Wednesday, April 6, 2011

ALIEN SPACESHIP
Step 1: design
Special credit to my brother, Marty Coons, for designing the alien spaceship. This is his initial sketch. He's got beautifully wacko designs in his head (here's more of Marty's work), and I'm glad we got to collaborate on this.

Step 2: vacuum forming
Marty made models for the three base shapes out of 20lb foam, and we molded them out of clear plastic. It's funny, as I write this I can smell ghost fumes. The paint is on the inside so they'll be nice and shiny on the outside!

Step 3: assembly
I took my broken boombox apart, and used some of the parts to make the spaceship look more technologically advanced. I wanted the look to contrast with the crafty handmade-ness of the cardboard city and its wax citizens.

rear view

side view

front view

Step 5: ANIMATE!
I just shot the first scene with the spaceship in it. Now I'm looking forward to destroying it :)




Me! and Cardboard City
This is just to give you an idea of scale... or it was supposed to be. It's actually a lot larger than that in relation to my head.

The Cast, Backstage!
A couple of the ponies, waiting for their scene to be animated. It should be within the week. Also a little pile of cars, and a row of wax men. They are frozen in positions of the different frames of a walk cycle. Replacement animation seemed a lot easier than animating something so tiny and mushy by bending it.

Crayon Melter
This was really fun: I painted the wax people with crayon, melted by this thing made specifically for painting with wax! Ali gave it to me :) You're the best Ali!

The Citizens of Cardboard City
Here are all the wax figures I made. I didn't count them, but i'm estimating a population somewhere around one MILLION. They were all made by hand out of microcrystalline wax, which melts pretty quickly when it's zapped by an alien lazer!!

WATCH some of my rejected scenes! Official footage will not be released until I'm finished :P