Samurai Mini Film and Hiroshi Yoshida

Back in 2002, I was working in a research project about 2d an CG integration. That gave me the chance to produce a few very short films to test different techniques and softwares. Under that premise and with the help of Pau Rodriguez, a comic book artist, I did a mini film named "The revenge of the mother ninja pumpkin". I have to say it was good fun to do it. It's so short we could make it in a few weeks, so we never had time to get bored with it. But we had fun specially because the story was so stupid that we never put any pretension in the film, other than have fun and test some integration techniques.

The story is about a samurai. He uses pumpkins as dummy enemies to train his skills. A lot of pumpkins are slayed in the session. At the end a giant ninja pumpkin apears to take revenge for all its dead breed.



For the visuals we where inspired by the amazing work of Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950), a japanese painter from the beginning of the 20th century that inpired the anime industry. I love all his work but I specially like his water scenes. I love the sea and I bet he loved it too by the way the water becomes the main theme of most of his paintings. Here are some of them:

Pau Rodriguez ( www.escapula.com ) painted the backgrounds and had the story idea. He is a wild guy and a very creative person. I hope some day his comic books will be published by a mainstream editor so more people will be able to enjoy them. His last adventure has been dubbing part of Braveheart, Mel Gibson's movie, to the mallorquin, Mallorca local language, changing the story to suit local themes (catalan soldiers take all the mallorcan girls so the hero is so horny that starts a war against them). It has been a real hit. Of course you have to be from mallorca to understand all the 'subtleties' of the story. www.vaigfort.com