hobofield?

There has been some talk around the office of a possible project that consist of two strong mediums: Animation and Live-action. A combination that’s become a trend in most movies. Now, imagine AWF (with our paranormal creativity) making a project that relies heavily on that combination. Well, you get a Cloverfield……in Hobart. But this isn’t going to be anything like that movie, instead you might get things like an dragons, giant squids, giant crab attacks or even giant transforming isobar building that turns into a Mech!!!! Bet your curious now huh?

The other day I learnt that Adam has always wanted to make a live action movie combined with animation. At that very moment my mind blew up with ideas of the possibilities of live action and animation. I explained these ideas to Adam and he laughed and threw a pen at me…obviously they weren’t the ideas he wanted. So he gave me the full low down on his idea and the tasks that lay before us, it sounded big….no, it sounded epic.

The reason why we’re starting on a project like this is because our new Friday program called, “Creative Friday” (basically just start drinking tequila about 10am - a let the ideas flow). Truth = every Friday we focus on our personal projects. This way we can have more projects to show to our fans and keep them entertained with our awesomeness. And so our idea now is the project I mentioned about…which has a code name, Battlefield Hobart.

So what’s Battlefield Hobart really about? Well it’s a little different to the the one I explained in the first paragraph, basically three Mech’s will transform from any three of the buildings Hobart has to offer…unfortunately there’s not much of a selection… hehe … and just before you get excited and start thinking about the movie Transformers, no. These Mech’s aren’t going to transform like the movie, instead they’ll transform into giant pretty colourful flowers… oh … so sweet.

We still haven’t finalized the type of look for the Mech’s, they need to be unique and don’t looked recycled. But so far we’ve chosen our first building to work on, which is the hydro building near T42. So the first step was to draw a few designs that Adam would want the Mech’s to look like. Eventually we had a very rough/basic design, and so i went straight into planning the transformation of the building, remember its not transformers, it had to be more simple and yet awesome!

Having come up with a transformation that would work, I started the animation in 3d max but only using boxes to represent the pieces of the Mech. I started off by staying close to the volume of the building, avoiding any pieces going through each other, but Adam mentioning it doesn’t matter if it does as long you can’t see it… wow, he is really smart …. With that in mind I worked out a cool animation that best suited the Mech.

Once Adam was happy with it, I went on to start rigging the Mech and it turns out to be the most complicated rig I’ve ever created! Not only did I have to work out the complexity of pieces moving in the transformation but also create the mesh so it looks like a ‘Mech’ without losing the building shape. It got harder when I realized CAT’s limitations in its default movement (CAT is the awesome animation tool we use in the studio), so there’s a lot of extra bones on extra bones (on extra bones), more so then anything I’ve ever worked with. Basically my goal is it be able to create a rig that you can animated it’s enitre body while it is transforming, it would look amazingly cool to see the building both move like a human and transform at the same time.

It’s still in the early stages but soon enough, we’ll be able to get an example of the Mech coming to life right in the very heart of Hobart. One thing to note that I’ve been questioning is whether we should strict ourself with just photo stills or live footage. Stay close on further updates!