Archive notice: This article was originally published on December 10, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
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Darrel the Chameleon
It all began with the plan by the two directors Marc Briones Piulachs and Alan Carabantes to show in a film how routine can destroy happiness until you break through it and follow your instincts. As the idea developed, the team decided to try a light gag format wrapped around a small love story that ends unexpectedly. Making the story idea work was complicated. Marc says: “We came up with brilliant gags that unfortunately did not fit the story, so we had to try many different options and kill many darlings.”
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The CG lead character is called “Darrel” because at the time it was Marc’s favourite name for his new dog.
The project was inspired in terms of content by the animated short films of Birdbox Studio in London. Both directors appreciate the surprising endings of the studio’s mostly very short films. The work of Mindbender from Sweden served as a direct reference. To define the facial expressions and movements of the two 3D actors in advance, the two directors filmed each other with a smartphone.
The open-source route
The first year of production focused entirely on story development and testing the gags. The actual 3D production followed in the second year. At the beginning, the Darrel Squad was supported by rigging artist Nacho Maure. Since there were no financial resources available to realise “Darrel” and the artists were already familiar with Blender, they decided to use the open-source software. Although Blender offers all the features needed to realise a 3D animated film of this scope, some useful functions were missing: animation layers, for example, as found in Maya, or the ability to exclude lights, which is available in 3ds Max. These small shortcomings in Blender’s range of functions had hardly any noticeable effect on production.
Sexy Sophie meets clumsy Darrel
To design the two main characters, the team first produced various sketches. They developed many ideas in 2D so that they could quickly obtain feedback and run initial tests in front of an audience. “After we had reduced the number of characters and the complexity of the scenes, our quality expectations were achievable with the resources available to us,” said Alan.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”67697″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In parallel with the animatic, the team designed the environment, textures and 3D characters. Altogether, it took around four months to complete the final versions of Sophie and Darrel. The most difficult task was not to lose the visual connection between the two – they had to look as though they came from the same universe. Making Darrel clearly recognisable as a chameleon became easier once the key elements for the reptile’s design had been found: large, spherical eyes, an elastic tongue and the horn at the back of his head. In terms of anima-tion, the separate movement of the left and right eyes and the colouring of the skin as camouflage were crucial. With Sophie, the particular challenge was to retain Darrel’s strange proportions while making her look sexy at the same time. The team created the textures for the characters with two sets: one at a resolution of 2,048 pixels for close-ups and one at 512 pixels for wide shots. The heads and bodies were handled separately depending on the details required in the shots.
The team built the background in which Darrel and Sophie meet from combinable modules. They then treated it as a single set, making a few adjustments such as small asymmetries and unique details. Numerous optimisation measures reduced the complex scene so that the asset was not too large during production.
Rendering and compositing
In the final phase of the project, Marc Alloza supported the team with lighting, rendering and compositing. Lighting was done with an HDRI and several light bounces as well as indirect lights. Rendering with Cycles used not only the processors but also CUDA graphics cards. Additional render time was saved by simulating subsurface scattering through the lighting and textures. For compositing, the team remained faithful to its open-source approach and used Natron. Apart from lens-flare and depth-of-field features, the software left nothing missing from the workflow. The artists closed these gaps in the pipeline with plug-ins. The final fine-tuning and colour correction were also done in Natron.
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Darrel’s future
“The film is an example of our kind of humour and a distillation of our personalities. We defined Darrel’s characteristics from our own experiences – apart from the macabre ending,” the two directors explain. The team is still planning to produce a second film or even a series with the character Darrel. But only if the CG hero agrees too: “We are not sure whether Darrel has recovered from the traumatic experience in the underground station yet. But we will definitely try to convince him to work with us again, because we love making films with him.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Marc Briones Piulachs
Marc’s career as an artist began with the “Multimedia” degree programme at the Polytech University of Catalonia. He then opened his own studio, where he works in web programming and multimedia design and is active as a 3D generalist on creative projects. In 2O13 he completed his 3D animation training at Pepe School Land to specialise in this area of CG.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Alan Carabantes
Did you spot it in the picture in this article? Sophie is reading a book entitled “Alike” – an Easter egg referring to a previous film on which Alan worked as a 3D animator.
“Alike” won a 2O16 animago AWARD in the “Best Character” category. Alan completed the “Video Games” master’s degree programme at FX Animation in Barcelona. He then decided to focus on 3D animation, for which he completed training at Pepe School Land.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
