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.

Walk Cycle #04 - Double Bounce

A double bounce walk cycle using an odd number of frames (rather than even), making for a more equal division of frames. The double bounce gives much more character to the walk with a more jolly and happy tone.

Cantankerous Walk Cycle

A walk cycle with the tone/mood of our story element, so in this case, a 'Cantankerous' walk cycle.



I tried to emphasise his movements with a stomping motion, wider swinging arms and a hunch. With more inbetween frames and perhaps not so straight edges in the legs, would help smooth the animation as a whole.

Walk Cycle #03

Third walk cycle using the legs of Felix, with a greater emphasis on the contact mechanics similar to that of the previous hand drawn walk cycle.



I'm certainly gaining more confidence with each walk cycle I make, where I look forward to adding the upper body and further tone/mood variations to the walk.

Rig - Arms

With the addition of the arms, this completes the basic rig for a character model.

Hand Drawn Walk Cycle

First attempt at a hand drawn walk cycle animation. Its not perfect, but I am quite pleased with the results coming out better than I excepted, as well as making a small but essential step in understanding the practices of animation.



Initially, it was quite tricky to get started, as you don't realise how many motions are actually involved when walking, it starts to become a fairly complex process when translating this to paper. Even then, this is just a basic walk cycle, where tone and mood would affect the walk cycle quite substantially adding another layer of thought and consideration to the entire process.

Walk Cycle #02

Second attempt at a walk cycle in Maya and no sliding - hurray! Thanks to the tutorial and Ethan who helped clarify things for me.

Walk Cycle #01

Here is my first attempt at a standard walk cycle animation (with none other than Felix Junior). It wasn't as complicated as I first thought, although there are some tricky areas especially when attempting to achieve more accurate results. Alas, despite my best efforts, there still seems to be a notable sliding in the walk cycle when moving forward. Though with more practice and experience I'm sure I'll be able to rectify this in future.