The Cybertech Incident

I've been working on another stop motion animated short film on and off for the past few days, and it's finally done! The idea for making it came from this drawing Karthik did ages ago. The Cybertech Incident has less 'animation' per se as compared to Dark Machine - I decided to focus more on the sets and the overall look of the video this time. Took me way longer to shoot scenes for this, mainly because it's filmed in colour - it was extra hard to hide the fact that most of it was filmed in my room.

The Film

Download the video here (7.5MB)

Or you can watch it below. If you don't mind the crappy quality, that is.

The Sets

Ah what fun it was coming up with these sets. Well, they looked silly the way they were (I was filming kid toys in my house after all!) - that's where the lighting came in to create that much needed mood and drama.

Here are a couple of set-shots with the corresponding scenes in the film. World of a difference, no?

Notes

• The entire film was made in Windows Movie Maker. So technically, if you have a digicam and some patience, you could try this out at home yourself.

• The lighting equipment I used was a torch and two emergency lamps.

• The items used in the sets included a pen stand and a big blue drum.

• The map in one the scenes is my level for the Doom 2 WAD Reanimated.

• The font used in the video doesn't support capital letters so I had to manually fill in the gaps between the line and the dot in the small i everywhere. Wasn't possible to do this in the opening scene since that bit of text was inserted in Movie Maker. Everywhere else, the text was added onto the images themselves.

Edit: Here's a snippet of a chat conversation I had with Karthik today about the story (I never discussed it with him before making the video). Combining both our interpretations, this is what happens -

The cyborg goes in to battle the demons at the system core. Due to the fact that they've scrambled it, and as he's linked to it... he begins malfunctioning as well. The map and images are a kind of code that will help him stop his self destruction. But then he's also fighting the demons, and at the end, time runs out, and he dies [the end explosion is a shot of him dying].