The Duckpond

  I'm a huge fan of the Area 88 ova from 1985. The high quality plane animation is nice to look at. And the tone and setpieces have inspired the Ace combat games I also like very much. Since I'm such a fan It's only natural that I would want to build a model based on the main characters plane. Well one of them atleast. In the ova there are 3 main planes The F-8, F-5 and this one. I chose the F-20 because I think that it has the best color scheme. The little bits of blue on the sides make it look better to my eyes. The base model is Hasegawas basic 1/72 F-20. They also made a special Area 88 version with the correct decals in the box, but that one is out of print and also more expensive. So I would build mine out of the basic version and print my own decals. I started working on this kit by printing the decals, the most important ones were the unicorns on the tail fin. I Looked up references from the internet and screenshots from the ova. I made the decals in inkscape and pr...

The models and sets The first thing did was build the sets and models. The planes were built out of regular model kits. For Ciphers plane the F-15 I used a 1/144 scale F-15 model. The only thing I had to modify was making a hole for a stand at the bottom of the plane to be used in filming. But for Pixy it was more complicated, since there are no model kits of Pixys plane ”Morgan”. The Morgan was built out of a 1/144 Macross VF-31C kit made by Bandai. The VF was pretty close to the desired shape so I just had to do some light modifications to the plane and build the laser cannon. I made the decals for the planes by printing them on regular paper. Then I peeled the top layer of the paper and cut them to the right shape. It’s not as elengant as a waterslide decal, but it’s good enought for the video.  The sets were built out of cardboard and tissue paper. For the big dam set in the opening I would make the rough shape with cardboard and then add some paper that was we...