WARNING: Potentially Dangerous Toys

Potentially Dangerous
Toys

An animated short film
by James Peltzer

Potentially Dangerous Toys is an animated short film that explores the relationship between toys in a toy store. The film features an attack on a PEZ Dispenser by a pack of vicious chattering-teeth toys.

The submitted animation lasted 37.5 seconds playing at 24 frames/second with a size of 720x405. The project took 5 hours to render in the graphics lab, and several days to render an anti-aliased version on my home machine. Everything was rendered through my extended raytracer and composed through a keyframe animator I wrote specifically for this type of project.

Test Render This is a single frame I used to test my raytracer for several features. The first time I rendered it, this one frame took about 1.5 hours; with optimizations to the raytracer, I was able to take that down to 13 seconds.
Animation Sample This clip was my first test animation sequence for the project. It is just a one second clip of a chattering-teeth toy opening and closing its mouth.
Establishing Shot Here is an establishing frame from the submitted animation. It shows the pack of Chattering Teeth toys and the PEZ Dispenser. The animation zooms to the head Chattering Teeth toy to show its creation upon seeing the PEZ.
The attack begins The toys follow their leader in a mad dash for the PEZ Dispenser toy. I was able to avoid key-framing all of this by using a modified version of flocking to make the toys chase/follow what I wanted them to.
The attack continues The attack on the PEZ dispenser continues as the toys near their enemy and begin a frantic chomping motion.
The attack nears an end Each toy tries to catch its leader. After the leader is caught, the toy figures out who the leader was following and seeks the same target. If their is no leader, the toy has caught its final target and begins its attack. At this point, most of the toys have made it to he PEZ Dispenser; only a few are still looking for a gap so they can get closer.
The end All of the toys eventually surround the PEZ Dispenser. It was at this point that I had hoped to have the toys move in for the kill and destroy the PEZ. Due to the added complexity of such an attack and the time constraints for developing and rendering the project, this final phase was not implemented for the cs488 final project. The submitted animation ended with a scene of the toys chomping in a ring around the dispenser.
Copyright 2004 James Peltzer