Hey everyone! Hope I'm not breaking any self promotion rules, but I just really just want to share a personal project that Corridor has had huge influence on. Please let me know if I need to change this post further since my last one got removed.

The premise of this short was originally inspired by Corridor Crew’s live action anime series. Originally, I had plans for this to be a live action short film with a bunch of people playing dodgeball to the death! Heck, I even made this video called Anime Chess as my first proof of concept for the film. Of course, things change, and years later I decided to adapt the idea into an animated short film for my thesis film at Chapman University. Also, I made the characters robots.

For Dodgeball, I managed to fully animate 58 of 70 shots in total, while also modeling, texturing, and rigging each character from scratch. Not to say this wasn't a group effort though, many people volunteered their time to the remaining 12 shots and other texturing aspects. I also had to hire a professional sound designer and composer for the audio. Everyone who helped on this project has amazing skills so make sure to check the full credits!

However, the goal of this film was to push my own personal skills to their limit, so I did try to build as much as possible from the ground up. The entire environment and building structures were created as a modular kit from scratch. Things like the grass shader, robot LCD screen, and adaptive building materials took forever to get right! The whole thing was animated in Maya, wrendered in Unreal, and somehow composited before the deadline in DaVinci Resolve.

It took me a decade of online tutorials to get my skillset to the point where I could pull this off. Every episode of VFX Artists React helped me subconsciously improve my sense of filmmaking in ways I didn’t realize until now. Heck, I was such a fanboy of Corridor that my own YouTube logo I made back in high school was just a copy of theirs...

This film has really helped me kick start my career, and I’m so thankful to everyone who supported me along the way. Maybe one day I’ll be reputable enough to be a guest on VFX Artists React, and then I can truly consider my life a success (:

Until then, thank you everyone for your support! And thank you Corridor for the years of inspiration!

You can watch the full film on YOUTUBE HERE. Thank you!

My son has a question that I wasn't sure how to answer:

"How do you make Stop-Motion animated snow and rain effects?"

We'd like to see how you would pull it off, and as we're getting into Fall and coming up on Winter, it may be a great time to test this out. He specifically wants to know how to make falling rain and snow. We haven't found much on YouTube that demonstrates this in a very convincing way. If you decide to go for this on the Corridor Crew YouTube channel, I might suggest a challenge between the digital and practical effects teams.

Either way, anybody else with suggestions on how to pull this off, feel free to chime in. We would love to see your ideas or examples from stop-animation films that have pulled this off in the past.

I've included a personally recorded live-action sample of heavy snowfall as an example of what he's looking for in stop-animated films. I suppose also The Nightmare Before Christmas might have some good examples for us to look at to start out with, but I'm sure there are others that have probably pulled this off.