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"The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring."

Paul Rand (Design, Form, and Chaos)

Optimus Prime

    I thought it would be fun to recreate an inanimate childhood toy and make it… well, animated.  So here's Optimus Prime, the transformer.  He starts out as a tractor trailer and then transforms into his robot form.
The animation of the good old leader of the autobots took some time.  Each piece was modeled as a separate object so that he could transform when animated. 
    I was originally inspired to create this, while I was teaching Web Publishing.  A student made an animated GIF of the old RatBat transformer using a simply multiple layers in Photoshop.
     Here we've got a representation of a Vandyke brown print that I made of Optimus Prime here.  It's a high res rendering output to an image setter in black and white.  Then I took the negative and printed it on hand coated cotton paper using a light box for the exposure.