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At his core he would be an Extoplasmistic entity living off other evil, just like a whale lives of plankton, his very shape was to show an uncontrolled growth, based on the external growth of the evil around him.
These elements were to be my blueprint for Lord A, but creating him with these elements in mind would be again like the tree, an ongoing evolution to try achieving my vision.
The first design of Lord Akrafa was initially what I wanted him to look like, he would be this black entity that would twist and turn and represent the essence of pure evil. At the time of thinking about the shots involving his character I knew nothing about computers and computer animation, so doing this shot was going to be done in the real world and the concepts I had for the scenes would be instantly affected by real physical world restraints.
Also at that time in the production I had no budget, so this was another very important factor to take into consideration, although once the initial Lord Akrafa shots were done, (at the time of conception these shots were acceptable compared to other productions we were seeing on our TV screens) and these shots, however far from what I really did see in my imagination did contribute to me obtaining the funding to think slightly how other shots similar and finally the Lord Akrafa shots could be achieved on a different media.
Even now when I look at what I did do to finally achieve Lord Akrafa, I could sit down and do him in a completely different way, but at the time I went through an evolution of computers and a big learning curve and I didn’t want to waste all the long hours of work and the very, very long rendering time It had taken to produce what I could do now better and quicker. I felt strongly that I did not want to be constantly saying to myself every day, “Oh, I could do this again this way” and “ with this new thing I could do this scene this way”. I had to reach a point when I said to myself that's ok and maybe in my my next production I will implement that technique and sods law will have it that when I’m about to finish something new I will come out with ,“I could have done it better and quicker this way with this and that equipment” all over again. I know this happened in Disney's Dinosaur, they spent 10 years working on it and pushing their computers to the max and a couple of months before they finished it, the new technology could have done it in two years instead of the ten it had actually taken.
So back to my thread, Lord Akrafa went through quite a few guises and stages before I came to settle on one design that would do what I wanted, taking into consideration, money, technology and understanding that technology, if I was going to do it myself.
As you can see I started with several designs, in fact I actually did some very big colour ones of Lord Akrafa and many of the characters that are just two big to scan in, but I did do some smaller one’s that would put over the concept of his evil entity and sort of capture what I wanted him to be.
Again working from the script, all the shots were story boarded, based on what technique I was going to apply to the effects and finally achieve the shots. In the early days of production Lord A was to be a Animatronics puppet that by pulling hand triggers would bend him in appropriate positions for the shot, also rather than having eyes of fire his eyes were red diodes, using a star filter the red light emitted from the diodes would be split into however many points of light I wanted , in this case four points.
The fire background was back projected, this enabled me to silhouette Lord Akrafa against the flames, making it difficult to see the bends in his body type shape, the effect looked very nice and was good enough to (First) get me funding for the movie and (Second) be shown three times on TV, but where the story was concerned the physical restraints of the puppet just made it impossible to convey certain things, like anger and other important emotions.
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I left the shots for a while as I knew I would return to them later.
The moment I started to use computers seriously, I started to experiment in different ways to bring Lord Akrafa to life, I knew that if I didn’t come up with something, I could always use what I had, even if it was not exactly what I wanted.
The early tests were looking promising, the only thing holding me back was knowledge, but slowly I started to learn how to use Light Wave and all the things that came with it, as I said before looking back when I just finished the movie, I could do it a hundred times better and faster now, but these were the AMIGA days, yes the machines I had were souped up and the best available at the time but one frame on low ani alias could take up to eight hours to render and when you had thousand to do it was a nightmare, so when I did finally move up to a rapid rendering Mac I thought NO, I was not going to do the Lord Akrafa animations again, considering I had theoretically already done them several times over.
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One thing I did know was the shots were ok but they lacked life so I purchased a particle emulator for fire, smoke and anything else that was needed to add life and ambient movement to the scene, best money I ever spent as it not only added much needed life to the Lord Akrafa Shots, but it added the same to nearly all the shots in the movie. I often would say, if I had to, every week pay for the program, over and over again, it would have been worth every penny, even though I could not have afforded to do that, but that's how much I really appreciated and liked the program.
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