Sentry

An over-confident space hero enters the scene to get hs hands on a valuable gem stored inside a facility, guarded by various sentry bots. With his trusty blaster he begins his mission...


Sentry from Ravi Maheru on Vimeo.

Development

Sentry was made for my assignment for an experimental module during my second year (1st semester) at Wolverhampton University.

For that module, we were looking at different styles of (non-digital) animation every week. I really enjoyed experimenting in Lotte Reiniger's 'silhouette' style. My first attempt at this was in a group of 4 where we recreated some scenes from Jack and the Beanstalk.

I still wanted to explore this style further and chose it as the style for my final piece which I would now be working on alone. I wanted to break away from the fantasy/ fairy tale theme and setting. Choosing a Sci-fi theme I wanted to show the journey of an over-confident hero with a comical end.

'Visual' Concept art created in photoshop

The music was composed by Joe Cruickshank, who I owe a lot to for allowing me to use this as the idea came to life in my head whilst listening to this track. The music track was originally created for a game we were creating but it never really got anywhere so we decided to stop working on it. The track would have played during the opening mission for the game, which took place in a futuristic facility. So huge thanks to Joe for this awesome track.

It took 2 weeks to shoot and animate with a week of preparation before that. The characters and backgrounds were made using Black and white card, although I used orange card for a specific scene where an explosion lights the scene briefly.

Photograph of most of the card models used for Sentry

Characters are movable using wire hinges.

Sticking to the style and method silhouette animation, everything was shot frame by frame and no digital animation or editing was involved (except for compiling the frames into a video format).

Achievements

1. It got awarded a Daily Deviation at Deviantart in December 2009 which took me by surprise.
2. Shown at the International Flip Festival 2010 during the Launch Night (4th November 2010 7-10pm at Birmingham, Millenium Point. http://www.flipfestival.co.uk/ )
3. Shown at Shorts on Walls (animation forum west midlands) in December 2010