Click here to watch EXOskeleton episode 2
Click here to watch EXOskeleton episode 1
Development story:
EXOskeleton has been my passion project for more than 25 years . It began life in 1998 as a purely CG animated project. However, rendering times were too long and I was definitely lacking in my modeling and animation skills so I decided to turn EXOskeleton into a completely hand-drawn comic instead.
BELOW: Early sketches I made while developing the EXOskeleton design. I have documented the first decade of development in my “archives” YT-series (links to these videos at the bottom).
BELOW: My hand-drawn comic-version from 2007 of what has now become the opening sequence of episode two as seen in the screenshot further down below.
After years of further development, I finally left my hand-drawn approach and turned to Blender. It was simply too demanding drawing the machines by hand. Blender was a great help in making the visuals for the comic and in 2017/18 I released the first six chapters as a webcomic (no longer available).
ABOVE: My humble booth at Copenhagen Comics in 2017. Webcomics were a thing back then but it never really took off for me. Instead I turned the pictures from the webcomic into my 360-page movie story board shown below.
In 2019 I got a chance to present EXOskeleton to a small group of people involved in the movie industry. I made a treatment, wrote a script and brought my huge story board along with some toy concepts. I had of course hoped for a studio to buy the rights to the franchise and have my vision for an EXOskeleton movie realized that way - but it just never worked out.
ABOVE: Concepts for an EXOskeleton toy-line.
By then I was more than 20 years into development and I still hadn’t had a real breakthrough. Nevertheless, I felt very strongly that my story needed to be told so I refused to back down. I would die a bitter man if I didn’t try to somehow realize the project with whatever I had. So, with my limited rescources I decided to buy a Blackmagic camera, lenses, a Godox light and a ZOOM sound recorder. Out of plywood, aluminium plates and a backpack-frame I built a motion capture device that would enable me to combine a “real” exoskeleton interior (around the actor’s face) with the CG exterior parts. Ruth carries the thing in the picture below showing the Blender viewport with tracking markers:
ABOVE: Once the actor’s motions have been captured, the CG exoskeleton exterior can be attached. It has to be aligned carefully to make the face and the real interior parts blend seamlessly with the CG exterior. To punch a hole in the CG (around the face and the aluminium plates surrounding it) the red parts in the picture below have been designated as a holdout-mask
BELOW: The final result (from episode one):
BELOW: Creating shots with the exoskeleton walking was more demanding but I am happy with the way it turned out. Here’s my daugther imagining being in a thrilling sci-fi dystopia while walking along soft couches and family photos.
My daughter and some friends of mine generously offered to play the characters in my story. They enthusiastically went into this weird indie project giving it all they had. Thank you ladies! Our living room was turned into a movie set during day time around ten days spread across half a year.
BELOW: Excerpt from the story board for episode one.
ABOVE LEFT: Another peek into the shooting process: I am trying to wave gusts of wind into Silja’s hair. RIGHT: The final result of the scene depicted in the storyboard further above.
I now have most of the live action footage needed up until episode ten. Remaining for me is to take this material through the many VFX post processes in Blender and DaVinci Resolve and finish one episode at a time. Once the visuals are ready I can add sound effects from the Epidemic Sound library.
BELOW: A lot of sound bites are combined in DaVinci Resolve to give weight to the visuals. The sound of the exoskeleton steps are mainly made out of recordings of a freezer door closing.
BELOW: The final step is adding music. I compose all of the music myself in REAPER with Spitfire’s free BBC Symphony Orchestra svt along with various synths. I am inspired by the classical romantic music as well as early eighties synth pop. There is a man vs. machine / analog vs. digital theme going on in exoskeleton and that is also being reflected in the combination of these two musical genres.
ABOVE: All musical themes in EXOskeleton are originally my own but I decided to pay a little homage to Richard Strauss’s opening to his tone poem “Eine Alpensinfonie op.64”: “Nacht” (night). I like that musical piece a lot. The downward moving theme can be heard as the smoke clears after the cuiser has struck the command bridge and MO/130 gives orders to the crew.
All of this is a lot for one guy to shoulder in his spare time but I feel things have finally come on the right track. Though production has been moving slowly during the first two episodes it is finally building momentum and hopefully, down the line, I will be able to release two new episodes of EXOskeleton every year. There are 27 episodes all in all…
Thank you so much for your interest in the project! I wish you all a happy new year and lots of happy blending.
/Lars Kaag.
You can support the series greatly simply by subscribing to the channel.
All donations on https://ko-fi.com/larskaag earn you a place on the list of contributors in the end credits for the coming episode of EXOskeleton.
EXOskeleton merchandise:
Europe: https://exoskeleton.myspreadshop.dk/
United States: https://exoskeleton-shop.myspreadshop.com/
To watch archives videos click pictures below:
