Sonic X Chaotic Battle

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Behind the Scenes:

The project originally started during spring break of 2003. For the most part, I worked on it everyday with a few days off here and there and sometimes even a week. I would get home from classes around 12pm and work on the movie until 12am. Since I worked on it so much, it only took 3.5 months to finish. I worked my butt off on that movie. Some people say it's too "DBZish" because a lot of the elements in SXCB are posed from DBZ. I admit, I went overboard with the DBZ, but I liked the way the movie came out regardless.

The way we went about making the movie was completely wrong. Ido wrote the script and that was it. I animated the movie using the script and that was it. We didn't storyboard our ideas, discuss shots and angles or anything. There was basically no communication at all between the two of us. We learned from our mistakes. Not knowing exactly what Ido wanted, I changed the script around to fit my tastes and that's how the DBZ came in. I would talk with my friend Corey about ideas and basically everything else. I would send him the movie just about everyday with new content to get his input on it. He would push me to do better and change around a few things and on nights when I had no motivation, he pushed me to finish the movie. Many ideas came from Corey while Ido had little input other than the script. I would do scenes only to find out Ido didn't really like them, and I wasn't about to redo them, so we decided to keep them in there. It was hard enough to do the scene once, let alone do it over.

Some days, I would spend 8+ hours working on a single animation for Sonic or Shadow, from sketch, to final ink, to flat color, to shading. Usually there were many frames that needed to be animated, so the work and time spent added up. It would take me an hour to draw an initial sketch of Sonic on a certain pose that I was happy with. I strived to make it look like the style from the cartoon as best I could. Sometimes my ideas never made it to the screen because I didn't get the right pose I wanted and had to settle for something more simple.

I got Sonic X screenshots and used them as references throughout production. I would practice drawing Sonic until I got it right. The eraser tool in flash was used very much on my part.

The equipment I used to make SXCB was Flash MX, Photoshop 7, and my trusty Aiptek Hyper Pen USB Tablet ($150).