Oil Wars 2059 - Trailer

[Matt]

This is a trailer a made using stop motion animation. It was shot in my garage with a large amount of sand and a collection of Corgi and Can.DO M1 Abrams tanks. The animated sequences were created with a DV camcorder, AnimatorDV Simple and a laptop with firewire.



I originally tried using lots of blue screen but found it impossible to separate the detail of the tanks from the back ground. In the end I opted for good old fashioned masked images.

The plan was to make a full length film ... but I ran out of free time ... and haven't got a script!

[Gyro]

So, are they just shooting up refineries?

Great stop-motion, by the way.

Have you seen Moon? Has some fantastic stop-motion.

[Matt]

The original (and very vague) concept was that it was the battle for the last refinery on Earth. Who was fighting who wasn't something I had decided

Haven't seen Moon yet but it's on my list.

[Ornsack]

I love it! It's like Thunderbirds. Really nice style to it. I love minatures.

What was the green screen problem? The green on the tanks mixing with the green background?

Here's one for fact fans: Jason (of Guksack fame)'s uncle produced Moon. You will see a familiar Itallian-sounding surname on the box in the credits

[Matt]

I was using a blue screen so no real clash in term of colour ... I just couldn't remove all the blue without starting to lose parts of the tank. The barrel and aerials were the worst bits. There just didn't seem to be a sharp enough edge to work with.

I knew I couldn't do 'real' so I decided to go 'stylised'. I was thinking back to days of watching Thunderbirds, Joe 90 and Terrahawks.

[Ornsack]

Faldor showed me the way when it comes to chromakey. Get Keylight for After Effects. It. Just. Works.


This is the original (captured from something that should be online in a couple of weeks time).


This is what happens when you just plonk on the After Effects inbuilt keyer over a white background.


And this is using KeyLight on default settings. Ramp them up and it removes the shadows. All the hairs on my head are kept intact, along with motion blur etc. I reckon it'd work wonders for what you've done.

And if you do anything like this again, pyrotechnics!! It's the ultimate reason to do something in minature

[Gyro]

So much Monopoly...

[Ornsack]

Very good

[Matt]

Pyrotechnics were part of the plan, just didn't get around to trying anything.

Also I only had so many tanks so didn't want to destroy any of them in the first five minutes!