This was the first shot I did in POSERS. I thought it would be just an experiment to get the feel for animating these Phicen bodies, but the first take came out good enough to keep.

An aging James Bondáge ambles into frame, does a double-take at the camera, draws his gun and fires. But then he collapses from an apparent heart attack.

The 1:6 walker was custom made by NorthernLightsMinis, and I added the tennis ball feet from a plastic necklace I sourced separately.

I animated James falling solely by balancing his body, without any rigging. That wasn’t easy on a 24” round mirror floor, but it came out way better than I thought. When he flings the walker away, I did that by suspending it from green fishing line and then Photoshopping the lines out in each frame.

My original script called for James to fall through the moving matte hole, and virtually into the viewer’s lap, and then get dragged around a bit. But to do that, I realized too late that I should have printed and cut a physical matte to perform that trick with actual physics rather than try to fake it all in Final Cut Pro. Maybe someday I’ll redo it that way?