What is the film about?

Monster Match follows Walter Wolf in his desperate attempt to find love. It is speed dating night at the local restaurant, and Walter attempts his fate there with the aid of his handy dating book. He goes through a couple of bad dates but finally manages to get the meeting with the vampire hottie. After things don’t go so well, an accidental encounter might be his chance at love.

What influenced it?

The techniques and look developed by Daniel Gies directly influenced us as far as the look goes.

A little background information...

This was Lauren Collins and I’s senior thesis at the University of the Arts animation program. Usually, seniors work solo heading their own projects, but Lauren and I wanted to make our piece together since we stepped foot into the school. So after convincing the staff to let us work together, we pushed hard to make something great and prove that working in tandem might be a path for other students in the university.

How was the film made?

We used After Effects for this piece, and was able to achieve the 3-D effect using tutorials written by Dan Gies. The puppets were drawn up and illustrated using photoshop to give the characters a heavy textured look. In After effects, we rigged the characters using Duik IK plugin, and plenty of expression controls.