 
Jason Gary has been working with 3d graphics for over 12 years now with the last 9 of those spent mainly working in the game industry. His experience covers several videogame titles, in a wide range of art roles, on a variety of platforms, from consoles to handhelds. Over the past year, he has started his own company, Digital Jackson LLC, and now works freelance from his home in Driftwood, Texas, where he lives with his wife and two children.
Copyright 2007 Digital Jackson LLC | jgary@austin.rr.com 
My goal for this 'making of' is to give an account of the work I did on 'Monster Job Hunter', a short film by Horseback Salad Entertainment. In this comedy/horror film, the main chraracter, Morgan Aquinaldo goes to a job interview that takes a turn for the worse. During the interview, the potential boss interviewing him leaves the room after being paged. During this time, Morgan finds a gun hidden in the office, and when the boss returns, Morgan accidentaly shoots and kills him with it. The body of the dead boss then sprouts crab-like legs, expands and grows into a large monster (planned as a mostly digital effect). The monster eats a clock off the wall, and then moves towards the desk that Morgan is now hiding behind. Finding the courage, Morgan shoots the monster repeatedly with a second futuristic laser gun he finds under the desk. Once shot, the bullets from this gun cause the monster to swell massively until finally exploding, leaving blue guts and goo on the walls. The short ends with a shot revealing a secret room with a one-way window, disquised as a fish tank and looking into the office. In this room, two strange, futuristic looking individuals are conducting the real interview for the job of monster hunter.
For this project, I was hired as a freelance artist to create, animate, render and composite the cg monster into the live action shots. I also ended doing some work modifying background plates when there was not enough practical gore effects or when the set needed to be extended. I did all of the work at my house over a 4 month period and communicated with the director either through phone or email as needed. About once every 2-3 weeks we would meet in person for project meeting. While not getting into specific details about every step, I will instead focus on general workflow decisions and what led me to make them. Having worked almost exclusively in games, I have no film industry experience, but hope to show that it's possible to do some respectable effects work on your own computer for a short film like this. 
On this project I used Lightwave 3d for modeling and rendering, via the Fprime renderer. Maya was used for rigging and animation. To bridge the two together I used the freely available plug-in Maya2Lw, which allows you to transfer animation data from Maya to a mesh in Lightwave for rendering. I used Zbrush for detail modeling and texturing, After Effects for compositing, along with the indispensable Photoshop. I used a home built PC with a AMD 3800+ dual core processor and 3gb of ram for rendering, along with a Dell m1710 laptop with a Intel Dual Core 7200T processor and 2gb of ram. I had additional rendering help from Hoyt Lindley of Horseback Salad, and even heisted my son's slow computer for some rendering when things got tight.
When I started work on the project, the live action had not been shot yet and design work on the creature had not been done. However, there was a screenplay and an animatic that had some monster sketches that could be used for reference. I discussed the monster's design with Yehudi Mercado, the short's creator, writer, and director (I'm going to refer to him as 'the director' for the rest of the article). His general idea was that he should be large and scary, top heavy, have spikes/horns, glowing eyes, and be realistic looking, but still have some stylization to his shape. (figure 1a)
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