Back in November 2012, Nintendo Player interviewed Jason Bakutis, a former Hollywood special effects artist who had worked on Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Casper. Later he joined Viridis Corporation to handcraft all of the models and prosthetics in the Philips Compact Disc Interactive (“CD-i”) game Zelda’s Adventure.
Have a look at the picture above (the handcrafted model house) and below (the digitized wizard room):
These handcrafted models were made of clay, latex and polyfoam. They had a simple aluminum wire frame in the mold and the rest was made of everything he could find. They were painted and he added clothing.
Jason: "I would mount the creature in front of this blue screen we built and “grab” a still using a $14,000 broadcast-quality Sony news camera. It was basic stop-motion animation, but we were only allowed very few frames to create walk cycles and fight cycles. We had a special card that converted that video still into digital information. In other words, we were doing digital photography before there was digital photography. I’m sure my phone takes way better pictures now."
He continues: "Every creature I made, due to memory limitations of the time, and the CD-i, had to be reduced in size, resolution, and color. Ultimately, until now [you see these creatures] the world never got to see just how cool this game could’ve been. It’s like we took HD 1080 pics and turned them into tiny lo-res thumbnails, but worse. Still, I am proud of all the creatures and props."
The programmers were constantly removing things so that it would run at all. Let’s face it, it was too ambitious of a project for the time. We were trying to get to the moon in horse-drawn buggies. But we tried, fools that we were.
[Source: http://www.nintendoplayer.com/interview/zeldas-adventure-jason-bakutis/] Much more can be found here!
[Thanks, Nintendo Player]