First Animatic

The purpose of this project is to act as a style development for my thesis while also being a self contained little film. Thus the visuals will be more important then the story itself. In this animatic, I have attempted to present the seven simple shots that make up this piece as well as laying out a temporary soundtrack.

The animatic comes in two forms, standard and stereoscopic. The latter requires red and blue 3d glasses to view. The final film will utilize polarized projection, which requires colorless 3d glasses similar to the ones used in Sony's BeoWulf. This type of projection allows the filmmaker to keep the quality of the color in the film, but is a little more difficult to work with.

Standard Animatic

Length 1:29, 7mbs

Stereoscopic Animatic (Anaglyph)

Length 1:29, 7mbs

Hatchiman

I have used the character of Hatchiman in several films and stories before. He first appeared to me in a dream, or rather it was myself, standing in a yellow field with green sky, wearing the stitched leather garb.

First drawing of Hatchiman, the morning after the dream (2003)

I am now attempting to use Hatchiman in this project, as I find that he tends to lead me through different paths of self discovery. Thus below, you will find a brief history of his development and growth:

Following the dream, I was intrigued with the character's look and began writing stories with the purpose of figuring what the character was about. I now believe that the stories and comics that I drew were too introspective and thus felt like cliches. It was not until 2003, when I began working on a short animated film called More Human than Human that the character began to take form. In this short , a starving Hatchiman washes off the edge of the earth and is rescued by a Windor (dragon-like creature), who carries him to her nest.

More Human than Human, 2003, 4 minutes

Sensing Hatchiman's hunger, the Windor takes off to find him food. Unfortunately, Hatchiman's impatience gets the best of him. He lights a small fire in the center of the nest, and begins to boil the Windor's children. When the mother returns, Hatchiman burns her and pushes her into the sea. The film ends with a back shot of Hatchiman taking off his mask, revealing long black locks of hair. Coupled with his waify physic, this brings up the question of the character's gender.

While I am not sure how successful this film turned out to be, it never the less established for me that the character is selfish, impatient, ruled by his desires, and also, perhaps gender-ambiguous.


Soon after, I was to begin working on my thesis project at Camera Obsucra School of Arts in Tel-Aviv.

I wanted to discover more about the character, and so I began to write his childhood story, which asked the some of following questions; where and how he was raised, the society and the world that he lived in, his ambitions, struggles and goals. All of these traits were to be portrayed in my fourth and final year film, entitled Shadows Fall. I developed this project intensely over the summer of 2003 with the help and support of my instructors, Tami Bernstein, Amit Shalev and Raz Oved.

The cast of Shadows Fall

By the beginning of the first semester of the last year, I had two small books, each with over one-hundred pages of text, drawings and storyboards that would be used as the building blocks for the film. I also had a 10 minute detailed animatic to accompany these books. My instructors were very excited about my progress and were eager to see what I would produce. Unfortunately, the project seemed like it would be to grand to finish properly over the course of nine months and so I opted to scrap it. I proposed a different project starring Hatchiman, call Shadow Bazaar, but it was met with some hostility. I am not sure if it was simply a backlash to all of the anticipation brought on by the pre-production of Shadows Fall, or if the idea of the new film was inherently lacking (I think it was).

Thus I began work on another story with a different character that somehow led me back to Hatchiman!? This was the story of In the Silence. My thesis film for Camera Obsucra.

In the Silence, 2004, 7 minutes

In this movie Hatchiman began to establish himself as a wanderer, and a character that is only concerned with his own survival. I realized that most of his stories began or ended in the ocean. Even in the current tale that I am trying to tell (The End of Things) he is sailing at sea.

Character designs for In the Silence (2004), including sculptures for both Hatchiman and the Spiker

I left Israel in 2004 and with that I also left Hatchiman behind. Yet recently I have began to wonder about his timeline....

...how do his stories link up together to create an entire lifetime? Has he grown and matured with me over the years?

While The End of Things is not a film that will explore the character's personality, I am finding that it is helping me to discover new things about him, and thus about myself. Hatchiman perhaps, is an alter-ego of mine, a self-critique and a tool to solve (and cope with) my own personal dilemmas.

Recent stylistic designs for Hatchiman (2008)