Dead Fury: Making Cartoon Guts Spill
Steve Barton
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In Dead Fury, BlackArro Productions’ latest 82-minute horror-gore-cartoon, a zombie-demon gets its head blasted apart from a slew of shotgun pellets, bloodshed and brains spreading into the air. Max, the hero of the story, rushes in with his pick axe, tearing off its legs, ripping out its guts, and slicing the fallen corpse into pieces.
Blood flows readily in Dead Fury (review here), but what’s involved in spilling the red? The first step starts out on paper. Each gut, brain, organ, and intestine is carefully drawn by hand, with some shading and tone added for increased detail far beyond what cel-shading offers, accomplished with the use of a simple ballpoint pen found at your local dollar store.
The next step? Scan the gory black and white illustrations into Photoshop. With the use of a few manual tools, rich colors are added, particularly vibrant red. After the color, each organ is separated into individual pieces, then placed inside the head cavity of the zombie-demon. The scene is set up, and the animated bloodshed soon begins.
But not without first importing the Photoshop set up into Image Ready, a basic animation program within Photoshop’s software (though plans are being made to soon upgrade to After Effects). In the first about two hundred frames, the corpse’s head is still intact. But the bullets fly, and upon impact a blast of red blood and brains bursts outward, accomplished by meticulously moving each piece from point A to B, keeping their motion path on track with each frame.
Throughout the two hundred frames, the wounded zombie-demon twitches and wanders around the room mindlessly, while the blood shoots out of its neck cavity. The entire sequence, from the initial bloody impact to the final dissection, takes thousands of frames to animate. Once each shot is approved, it moves on to rendering, which doesn’t take very long, considering everything is in two dimensions versus three dimensional animation.
And then on to the next gory scene, of which Dead Fury is filled to its bloody rim. For more information on how it’s all put together, be sure to check out The Making-of Dead Fury and the detailed, feature-length Director’s Commentary, found on the Dead Fury DVD, now on Unearthed Films (click the image below to buy).
Be sure to visit the ever-so demented Frank Sudol online by visiting the official BlackArro Productions website here!
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