Replacement Project: Animals of War: Project Menagerie (Season 1)
Latest Update: (July 14, 2019)
Scroll to the bottom of the thread for the latest work and updates!
This project used to be a fan fiction of the Movie G-force, named The Story of Ven. Have a book written and everything. Recently this grew into an original but you can read the original idea below.
BELOW IS THE OLD THREAD STARTER
(Dec 2016) Okay everyone, if your reading this thread, be prepared as I essentially give you my life story. Or at least with blender, kinda. This is a film project that’s currently in the concept stage, but has been planned out since 2013. This is a prequel and a sequel to the film G-force that came out in 2009. Now okay, a fan fiction? I mean so many people have made good fan fictions of so many things and g-force was no exception. I wanted to take it a step further, pushing a fan fiction into a film. This is the tricky part, how do I know if I can do this G-force style film if the characters are copyrighted from Disney? Am I even capable of doing this? Will Disney sue me? I obviously cant make money with it… Well, first off, I had NEVER intended to make money off of this, or for any of it. Heck, I’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on things I know I’m going need to just make it. I’ve bought a ton of audio equipment including a condenser microphone and a upright piano to score the film.(Ironically, the piano was cheaper than the microphone:)).
Why? It’s more of me being persistent and stubborn. I don’t care about monetary value, all I care about is making a film that everyone can enjoy, and making characters that people remember and love. Or in my case, I love taking existing characters that have little or no background information and exposing the audience to it.
Second, I’m actually not too sure about using the original characters in general. In fact, in my story, the main characters from G-force are rarely in the film. With the exception of Darwin, all the other characters are in like one scene. My film spreads out to a village of guinea pigs far east of where G-force is located, this is where my main character lives. Besides the point, because this film is going to be created with no monetary incentive I wonder if Disney will allow it. I mean if fanfictions are allowed, why not an animated fanfiction? This is my current thought with that.
Back to the project and a little history about myself.
I was born in a place called the abyss, to a pack of gerbils, and I was told that my meaning in life is corgis. And Guinea Pigs. lol
Actually when I was young, my mom would get these 101 Dalmatian stuffed animals, along with other animals, and I always found those toys my fallback to when I needed a friend. Since I had a hard time making friends in elementary school, I would just go home, get my stuffed animals and start role playing with them. Usually it was something Dragon Ball Z related, like my stuffed animals could go super saiyan… erm, super dog, and super dog 2. It got me extremely attached to my stuffed animals, each of them had a specific history, and a lovable character. That’s where I got my love for animal characters, as well as watching a lot of Disney cartoons. As I grew up, I got my first taste in CG when I saw the Garfield movie back in 2004. Of course, I fell in love with the character because he’s an animal character and it was relatable to me thanks to my toys. But things really didn’t get serious until I saw Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 in theatre back in 2009. After watching that film, I think my life changed in regards to 3d animation and characters. I remember being amazed looking at the fur and how real it looked, I focused on the characters WAY more than the plot, specifically Theodore. I guess his cuteness and softness in personality got me hooked. His character was posted all in my life, it was my background picture on my phone, the computer, and sometimes I would dedicate a song I heard to him, or just write one about him. I even made my nickname Theo so people would know that I love that character. I was a freshman in high school at the time, and being a teenager, I wanted more. I went on the internet and searched on things about Theodore and I came up to a website called fanfiction.net. Holy crap! I was in disbelief that people wrote stories about there favorite characters and posted them on the internet. My favorite one was a like a pg-13 story about Alvin getting kidnapped and was put in this dark prison with another chipmunk that was pregnant. They escaped and the mother gave birth to the kids, but sadly died. So, Alvin took the kids and raised them as his own. These dark stories were always the best ones and it was my inspiration for making good characters. Later on until 2011 I saw another film that changed my life, G-force.
When I first saw the film, it was on the Disney channel being played on the TV. I only saw the last 30 minutes of the film and thought to myself, “Military Guinea Pigs? wut…” I mean its actually a pretty cool idea, and I rarely see anything military related involving animal characters. I went ahead and bought G-force on Blu-ray and was mind-blown about the CG and effects. Although I was a little disappointed about the plot, the film itself was considered a meh film. Me though, I didn’t care. I saw animal characters, I saw military, and being a teenager, violence was what I liked in stories. Well, being a pg Disney film, the violence was rarely there. I thought to myself, has anyone attempted a cg film like G-force that was rated R for violence like Black Hawk Down or a lot of military films. So I took action and started researching what programs were used for film making, the first thing I came to was Autodesk Maya, and I found out that G-force was made on it, so I got a student license and attempted to learn maya. I did I think 2 weeks of research on how the fur was made on g-force, as well on how they made the film. As I started modeling on maya, I was getting confused on the shortcuts and there was little info and tutorials at the time, so I accepted fate, and gave up. At the time I just accepted the fact that violence in animal character films were non-existent, at least in a modern society. When 2013 came I graduated high school and was forced to face life and lived it pretty horribly. Long story short (with the exception of this giant post) I made bad decisions and was forced to live with my stepfather again. I built myself from the ground up and got a job, from then I had little free time to write anything and was focused on life and bills rather than fanfictions. Well, me and my stepfather both lost our jobs and was forced to live with his mother. I managed to get a part-time job at a pizza place, and being part-time, I had free time again! yay! One night, I randomly thought, what if Darwin from G-force had a twin brother, and he was evil? I literally spent the whole night thinking out the plot, how it would end, who dies and lives, so on so forth. A few days later, after input from people at work and changes (major changes) to the story, I had a initial plot planned. The plot was good enough to be movie I was told, and that was my inspiration to get back into CG. After my failure with maya, I started searching for 3d programs to make films. I came up to a program called Blender.
Now, BLENDER! yea! This was my solution to what I needed. It was completely free, capable of everything I wanted to do, and had great support, artists and community. I started immediately with Cgcookie’s Introduction to Hard Surface Modeling and got a citizen membership. For some reason I stopped participating in the tutorials and just started watching tutorials just to learn. Also partly, I couldn’t do anything serious with the Dual Core laptop my stepfather had. I was in need to get a better computer. During this time of bulking money for a computer, I wrote my entire story and 3 more books (which will be explained later). Btw, that evil Darwin’s brother turned out to the protagonist of the story and he isn’t evil anymore. I also created an entire village of guinea pigs, about 40 pigs! After about a year, I gathered about 2500$ and built my computer as it is now.
I finally can start blender properly, after re-watching the tutorials, I felt confident to create my first Guinea Pig character, this is what I got.
<-lol its pretty bad
At the time though I thought it was good. I was trying to base it off of Darwin, since the protagonist is his twin brother. It was a complete failure, I don’t know why I considered that good. After getting little to no feed back about it, I was once again at the point of giving up, and I did… of course. This time I stopped for two reasons, one was for the crappy result. The other is because I had enlisted in the military. I had to go to BMT (Basic Military Training), then tech school, and finally got stationed up here in Anchorage, Elmendorf AFB. Now that my job was stable, and I still had free-time off-duty, I rededicated myself to the project. This time it was going to be done right!
Part 1 of 2
