Immortal Pictures recently provided the animated segment of this short film explaining the Oxitec method for eliminating Dengue fever. We built the puppets and shot just over 3 minutes of animation (courtesy of animator Ben Halliwell) in just over two weeks  – a quick turnaround but a nice little job.

Raging Balls of Steel Justice

Here’s an early promo image for Raging Balls of Steel Justice – a short film currently in production. You may remember from one of our previous blogs, that we are creating this 10 minute short with development help from the Film Agency for Wales. All the puppets have been created as you can see in the poster, and we will be shortly finishing the sets.

Mike recently built this large scale plasticene octopus and provided animation for the new Brooks running shoe commercial for Passion Pictures and director Marc Reisbig

We’ve just embarked on making a short animated film here, with development help from the Film Agency for Wales. It’s a 10 minute short based on the Balls of Steel concept seen on the media page (we’ve changed the name for obvious reasons). As we progress, we’ll upload images occasionally to give a taster of the film and the character of Chuck Steel. The ultimate plan is to make a feature film of this idea and the short will be used to attract funding. As it’s a small team and small budget on the short film, the workload is high and the shooting time will be quite long but it will be worth it in the end. Stay tuned!

Talk Talk – A Brighter Home for Everyone TV Commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmNglspNLoM

Talk Talk – Homesafe TV Commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DWlX9SW0ow

Click the image to the left (or here) to see the effects test animation, and to view behind-the-scenes stills of the creature build, click on the model making page.

“…while money is being spent on taking a safe ride, rehashing stuff we’ve already seen, already know and already love and don’t need to see ruined, they’re not backing new filmmakers, new writers.”

The full interview can be read over at the Fangoria website.

The rig consists of several grips which hold all the tentacles in place, together with the central rig holding the body. We’re shooting on a Canon 40D (if I remember correctly) connected to Stop Motion Pro software running on a laptop. The software allows us to preview the sequence in real time, delete frames, add frames and basically anytihing else you’d need to do.

It’ll only be a short animation, but it will hopefully be enough to show future investors how the final piece “could” look… nothing is set in stone.

Stay tuned for more news, and to see the animation test when we’ve finished.