The Fire Stoker

1997 - Traditional 2D animation with CGI backgrounds (and co-star)

This one was a bit more personal, and too long too. There was no way I could have gotten this one finished on time. It was storyboarded out to about three minutes and I planned to have one CG character interacting with 2D animation on a CG background. The background designs there quite unique, and the character designs were decent enough for the time (one of them my second cat based design, this time with double jointed legs!). I got my flatmate, Dave, to work on the CG Phoenix character, and Becky worked on the backgrounds.

We took some video reference footage of ourselves to assist with the animation of key scenes. I did some decent enough 2D animation and managed to get about a third of the screen time animated with one character, but unfortunately the other character and the backgrounds never really made it that far. We made it to the screening deadline with three separate screenings of all the separate elements, not ideal. My part was just an animatic with a minute of line tests cut into it.

This was my project really, I started it, planned it and unfortunately didn't really follow through on the supervision and organization of the elements I wasn't doing myself. A harsh lesson. The song "Fire Starter" came out at the end of this project too, so I took some stick for that too! I was still proud of the results though, and at least I had a stab at combining two characters from different mediums (the Phoenix held and dropped the Fire Stoker from his claws). At the end of the day I still like the story and the setting, so perhaps I'll remake it some day.