King Kong 3d Animation
Agenor Ramadan
Hi guys,
Recently I have a chance to work on a small game. The main character is my own design of a small gorilla - kinda like Banana kong.
It really was my first try doing animations for quadruped, so if there's any way to improve, I'll be very glad to hear from you guys. Thanks!
What if King Kong faced the Indominus-Rex? My name's Francesco Daffini, and I'm currently specializing in 3D animation at Side Academy.Giving life to such classic icons isn't an easy task, but the bright side is you also have lots of inspirational material. Let's take a look at my second-year animation project.
Finding cool references isn't tough, given the huge amount of online resources we have nowadays. The most challenging part was filtering all of that and isolating what I needed for my short. I mainly based the animation on specific movie scenes, as a sort of tribute to the flicks I loved as a kid, but further references were used to get a more accurate idea of how real gorillas and big lizards move and behave. I wanted to focus on the weight of massive bodies moving and interacting with each other.
Animating a walking dinosaur was harder than I thought; it took me several weeks to understand how a theropod body works in motion and how to translate it into my animation. Once the cycle was completed, I set the camera and adapted the dinosaur animation to the shots, adding asymmetric movement and variation.
After importing the rigs and the references in the scene and creating an initial camera, I proceeded by setting a blocking of the animation in stepped mode, starting off with key poses, followed by breakdowns and in-betweens to match the timing and choreographies of the movements as much as I could. The spline/polishing stage came right after, in which I had fun recreating and cleaning all those heavy-weight collisions and ground contacts. Details like muscles and camera shakes were the last elements to be integrated before the environment/render time came.
One of my goals was to pay homage to the movies that left me speechless when I was a kid and that were the reason that pushed me to embark on this journey. Animating these beasts was a true challenge, but I had a lot of fun working with them throughout the different stages, facing one obstacle at a time.
According to Suchan, the genesis for the exhibit was derived through informal conversations with his childhood friend and early 8mm filmmaking collaborator, Greg Kulon, who is now a retired aerospace engineer, published author and scholar of stop-motion animation, and avid specialized collector of cinematic art.
Stop-motion animation, for those who may not know, is basically taking a series of photographs, moving the object very slightly in between shots, and putting them together to create a motion sequence on film. The first documented, commercially released stop-motion animation film is Vitagraph's The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1898, credited to J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith. Producer Wladyslaw Starewicz is another pioneer of the field, known for using stop-motion in a narrative. But arguably one of the most famous animators of the time, the one that kicks off our look back into King Kong, is Willis O'Brien. O'Brien's craftsmanship of miniature creatures was featured at the 1915 San Francisco World's fair, where his work caught the eye of a fellow exhibitor, who called on O'Brien to create the 1915 short animated film The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy.
Armed with a stunning pedigree and an extensive catalog of special effects mastery, O'Brien was brought in as the special effects' supervisor for King Kong. His first step was to call on frequent collaborator Marcel Delgado, who as a team had become well known throughout Hollywood. A full-size bust, arm, and leg were created for close-up scenes, but for the most part Kong on screen is portrayed by a 18-inch puppet, made from metal, rubber, and fur. The puppet, as well as the other creatures seen in the film, were painstakingly shot one frame at a time, an animation process that took over a year to complete, including a seven-week period to create the Kong/T.Rex fight scene. The stop-motion work alone is revolutionary, but the true genius of O'Brien's work in King Kong is how he brought the animated sequences and the filmed sequences together.
To do so, O'Brien used every filming technique of the time: animation, miniatures, matte paintings, traveling mattes, rear projection and miniature rear projections, to name just a few. For instance, consider how the live-action actors interact with Kong. Two processes were used to create the illusion. Rear projection had live-action footage projected onto a screen built into a miniature set, like the jungle, projected frame by frame to match the animation. The second was a process known as the Dunning process, a special method first used by O'Brien to combine two pieces of film together at the same time. So while the techniques themselves weren't new, the combination of them to create a world where the fantastic meets reality certainly were. Interestingly, O'Brien himself animated close-ups and particularly emotional moments involving Kong.
