WING CHUN - MECHANICAL ARMS - 3D ANIMATION
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
This is the final version of my animation project which i’ve worked on in my spare time for about a year doh! It features a robot torso performing Wing Chun techniques against a dummy. I did the project because I was inspired by Digital Domain’s Mechanical Legs advert for Adidas which features a pair of robot legs playing basketball in a laboratory. I decided to do the same with a pair of arms lol but took my passion for Wing Chun and employed that into the animation.
The piece was modelled, textured & animated in Maya and rendered in MentalRay. Layers of renders were then composited together in After Effects adding motion blur, depth of field focuses, lens flares and other subtle colouring tweaks.
Sound is a combination of subtle whistles, whines and whirrs from numerous gadgets and the impacts are recorded from a real wooden dummy as it is a very unique sound and no “impact” on wood sounds quite like a wooden dummy being hit. This was very important to the piece.
I’ve slowed some techniques down and made them more visible as anyone who practises Wing Chun will know just how subtle some of the techniques can be. In 3d animation alot of this would be missed so I’m overexaggerated some moves and slowed them down in others.
The piece would probably take me 6-8 weeks full time but it was done amidst a 48 hour working week, 6-8 hours of kung fu a week, a college class and a wkend of skydiving too lol. Overall I’m stunned that I ever got it finished hehehe!
Thoughts and comments welcome as always.
You can watch more clips, download higher quality shots & read the wip blog which details a full start to finish of this project on my website www.anthonymcgrath.co.uk 
Duration : 0:0:50
To produce this unique commercial the production company of Guinness contracted the world record holder in domino toppling Weijers Domino Productions from the Netherlands. www.dominodomain.com
Watch our other domino adverts! www.dominodomain.com