Jan 15, 2013

Goodnight, Sweet Pac Man" Chris Weller

Animator Chris Weller brings the concept of Pac-Man back to life in the modern age, cleverly reimagining the "Pac-Man" mythology...

Chris tells us about the making of this short film.

He has spent the last two years putting this piece together in the few spare hours he has between paid jobs (he previously worked on season 3 of HBO's "The Life and Times of Tim" and has produced dozens of animated web videos).

In conceiving this piece, I was inspired by the frequent "Gallery 1988" art exhibits that reimagine nostalgic and familiar 80s anime and video game characters in a variety of thoughtful and artistic ways. Even though those exhibits are mostly paintings, I wanted to make them worthy of incorporating the aesthetic of this work. The big question before I began was, "Why is Pac-Man still so widely recognized more than 30 years later?

I broke the game down to its basics: you are a mouth, stuck in a never-ending maze, trying to eat all the food while avoiding death at every turn; every three levels, there is an animated "cinema scene" where Pacman meets Miss Pacman; the two fall in love They fall in love, and every three levels, Pac-Man Jr. is born. In short, the game resembles the primitive basics of life: eating, procreating, and trying not to die. In Pacman, as in life, no one "wins". Or get really, really good at it, get to level 256, glitch out and break the matrix.

Anyway, this is the core of what I wanted to keep out of the game, but also what I wanted to adapt and render it in a more complex style. I've been working in the animation and VFX industry for the past 8+ years in various capacities, and I wanted to combine all the different skills and techniques I've learned (and found many new ones) and put them together into an explosive little short film.

For this piece, all the animation and compositing was done in After Effects, with a little Photoshop to hand-color the characters' bodies. The background was modeled in the free CAD program SketchUp.

I hope you enjoy it. But now, two years later, I am happy to have completed this work!