Lets go way back to the Summer of 2016. As I mentioned in a previous blog I'd just made a slight itsy bitsy error and deleted 2 years worth of files for a film I was making. Well obviously I was none too pleased, but at the same time I wasn't 100% happy with the film.
There were still some files intact so I could have gone back and re-built it all, but it didn't feel right. I decided to start something new. I love mechanical things, so I started sketching out some ideas for a Victorian robot:
This wasn't actually new ground for me as I'd dabbled with robot characters before... a couple of characters called "Screwloose & Bottletop". People seemed to like these characters, feedback was positive, so it seemed a good idea to go down that road again.
This time though, I wanted to really challenge myself and create a robot that no other animation studio would touch with a bargepole. It would be complicated and difficult to animate... well you have to suffer to be different, right?
I wanted him to be primitive and old fashioned, a conglomeration of gears and steam. So to start the ball rolling I bought an old
clock mechanism on ebay for £7.50 and modelled his body around it.
It took about 9 months in my spare time to construct him inside my 3D computer program. But when I started to bring him to life in some test animations, I decided he needed a whole new set of arms and legs so that he could move better. So, after about a year, the final Rummage was born!
At this time I was actively writing the story and I knew I needed another character that was going to be completely opposite in every way.
Two reasons for this... firstly a super futuristic character would cause immediate conflict with an old Victorian automaton with plenty of scope for humorous confrontations .... all good for the storyline. Secondly, to make the film actually do-able I had to balance the animation work with a very simple character model, so he's basically a "floating head" that is so easy to animate compared with Rummage.
So there you are. That's how it came to be.
I'm always busy chipping away at the animation whenever I can between other commercial work (which is funding the film). See future blogs to see how that's all going.