The Mischievous Bears

This is the first movie that I made and I spent some time planning out how the storyboard would flow. The end result included pretty much everything that I intended to put in this movie plus some last-minute ideas. Most notable is that the room itself was based on my own including the furniture and most of the little trinkets (books and the flashlight) around the room. Also, the radio-controlled car was also based on a real RC car that I came across (having an engineering professor for a father comes in handy).

The Mischievous Bears took over two years (with several breaks in the middle) to make, and it took two weeks (on a 3.0 GHz computer) to render it out, with a couple of the shots taking 30 hours. However, this movie does have its share of flaws. The actual bear models, as well as the fur, behaves a little screwy in some shots. If I make any future movies with these characters, I will probably start from scratch on the bears’ models. Overall, the animation looks pretty good, and the environment (the room) and the lighting turned out really well.

The audio that I used in this animation as well as all of my others, came from several sources that I’ve collected over the years. Only a few of the sound effects were made by me, but since I don’t really have the equipment to record decent sound effects, or have any musical talent, I went with what I had laying around on my hard drive. I honestly don’t remember where most of the music came from but I do know some of the sounds came from SoundDogs.

The Powder movie (link on YouTube) I made as an experiment by animating a bear and seeing how the fur would work. I spent a great deal of time tweaking the final appearance of the fur and the lights to get utter ‘perfection’ (well close enough). In reality, I should have spent more time on that. If I had to do it again, I would dump the fur and just create a high-res fur texture map to wrap around the model, which would have saved me the headache down the road.

In the end, I hope to make more of these movies, while fixing some of my mistakes, in the future, which includes side projects which these characters, but it may be a while before I start such a project. In the near future, I plan to create a DVD-Movie disc with these movies plus some of my other movies on it as well.