KLED Animations Presents: 'Day of the Chainsaw Wielding Baby'

The studio group project came to a close last week, I'm proud to present my team's animation trailer: Day of the Chainsaw Wielding Baby.

‘Project 6’ – an experiment to create the perfect killing machine, goes astray when their latest subject escapes from a secret laboratory located in the depths of the Earth.
Alone and confused, Project 6 is out of control! Who can stop this ‘baby’ now?



This is actually version 2 of our trailer which I feel works better than our initial version, that featured a narrative trailer voice. You can view the original here.

For a little bit of fun, we actually included some small Easter eggs for the competing studios including Gremlin Box Productions, B3D Studios and Creature Studios and their respective animations - so see if you can spot them, and be sure to check out their respective trailers. Unfortunately, we were not able to fit in Void Canvas Studio, Inspire Studios and Lucid Studios (apologies!) but be sure to check out their works too!

The main share of my work in this project included Concept art, modelling, texturing and rigging our Baby character, creating the Laboratory scene as well as general compositing including small special effects such as bubbles and smoke. My apologies that I couldn't give more frequent updates to this side of the project, as things were pretty tight on schedule. Hopefully, the documented Making Of publication below will make up for this, providing a behind-the-scenes look into much of the process my group and I worked on.

The Making of Day of the Chainsaw Wielding Baby

Here is an additional walk cycle I attempted with the Baby model. I tried to capture the baby's walk cycle by making him a little off balance and slowing his movements.



Where I've also presented a Turnaround of our Baby character for your viewing pleasure.



Feel free to head over to the KLED Animations blog for more details on our progression throughout the weeks.

Otherwise, the next and final project for the second year is soon approaching, entitled Transcription. More on that in the coming days.

KLED Animations Update #3

Phew - its been a while since my last post as things have been busy over at KLED Animations, so forgive the lengthy post! We're nearing the end of the project as we the enter the final days so everyone's been working overtime to get things done. I've mainly posted my progress at the studio blog, but I also want to keep things updated here.


The baby is fully rigged and skinned, complete with controls. He actually has three forms with a a normal form, a single chainsaw form, to a finale of a double chainsaw form.

Normal form

Single Chainsaw

Double Chainsaw


Front, Side and Back.



Chainsaw Model



The chainsaw animation is made similarly to the process of tank traps by using a nurbs circle as a path for the teeth to follow. Initially, I tried using a wire deformer which did not want to work for some reason, but eventually found the solution with the use of a mel script. Here I made made a quick experiment speeding up and slowing down the chainsaw animation. When it comes to animating the chainsaw fully, I'm hoping we can add some vibration to the chainsaw and perhaps motion blur when compositing.



I've also added the mouth interior to the baby, with some teeth and tongue. UVs are also laid out ready for texturing.




Created an initial set of face blendshapes to convey the facial expressions of the baby.



Made a quick test just experimenting with the facial blendshapes, so no subtle eye movements or blinks in this one.



And lastly, here are my initial attempts at texturing the baby focusing on the texture maps.






Head UV


Back to work! Meanwhile, be sure to check out the KLED Animations blog for info on the project.

KLED Animations Update #2

Hot in production, our animation trailer for The Day of the Chainsaw Wielding Baby has been taking shape. We've approached this by identifying a hierarchy of props needed for key scenes and environments in our trailer, and delegated tasks respectively to form a clear list of objectives in mind.

With our tasks outlined for us, we needed to ensure a system of sharing and accessing each others' files was in place in order to work efficiently with production. As such, we've established a sharing system using Dropbox to sync our project files together, where each member also maintains a local backup to work from in case of any lost/corrupted files.

My main areas of focus were creating the Previs/Blocktest to further refine pacing and camera shots, Set Dressing the environments together with the modelled props as well as taking responsibility of the Baby himself from modelling to texturing.

Here is the Previs of our animation trailer, developing from our initial animatic.

Apologies for any inconsistencies with sound as the audio is not yet final.


My work-in-progress of our Chainsaw wielding baby, using the orthographic provided by studio team member Kin.





The nature of our characters exist in a very stylised world, consequently, he may look a little on the wide side at the moment, but I'm sure that once the head is in place the proportions will start to fit more naturally. The chainsaws will be modelled once the 'human' model of the body is in place. Its still a work in progress, but is hopefully headed in the right direction. See more after the link.

There's still much to do as we near the end of production, so wish us luck! You can keep track of our progress at KLED-Animations.blogspot.com.