First things first...

Hello all,

Welcome to ZAZ animation's new "The Devil production Diaries" blog.

In this blog we will be posting about the making of "The Devil": tests, tutorials and some other delightful hellish stuff.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

The sets



Well, and now for the sets.
The biggest challenge in building the sets was to give a good foundation for all the green screen and matte painting work that followed in each and every one of the shots. We only built small parts of "hell", knowing that the sky, mountains, and sometimes the other characters were to be added later. 
As with the devil, we used found objects from scrapyards, old trees and other strange stuff laying in the backyard. These objects aesthetics would be the foundation of the gritty look we were looking for, and the inspiration for all the digital work we did afterwards.
Here are some examples of stuff we used, and first the sexier ones:

yep, this are gummy bears. they light up like pros

the exit sign is a plastic soap box, and the portal is an old picture frame. more electrocuted bears on top

 and now for raw materials: 

oak tree bark

petrified alien droppings

If you know what the hell this is, please tell me

From these objects we just started to try things out, to see what works. lots of designs were a thing of trial and error, but things happen to fall to place, and find a good way to fit.

this started with this box
one design that we didn't keep, it wasn't mean enough
the chosen design, and color tests with the puppet to see if everything matches
As building materials we had tons of hot glue gun sticks, old junk and a lot of gypsum. We used it to give the textures of the ground, as seen here


The gypsum is modeled and textured by hand, and colored with acrylics and other organic pigments like coffee, cinnamon and cardamon. It sure smelled good building it....








Actually that's it. the same ideas and techniques were used throughout the hole production, in order to keep continuity and style.
Next post i am going to show some examples of the different animation setups we had to deal with, including a suffering vocalist, falling bears and a summary execution.
keep posted. as always, questions are more than welcome.

Cheers!