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Maybe you saw End Game – the kayak movie from Corran Addison. Due to a picture I sent to Corran, we started with the production of the Intro and Credits – all of these featuring the Mechalien …

This is the picture that started all ….

The production included mailing really big attachments (up to 50mb), playing with the figure animation programm Poser and composing everything together with Adobe AfterEffects …
If you are a little bit interested of how it was done, then read on …

How to move a Mechalien Well, if you know something about keyframes then it’s a simple thing. I used Poser from Curious Labs and downloaded the free Mechalien from Beyond Bent plus some props from different sources. After Importing the Mechalien you start with the first picture of the animation, move a little bit in the timeline – change the dials for all the movements you want to do and so on … after some time you got your first animation and you render it to disk. An important thing here is to render you movie as a still sequence (I use photoshop files) – the reason for that is, that you have an alphachannel for your alien and so it’s easier for the next step …

Composing the Mechalien into the forest
In Adobe After Effects you make a new composition and import the still sequence. AfterEffects recognises the alphachannel and you can put the animation into the timeline. The only thing I had to think of was that the mechalien had fly behind the trees so i duplicated the orignal forest-layer (transparency is down in the screenshot) and move the duplicated one above the mechalien. Then I masked the 2 trees and thats it – simple … For the effect at the end (when the mechaliens flies into the camera) I switched „Frame Blending“ on and the movie was ready …The text effect …
Well – just have a look at the cool After Effects tutorials at Creative Cow – the one for the effects is called ‚Creating a Flowing Title Effect‘ but there a plenty of brilliant tutorials there …

That’s basically it … if you want to see some of the clips just click on the links below

The final intro
The Mechglider and his surfboard (for the Credits of EndGame)
The Mechglider with some heads