TANK - A short film by Stu Maschwitz

June 17, 2018 10:33 PM

TANK is an animated short film that took that Stu Maschwitz a year and half to create..."but I have to warn you, this is not how I would recommend anyone make a film."

"Putting aside current 3D modeling techniques, Red Giant’s Chief Creative Officer Stu Maschwitz looked to the past and built a visual homage to vector arcade games of the 80’s entirely in Adobe After Effects, using math, code, and hundreds of hours of painstaking animation work." [h/t Daring Fireball]

posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug (10 comments total)

Holy crap, the lengths to which he went to do everything the hard way are amazing. Watch the “making of” video and you’ll see what I mean.
posted by egypturnash at 11:02 PM on June 17, 2018

That is some deep, deep nerdery of the sort that ignores the voice that says "self, there's an esiaer way to do this.)

Pretty cool
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:20 PM on June 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

He's obviously a huge fan of Battlezone, one of the great 80s video games.
posted by zardoz at 11:20 PM on June 17, 2018 [6 favorites]

That making-of video gets crazy about 10 minutes in. All the details he considered to get the look exactly right... it’s wonderful.
posted by Robin Kestrel at 12:21 AM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I made a (very) short 3D film in the late 70s, using the effects he is imagining someone using. I pointed a film camera at the monitor of an Apple ][. I had it all drawn out on paper, too, the way he shows from his youth. It was a spinning cube that transformed into a rhombicuboctahedron. I had worked out the geometry to expand it to other polyhedra, too, with lots of zappy vectors floating around.
But then I graduated high school and didn't have access to a computer.
Now that I have computers again, I would love to revisit all that. My ideas were always about the vectors, which seemed so old fashioned for a long time, but now I guess I could retro-style it.
posted by bitslayer at 4:07 AM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

This is great. Love the synthy soundtrack too. The whole thing is like if a Battlezone film had been made instead of Tron.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:58 AM on June 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

I love the multicolor effect of the tank's core. Vector games were rare but color vector games were very rare; KLOV only lists 27 in total, made in just five years. That shimmering multicolor effect is beautiful. I think the Star Wars game used it for the cannon ball / asterisk shots the turrets fired at you.
posted by Nelson at 6:50 AM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I believe this is my sister's childhood friend, which I only note because as a very obscure person I don't expect to see names of people I have known in topic titles on Metafiler. :)
posted by Squeak Attack at 12:51 PM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

That's not a tank though. That's a wireframe of a fully-awakened Necron Monolith. Well, that and he got the Gauss Flayers and Particle Whip wrong, but, vector graphics...
posted by Samizdata at 12:58 PM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

(Despite my snarky comment, I LOVED it!)
posted by Samizdata at 10:01 PM on June 18, 2018