It’s been a while since started making Zeons secret asteroid base, so I’ve forgotten where the urge to make it came from. But I can tell you something else that inspired its creation. I saw a Bollywood movie. There were quite a few oddities compared to the regular American action movies I’m used to. But the big one that stood out to me, was how they were more concerned with putting up a good show than with making it look real. An American movie might avoid something too flashy since it might end up looking cheap and tacky. But in Bollywood a silly looking special effect won’t be a problem. With my previous Gundam stop motion video I chose the setting to be a barren asteroid. Since I could build somewhat realistic looking fake rocks. Anything else would have looked silly. This time I went in and made whatever I wanted, no matter how cheap it would look. I also chose a more stylised and cartoony animation style for this video, since I wasn’t going for realism this time. The original Gundam video ended up looking kind of ugly, and also not at all realistic. But this time, with more stylised presentation the new one ended up looking a lot better. (That might also be because it’s been a few years since I made the last one and I’ve learned a lot since then)
Most of the robots are shot against a blue screen. Even when inside the base. When the robots are shot with the real set, I used a display stand with a claw arm to keep them up. For this video I tried to think of the separate layers the same way you would think of cells in traditional animation. I did the same thing for my previous video, the Ace combat animation. Speaking of traditional animation, I animated the explosions in this video with 2D drawings. I’m not a huge anime fan, but I really like the way their effect animations are drawn. I wanted to learn to do something similar, so I drew the explosions for this video. There isn’t really anything special about this videos visual effects I didn’t already cover in what I wrote about the Ace combat animation. One thing I can think of is the exterior shots of the white base when the ramp is open. I created those images by photo bashing images I took of the interior sets. The white base interior was the only new set I built for the video. Everything else was recycled from Ace combat or the previous Gundam stop motion.
A model next to the fake rock I used for the asteroid base
The same model next to the set I used for the exterior scenes. The set was photographed and then added to the asteroid in editing
A test shot I took to test out the lighting in the White base hangar
The green screen was for the shot where the hangar doors open. The small christmas lights I used for lighting are also visible
Update: I made a short video showing off some of the effects
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