Arnold, an unemployed anarchist muppet, who wants to change the world with his ideals, can only do it with the help of his prole and skilled flatmate Gugi, who keeps screwing his plans and benefit from them for his own good. However due to their differences, they simultaneously despise and depend on each other. The two anti-social characters represent society’s conflicts and how the characters resolve them through themes such as politics and technology.
GUGI AND ARNOLD is a 3D animated show, influenced by the style of Sesame Street and The Muppets, but fully animated and with content intended towards an audience from ages 16 and up. Each sketch is about 5-7 minutes long.
There are currently five written sketches, complete Animatic and storyboard for the pilot, and the first 1,5 min from the 6 min pilot are completed
Gugi and Arnold extract:
Twenty four seconds of rendered animation from the one and a half minute long pitch.
The whole pitch is still not public since I’m currently still looking for funding option.
Anyone who might be interested in supporting or contributing to the show, is of course invited to contact me via the contact formular at the bottom of the page.
First shot rendered:
Some details about the shot can be found on my blenderartists post.
Enterance room – current render progress
Storyboard is written both in Engish and German. Here are just a few pages from the storyboard to get the taste of it.
Shot overview
In this Blender tutorial I go over the technical aspects of Gugi and Arnold’s shot. I explain how I’ve added an “automated” breathing using the noise modifiers, and how I’ve combined physics simulation with the backpack’s rig.
Some drafts and bits from different storyboards
TECHNOLOGY I`m currently using only open source tools for the project. Mainly blender, but also Krita and Gimp for the textures. Kolja Lubitz and Benjamin Walther-Franks connected Arnold’s rig to the leap motion hands controller using the BlenderNUI addon .
I was really excited when I could control Arnold with my hand, I thought it would be great to capture the hand movement with leapmotion and to use it as a base sketch for the animation, to get the timing for animation and the feeling of the hand puppet. Unfortunately, the capturing was still not precise enough and very jittery when I tested it. It might work better now since leap motion released their last SDK, which seems to have much better results.
Feel free to contact me
Tal Hershkovich Portfolio 