The Duckpond

  About five years ago I watched Space ghost coast to coast. Seeing the cheap animation in it and other adutswim shows made me think ”I could probably do that” So I opened Gimp and drew a little picture. I made some primitive 2D animations and kept practising. Stop motion animation has been my primary focus, so I haven’t really been practising drawing as much as I should. Still, I felt that I might be ready to try out a complete 2D animation. I was not ready. As you can see the result leaves a lot to be desired. But even so, I managed to complete it, that’s worth something, right? After making Imperial inspection in 2015 I said that I wouldn’t do anything with green screen again, and then years later I made the Ace combat animation and Gundam stop motions. I might be tired of 2D now but what about later? I guess we’ll see where my journey with 2D animation takes me. But It’s not taking me anywhere just yet. My next video will most likely be normal stop motion. After th...

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 Gund...

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...