April 26, 2005

Helmet

This is a helmet design that to me looks Star Wars Stormtrooper inspired. This was drawn back in 1981 for the Triumph short film (see the entry called 1981 Flipbook).

This was drawn with a happy fun No. 2 pencil on standard copier paper (which was amply supplied by my father, the copier repairman).

(Thanks, Shelley, for saving all this old artwork.)

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)

1981 Flipbook

When I was growing up, I first wanted to be a rock star, then an animator, then a special effects wizard and then a film director. During that whole phase of my life, I wrote short film scripts, illustrated otherworldly characters and even created a couple of flipbooks. Here is the first one, based on the ending of a short film I was never to create. The short film was to be titled Triumph, after the name of the smaller spaceship in the flipbook animation.

To create this web-ready version, I scanned in each 3x5 card on which the flipbook was created, brought each image into Adobe After Effects, used AE’s motion stabilization feature to re-register each frame so the movie didn’t jump all over the place, and then render the final out to a Quicktime movie.

Here is a picture of the flipbook in mid-flip:

Here is the final movie version that plays at ten frames per second:

1981 Flipbook (1.3MB)

Quicktime is required

The image and flipbook movie are Copyright 2005 Nathan Dickson. All rights reserved worldwide.

Posted by Nathan Dickson at 05:57 PM | Comments (1)