PROJECT REGRETROID - Intro To The Monster

(For context, I made this post on my old development blog back in 2017, before that year became a black hole for this project, now we're in 2018 and I'm ramping up production to finish the short, I thought I should repost this for some background )

So back in early 2014, thanks to my friends in my current studio I was pointed in the direction of a new parody album, by a band called Starbomb. The band basically made an entire album of absolutely ridiculous songs based around their favourite video game characters.

I loved every track, complete absurdity and ridiculous lyrics. As with an album like this, it spawned a never ending plethora of youtube animated videos to go with it. As one of the bands frontmen was Arin Hanson AKA Egoraptor, a pretty kickass animator on youtube, there were some pretty wonderful official (and just as good unofficial) 2D animated music videos for some of the tracks.

Meanwhile back at this time in 2014, I wanted to proper push myself to get back into character animation. Originally when I graduated from Uni in 2010, I specialized mainly in character rigging and unfortunately the course didn't really allow much time to delve into proper character animation, so I never really got the spark for animating as much as I did for creating character setups.

So I wanted a project to get my teeth into. I generally learn through a brute force method of learning (I know it sounds weird). But if I want to learn a mountain of skill, I need a project to do to get me there.

Learn the basics, improve upon them, get creative and bolster my skill towards a product created by the learning up until that point. As I am currently learning python scripting, I work this same way in that aspect aswell (to much hair pulling results).

Anyway so when I listen to music tracks, like most people probably, I tend to go off in my own little world and imagine characters and adventures that go with the lyrics/tone of the track. I love just sitting back and creating worlds to the music and consequently its jammed up my brain with music video ideas over the years. But with the Starbomb album it was pretty easy to imagine something fun to animate, as the lyrics tell the story from the get go.

The track I most identified with for a fun, vibrant, silly little short, was Regretroid.

As previously mentioned, there's a kings dowry of 2D videos already animated for this song, since the album came out, they've continued to pop up and there's lots of great little shorts spawned from the track.

Fantastic little flash short for the track by Andiemations:

But regardless, I thought I could get together a few game meshes, rig them up in my spare time and fire out an animated short to the song in record time and put those 2D pieces to shame. I was so wrong. SO FUCKING WRONG.

I wanted to make a short that forced me to learn the finer points of character acting, forced me to shoot reference footage and interpret it to better my approach to animating a character. When I say forced it may come off like I want this to be a chore, but in reality, forcing me to get into these habits means they become routine and second nature. To also learn why a character would feel a certain way and how he/she would manifest it. Get into the skin of these characters and try to bring a more subtle performance to something based around pure gags and ridiculousness.

So here I am, writing this blogpost, in 2017, still not finished with the short. So you could say, nay I'll say it. I was so stupid. This was just a little introduction post to give context to development posts I'll be throwing up on here, sorry if it was a little wordy, I just wanted to convey some of my motivations at the time and my continued motivation, behind this project.