Animorphs: a fan film that never was

About two years back me and another guy decided to colab and work on a full length animorph's fan film. I haven't read every book, but I was a pretty big fan when they were in their prime in the late 90s and had just started getting back into them a bit. even bought some of the other books I missed off ebay. anyway, back on topic, me and the other guy (sorry, I cant remember his name at the mement) started discussing things on aim first and we decided we were going to need more help. he set up a forum and we set out to see if anyone else would be willing to join our team/studio, which we were thinking about calling "paragraph pictures". we slowly progressed a bit and recruited about 4 team members. we thought we had a decent start, we had writers, texture artists, models/animators (that would be me and the other dude).









We barely had a basic plot going before we even started. we started modeling things we knew any animorph fan would want in a fan film.
you got your dome ships, andlite fighter ships, bug fighters, andilites, yeerk and a hork bijur. pretty much everything but the stars of the film: the animophs themselves. not to mention the many animals they were supposed to morph into.

After talking it about a bit we figured modeling and animating humans would be too difficult to do with the tools we were using. (mainly a freeware aplication called "Anim8or")

The program is great for introducing people to 3d modeling and animation, however being free and all it was very limiting. more so in the rendering department than anythingelse.

Never the less we wanted to continue on.
I quickly made this make shift teaser trailer of sorts. more for my amusment than anything else. it can now be found on you tube.


it didn't take long though before we realised just how over ambitious we were.
at first we trying to make some compromises such as shorting it dramatically. but even that didn't really work out. and the rest of the team wasnt really with us. part of that was due to being in many different time zones. it was hard to contact them all at once in real time. so communication was difficult. everyone started to loose interest. the other guy tried to just encourage me to continue, but I had lost my earlier motivation.

but none of the little things really mattered. the main reason it never really got into production was simple: we didn't have a clear direction. we had a very vague idea of what kind of movie/short we wanted to make and got way too ahead of ourselves.
In the real world you need a lot of planing before you even think about the minor details. we went about this whole thing backwards. But I'd like to think it wasnt a total waste, and that I came out of it knowing that the next time I even think about doing another project, I'll plan out as many things as I possibly can. and maybe think on a smaller scale. I haven't done any thing with a story before afterall, so I was out of my mind to think I could pull off something that ambitious.

There was some cool models to come out of this project though, and I'll share some more of them with you if I ever get around to rendering them again.