He may be an amateur, but John Huang is single-handedly responsible for the greatest gaming-themed stop-motion videos in recent memory.
You may recall Huang as the creator of Sephiroth: The World’s Enemy, a Final Fantasy VII-themed stop-motion video that we spotlighted in July. Among reams of hyperbolic praise, I described it as “the best Final Fantasy stop-motion animation you’ll see today,” and said that the end result was better than similar professional, Hollywood projects.
I stand by that praise, especially now that I’ve seen Huang’s follow-up, a stop-motion video focusing on Street Fighter mainstays Ryu and Ken doing what they do best.
Like the earlier video, this clip features phenomenal animation, attention to detail and an obvious love for the subject matter. All the animation is painstakingly hand-crafted, but Huang draws audio from the Street Fighter Alpha series, along with same anime-style design cues that Capcom has been trying to ape for the last few decades.
Odds are solid that after watching one of these videos, you’ll be yearning for another Huang joint as soon as possible. The bad news is that since these shorts come from a one-man animation studio, the wait for each new video can be a bit lengthy. However, Huang offers gamers a bit of a tease in this clip’s YouTube description field:
In this video I try to make the fight back to original and not to use too much special effets, hope you guys like it, this took me around 1 month for the proccesing, and yeap I am already working with Halo and the next one will come first with the hot girl gun fight, wish you guys enjoy the show…Thanks
Again, Huang is not a native English speaker, so you’ll have to forgive the grammatical errors. Given the quality of his creative efforts however, that shouldn’t be too difficult.
That Halo project he mentioned? Odds are pretty solid that as soon as it’s publicly available, we’ll be bringing it you. Stay tuned; same Escapist time, same Escapist channel.
