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Every so often, we get the pleasure of receiving an email here at TSP of artists who have finished their short films and would love to talk about it. Since we are big supporters of the indy artist and film maker, we always jump at the chance to get a more in-depth look and bring it here to share with our readers. This time, we got some inside scoops for “Show and Tell”.

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Every animator in the world working on commercial projects has a dream of making their own short film. Constantly boring our friends and family with ideas, plot twists and sequences for this imaginary film. As the years pass by, the sketchbooks pile up and characters are redesigned for the fifteenth time, it starts to become obvious it takes more than a bit of free time here and there to start let alone finish the damn thing.

With Show & Tell we were incredibly lucky to have the backing of both a very talented director and an enthusiastic and hugely successful writer. They gave us the building blocks, guidance and backing to turn all those years of pent up frustration into something real.

Planning and Pre Production

Our writer Bradley Trevor Grieve came up with the initial idea of a short poem about a strange young boy named Earl who brings all manner of odd decaying items to school for Show & Tell. Our director Mark Gravas then sketched some fantastic designs for Earl and the other characters, he also gave us the dream brief – “Make it twisted and strange, go mad and make it something we’re all proud of”.
We looked at as many animated films as we could, looking at how others had solved various design issues. We also discussed an over all look for the animation, and agreed we’d love to make the whole piece look more like stop motion than the shiny plastic cg look we all know and hate.

In the mean time we’d set up a little bedroom studio, two computers and a large drawing table and a big stack of CD’s. We then spent two weeks sketching out designs for sets, the poem was easily broken down into interiors and exteriors, most of the action was to take place in the school house, with four external sets – a creek, a spooky cave, a highway, and a dodgy street in the city. We knew the school house was going to need to be flexible so it had to be built complete, however the exteriors could be built for specific shots, so designs for these sets were almost an early form of storyboarding. We drew up a production schedule based on two people working for three months full time. It was obviously going to be tight but if we were smart with storyboarding and modeling then it was achievable.

Modeling and Texturing

Marks’ character designs were fantastic, concept art has to be inspirational, it doesn’t need to convey every detail of the model, just the flavor and basic proportions. Obviously a 2D drawing can’t solve all the problems associated with representing something in 3D so we often had to sit and look at a drawing for a while before launching into building it.

Our first time saving move was making earl’s head the basis for every other character’s head in the scene, once earl was built his head could be transformed into all our other characters, as well as his rigging in many cases. Everything was built in MAX using mesh editing and mesh smooth, this also allowed us to have high-resolution models in the render but lower polygon counts in the viewports.

At the same time we had to work on the sets. The school house was completed first, it took about three weeks all in all to complete, which in hindsight could have been done quicker (blink and you’d miss all those books but they’re all individually modeled and textured). The other sets were pretty painless, we had a fair idea of camera angles at this point so sets such as the creek, the cave and the highway are built specific to the shots. We even went so far as to add false perspective to the highway and creek, this was in keeping with the stop motion concept.

The texturing was where we really went to town, all the characters faces are mapped with hand drawn chalk pastel textures, with scratches and indents to give them that hand made puppet look. All the clothes are textured with scans from real items, whilst the sets were textured with a stylized model approach. If you look closely at small-scale models, artists add shadow using a black ink or paint wash that sits in the crevices, this is something we love and added to many of the characters and models.

Character Rigging

We knew our characters had certain requirements, Earl and the teacher needed a full range of movement as they appeared in many scenes, whilst the background children and drunk would only really need their arms and heads to move. A setup was constructed using MAX wiring and scripting to give each characters head a look-at target, which was weighted through the setup. For example if you move the look-at object a characters eyes will move to stare directly at it, the head will move 90% of the way there and the body 30%. This gives natural movements very quickly and made animated the background children a lot quicker than having to deal with 10 rotations per character.

Obviously all our set ups had to be manually override-able. As an animator there’s nothing worse than having your poses dictated to you by bad setup, happily however the weighting was heavily tested and ended up working perfectly for many sequences.

Storyboarding

By this point the story had been finalized as had most of the sets. Although traditionally the storyboarding is completed before the modeling stage it actually helped us a great deal knowing how the sets looked when picking angles and camera moves, we ended up being able to draw out the best possible angles from our sets as we knew them so well. We split the boarding equally between us and Mark, each of us taking a third of the film each and then coming back together to brainstorm over everyone’s ideas. Having a few weeks to really think about the storyboarding was invaluable, the quality of a storyboard can make or break a film. It’s a stage many computer animators hate or find pointless but we can’t stress enough how the storyboard drove this film forward.

Once the board was completed we cut an animatic to have a rough sense of timing, and broke the film down into 32 scenes. Each scene was given a progress sheet which we filed away so we’d always know what had been done and what still needed to be worked on. This was also useful for feedback from the director on shots as they progressed.

Scribbling in the check boxes as scenes were completed became a ritual we relished. Motivation and moral are hugely important when two of you are locked away for three months trying to complete four minutes of animation that should really take a team of people a year to complete.

Animating

Armed with our new copies of “The Animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard Williams we had exactly one third of our time left to animate the whole film. Not much time at all but all our pre production and planning was beginning to pay off, all the characters we set up and we knew our storyboard top to bottom. The animation was completed in passes, using stepped keys we blocked out scenes. This gave us a scene of camera position, gross character poses and timing. So each scene would feature a series of held poses, this gave us enough structure to see the whole film early on in the animation stage, allowing the director to comment before we committed large chunks of time to each scene.

We then went back and completed a second pass on the scenes, smoothing out the animation and adding our secondary and overlapping action. We also had some help at this point from Jim Dodd and Alex Weight who each took a few extra scenes and made them look fantastic.

Lighting

All the scenes were lit at the end of the production, a basic lighting setup was created for the classroom, merged into all those scenes and then tweaked for each shot. Having those large windows at one side of the room gave us a great logical light source, we also added some volumetric light which was composited into the classroom scenes to give the set atmosphere and a dusty feel.

Rendering and Post

We were very lucky that James Whitlam head of 3D at our usual place of work, Ambience Entertainment in Sydney allowed us to come back in to their studio at night and render on their pc’s. We then had two weeks of no sleep setting of renders, swearing at the machines when they crashed and compositing frames in Combustion. Ambience also helped us out with a cost price Flame* session to grade the entire film. We sat for two days in the Flame* suite playing at being clients whilst Josh Baker did a fantastic job of grading the entire film and making our baby look beautiful (and yes we do have photographs in our wallets).

In the end…

We’ve been bitten, if there was any way that we didn’t have to work and could make short films like this forever I think we would. We’ve also proved we can do this, we can take an idea and make it into an enjoyable film. This will help finding funding for future projects, there really isn’t a better recommendation to funding bodies and studio’s you may pitch to in the future.

So now we have four minutes of video tape to show for three months driving ourselves crazy, and calling in a hell of a lot of favors from friends and family. Now we just have to get someone to watch it!

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Credits:

Produced by Kapow Pictures & BTG Studios, Sydney Australia
Written by Bradley Trevor Grieve
Directed by Mark Gravas
Produced by Sandra Walters
Design and Storyboarding by Mark Gravas, Darren Price and Ben Cowell
Animated by Darren Price and Ben Cowell
Additional animation by Jim Dodd and Alex Weight
Sound design by Scott Collins @ Sixty40
Voice over by Lee Perry
Rendering and post-production supported by Ambience Entertainment Sydney
Software support by Peter Moxom @ Discreet Logic