Saturday, December 09, 2006

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


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].

20 comments:

Poornaa Venkatesan said...

Hehe! You forgot to mention you had to make your mom stand on the table and hold the light for u for one shot!

And I analysed and I like DM better! YES YES!

Anonymous said...

well the quallity of pics is really ......(i'm not getting words to describe it man).
Its great.....

Anonymous said...

It's incredible how you got such a quality video with home tools and toys! ;) He, he! :D I would have never said you used those things! :P
Simply awesome! =)
Congratulations!

Anonymous said...

i had a feeling he died at the end.
its a funky video! no way i could make one with just a photo camera :-D, but i like dark machine better, not that this one isn't good, its great. :-)

-P

Anonymous said...

Good Job!!
The music was perfect for the scene :)

Ganeshan.

Varun Abhiram said...

Poo, Suresh, Ismaele, Pablo, Ganeshan - thanks a lot!

I made lots of edits to this post, so you might want to go back and see if you missed anything ;)

Anonymous said...

Thats fuckin good. Great stuff. Tell you what, you should use Power Director 5.0 instead of lousy WMM. At least that way you won't be spending much time on your editing.

Varun Abhiram said...

Hey GAPP!

Hehe there was actually NO editing at all :) Since you have to insert frame by frame in WMM, I kinda had the scenes in my head and shot the edited version straight away :P

I had a trial version of Vegas installed earlier and that was great. Power Director is also a very nice program! Both decided to stop working just as I began making this, that's how I ended up with WMM :)

arvizard said...

gg!! fun to watch wat a cam and loads and loads of patience cud do! so ur next one gonna be in 3d???

Varun Abhiram said...

Nahh I lost patience with 3D... too much work involved and I don't get anything worth showing :P

Perhaps if somebody like you taught me, I'd think about making one :D

Anonymous said...

funky poster. :-)

and i forgot to say, the music really fits the video! more madness :-)

-P

Anonymous said...

Wow! Neat Job Varun!

Really enjoyed it :)

-Pratyusha

Varun Abhiram said...

Pablo - Maybe I could have done without the 'time is running out..." bit :P

Pratyusha - Thanks! :)

Anonymous said...

Hey cool video! Music really fits...but i liked the dark machine better! Maybe becas this one has got few shots of just typo...But its really good...and it would have been better if it had been longer, i would have had more to watch!!

Anonymous said...

What i liked:
U made it color this time.
The Map,especially.
Music suits too.

What i didn't:
Cyborg falling from the grill.
U should have increased the length.

Varun Abhiram said...

Thanks Mira and Shashank!

Mira -- It would have been longer if I had more hols :)

Shashank -- Yeah the fall was a bit clumsy... was damn hard to film that. As for the length, read above :)

Anonymous said...

Hey Varun, it's your cousin all the way from down under. I liked the video but it was bit too short. Dark machine was a little better than this but they are both awesome. Keep up the good work champ.

Anonymous said...

Nice one.........hats off to your patience for having taken that gun-shot.

Dark Machine....Cyber.....what next???? Nasty little productions...

Well,i think i know what your next post is going to be------->about the web-sites you have designed....

I must say you are a wonderful all-rounder(director,producer,web-designer,not to forget 81 in jntu)..anything else which i don't know!!!!!

Rajeev Turlapati said...

awesome man,as always!!!
but i felt ur old one was slightly better

Anonymous said...

hey varun...nice work....the music suited the video....awesome!!!