Hey there friends, Martin here,
many of you are probably wondering when is the Heroes of Bronze shortfilm finally going to come out. Well, the thing is, while the basic idea for the film remains the same, its actual look has changed quite dramatically recently. The reason for that is the fact that some time ago I’ve finally received my Rokoko motion capture suit and after a few months of tinkering, I learned how to use it to create shots… well, like this:
These are some of the shots I’ve worked on recently and I am so pleased I can finally make my characters move (almost) in any way I want. As opposed to the previous videos, which were comprised mostly of idle animations or walk cycles.
With that, I’ve quite dramatically reworked the structure of the short film’s shots, making most of them realtime, as opposed to the previous slow-motion / frozen-in-time shots of the original concept.
And that resulted in a substantial delay. I hope that the final quality will however compensate for that. I am now crunching almost every day on Heroes of Bronze, trying to reach the final result in the next 3 months.
Apart from that, I’ve painted some new images for my illustrated book idea, accompanied by a storyline. In fact, this storyline is the heart of the Heroes of Bronze project, the actual short film will be basically a trailer for the overall story. Here is a little snippet of it - the time when Nikephoros met Philippos for the first time:
As the fight entered its closing stage, the audience started to roar in excitement.
Narrowly, Nikephoros dodged his opponent's attack and responded with a few quick strikes, ending with a crushing blow to Philippos’ face. Shouting in anger, putting all his remaining strength to the punch, he expected the muscular man to finally fall down. And for a moment, he did seem stunned, stumbling backwards.
Then, however, he just shook his head, stretched his muscular arms and grinned at Nikephoros.
"That's all you can do, Athenian?" he growled, even as he sprung forward.
This time, Nikephoros misjudged the Milesian's intention. He ducked to avoid a blow - and felt a tight chokehold on his neck. This is bad, he thought. Instantly, he started to see the world darkening in front of his eyes...
Pankration (pan = all, kration = strength) was an ancient Greek martial art, an equivalent to today's MMA. With a slight difference though - in ancient times, you were allowed to break fingers, go for weak spots and do all sorts of nasty stuff. In its hearth, it is a combination of two other Olympic categories, boxing and wrestling. In the later periods, the athletes competed naked, though around 500 BC it is possible they wore loin cloths. As an artistic decision (and because I'm a prude 😅) I decided to depict the competitors using the loin cloths in Heroes of Bronze.
Finally, I put together some new tutorials, one for CGBoost, the other one for my own channel. Enjoy the free intro to compositing in Blender and my tips for Blender users:
Enjoy and I’ll share more exciting news next month!
Chairé!
Martin
