Mantis Trap VHST

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Guys, check out this old VHS I found! I remember getting nightmares from this as a kid.

This my my part for the NGTV Halloween collab! I tried a lot of different things while making this. I got to thank Valdriks for providing the amazing music for this, it would not even be as half as good without it! I also might post the non-VHS version if I remember.

I've wanted to combine 2D and 3D animation for a while now and it was fun! I really liked making environments in blender, and I like how they turned out, even if I basically had bs a lot of what I was doing. The only thing I hated about it was the render times.

I also tried out rig animation for the mantis aliens, and you could tell. It's pretty obvious I didn't really know how rigged animation worked when looking at some of the animations. It was also kind of a pain in the butt trying to make them not move so maniacally. I didn't enjoy it as much as hand-drawn, but it was a lot faster to animate so maybe I'll use puppets again in the future.

I learned some new compositing techniques while working on this. Usually I just combine my animations with the background and add some sounds, maybe I'd add the occasionally VHS effect if I was feeling fancy. Now that I know how to do some real compositing I'm definitely gonna do more.

This was my first real attempt at making horror. Hopefully it turned out okay. I got inspiration from Alien but I thought it'd be interesting if the human was a threat to the aliens instead. I probably could've made said human look more threatening but whatever. Also for those who've been following me for a while, It's the same character from this.

Despite all the criticisms I have for this, I'm happy with how it turned out.