If there were any lingering concerns about the film, they were quickly silenced when King Kong became a massive hit. By some estimates, the film was one of the highest grossing films of the 1930s, bringing in over $4 million dollars. The pioneering techniques used for the film are still in use today, either as is or as the fundamental building blocks for modern CGI effects. King Kong inspired a young Ray Harryhausen to reach out to O'Brien, becoming his protg, and taking what he learned from the effects master to new levels, creating Dynamotion, his own technique for bringing live-action and models together in films like Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. It also inspired a host of contemporary visionaries like Tim Burton and Peter Jackson, whose works are rooted in the movie magic KingKong weaves.
I have a good reason for doing this and I'm not the first. Pit made a blog defending Ken Kaneki vs Shinichi Izumi's animation potential and I'm sure a lot of other people have done the same thing when a matchup they want was getting blasted for it's animation potential.
Now onto the matchup itself. I think this is the best for both. It has great connections, animation potential is actually great (which we'll get to later), music is spot on, and all around, it's just a great matchup. The animation potential, however, is something a lot of people seem to not like it for. I know that it may just seem like a big monkey trying to catch a moth that just shoots stuff because she can't do anything on the ground. There is way more to it that what what people and the ones who said nay to it when PollyLowasLee posted on it in CSC.
I can understand that it might not look like much at first but there is a lot you can actually do with it. Kong isn't a savage beast like most people see him as, He's actually an incredible smart and strategic being. Mothra has a large variety of different abilities that we could show off and while Kong might not have much, he doesn't really need special powers to put up a good fight. Look at Hulk vs Broly, Hulk didn't have any ranged powers like Broly did, yet he put up a decent fight against Broly (and likely would have provided a better one if he wasn't downplayed so hard). Let's go over Kong since Mothra isn't really that big of an issue.
Kong clearly doesn't have any ranged weaponry, he just has his intelligence, strength, agility, and experience, and to be honest that's all he needs. Kong is smart enough to create his own weapons like spears and clubs and throw rocks which he can use to knock Mothra out of the sky since he has really good aim. He can also make pretty much anything into a weapon, like how he used a ship turbine with a chain as weapon when he fought Ramarak (that's the name of the giant Skull Crawler in Kong: Skull Island). He's practically a human if you overlook the fact that he is a gargantuan ape. And if we give him some terrain he can swing around on, then that would make it more fun. But that's not all he has.
Kong of course has his battle axe. He can use this axe as a throwing weapon similar to a tomahawk and use it to shield him from incoming projectiles like how it could deflect Godzilla's atomic breath. The axe also allows Kong to scale to the Legendary Godzilla, as it is what put him on equal footing with Godzilla. Legendary Godzilla has some pretty impressive feats. I'll link a respect thread so you can see.
This ability was showcased when he fought Godzilla back in 1962. It's what allowed Kong to beat and kill Godzilla (in the draft for the sequel, it is actually revealed that Godzilla was killed by Kong but he came back like he always does). Kong does have a way he can gain these powers during the battle. Mothra can create lightning and she can inadvertently give Kong his powers after downing him. This is also where we can scale Kong to Godzilla as that's how he beat Godzilla in the first place.
Introducing Mega Kong! This form causes Kong to double in size, which also increases his stats. If we apply this to a composite, which would likely use the current Monsterverse Kong as the base, then we would have a 600+ foot Kong! Heck, if you really wanted to get creative you could have Mega Kong with electricity powers! Another big opportunity for how creative we can get with the animation. Granted, Kong usually does need to merge with Jason Jenkins (his brother in Kong: The Animated Series) in order to achieve this form but it's pretty easy to ignore since nothing about Kong changes except his intelligence since he now has a human in his head. They forgot to take into account that Kiryu went berserk because Godzilla's roar awakened the OG Godzilla's spirit but the animation was only more fun once Godzilla came out and started ripping the Dragonzord a new one.