This article by Sabine Hatzfeld originally appeared in DP 03 : 2015.

For the film project “Le Gouffre”, Thomas Chrétien, Carl Beauchemin and David Forest quit their jobs, formed the Lightning Boy Studio and moved in together for cost and production reasons. A Kickstarter campaign brought the animated film with the unusual look to completion, which was nominated for an animago AWARD in the “Best Short Film” category in 2O14.

The trio met in 2006 at the Canadian college “Cégep du Vieux Montréal”(www.cvm.qc.ca). Carl Beauchemin and David Forest studied 3D animation, Thomas Chrétien 2D animation. In the third and final year of their studies, they decided to work together as filmmakers in the future. Thomas went on to complete a two-year 3D degree programme, while Carl and David gained their first experience in the industry.

After six months of developing the story, production finally got underway at the beginning of 2012 – despite all team members now working full-time. Carl and David worked as 3D animators at Modus FX on the first Canadian 3D feature film “The Legend of Sarila”, while Thomas worked as a VFX artist for mobile games at Gameloft(www.gameloft.com). There was only time for “Le Gouffre” at night or at weekends. So after six months, all three of them quit their jobs to work on their film full-time and only from time to time. To save costs, they also moved into a flat. We spoke to Carl Beauchemin about the project, which was successfully financed via Kickstarter towards the end. The film and makingof have been online on Vimeo since February this year(bit.ly/1zgSovu and bit.ly/1zMo3C1).

DP: Hello Carl, why didn’t you consider a crowdfunding solution or funding opportunity right from the start?

Carl Beauchemin: Our original plan was to get a government grant. But when you make a film for the first time, nobody trusts you. Our application was rejected three times in a row. At the same time, we realised that no company would support us as long as there were no presentable shots. That’s why we abandoned crowdfunding. Without actually rendered shots, how do you hope to convince people that you can make a good film?

DP: What hardware equipment did your budget allow for?

Carl Beauchemin: Each of us still had a good computer from our student days – because of the 3D homework. We also had a special computer at our disposal: in 2007 David submitted an illustration to a competition organised by cgsociety.com – and promptly took first place! The prize was a Maingear Shift(www.maingear.com), which we nicknamed “the beast” and which lived up to its name in the rendering.

DP: How was your pipeline structured?

Carl Beauchemin: The lion’s share of the work – i.e. modelling, animation, rigging, VFX, rendering – was done in Softimage. We also used ZBrush for the detailed work on some of the models. Concept art and storyboards were created traditionally on paper or in Photoshop. The compositing was done in After Effects and the editing was done in Sony Vegas. We also worked with Slipstream VX from Exocortex, a plug-in for Softimage. We used it to implement every particle simulation that can be seen in the film(exocortex.com/products/slipstream).

DP: How were Previs and Animatics used?

Carl Beauchemin: They were essential parts of our workflow. We spent months working on the animatic. We wanted to make sure that the timing was right and that the storyline was coherent. With the help of the Previs, we were able to create a rough version of our sets to get an idea of the proportions.

DP: What inspired you to make this film?

Carl Beauchemin: “Le Gouffre” is set in an undefined location. We did look at pictures of canyons, but we didn’t copy them one-to-one, we changed the scale and adapted them to our desired film look. For the characters, we focussed on a timeless look. We left out details such as zips or logos so that the design didn’t come across as too modern. Our aim was to give the film a special atmosphere, comparable to a legendary tale.

DP: How did the unusual look come about?

Carl Beauchemin: We had a very specific look in mind and it took us a long time to realise it. In the end, we had to paint all the textures by hand and find a clever way to put the shots together. During this process, we realised that in order to create a unique visual style, we had to forget everything we learned about compositing in school. Instead, we looked for a way to do it all in Photoshop with layers and paint brushes.

DP: How did you actually realise this for the sets?

Carl Beauchemin: For the sets, we first unfolded the meshes with UVs to assign the textures in medium resolution everywhere. This allowed us to make sure that everything looked good and looked painted from a distance. Up close, on the other hand, it sometimes looked really bad, but that didn’t matter: in such cases, we took a screen capture of the set from the camera angle of the shot and painted all the high-resolution details in Photoshop. We also often quickly created a greyscale texture shader for rendering in order to get more details on a new texture. Then we just had to project the whole thing back onto the original mesh. Of course, this only worked if the camera panning was not too strong. Otherwise you would have seen that the projection was expanding in a somewhat strange way.

DP: How did you approach the look of the characters?

Carl Beauchemin: Because they were animated, we couldn’t use the same projection technique. Instead, we relied on good, hand-painted textures and lots and lots of passes. We had a separate mask for the head, hands, eyes and hair, as well as for each individual item of clothing. We treated each light as if it were a colour layer. So we selected the exact colour we wanted to use in the lit scene and assigned it as a solid colour instead of having the layer in an additional mode. That helped us a lot to get rid of that classic CG look.

DP: Did you actually consider using an inexpensive MoCap system for animation references?

Carl Beauchemin: No. Firstly, that was never our intention and secondly, our budget wouldn’t have allowed it anyway. However, we ran through all the shots ourselves and edited them into a reference real film. This allowed us to see whether the flow of the film worked. We always tried to place the cameras in the same way as in the animated film so that we could also test whether the cuts worked. But the biggest advantage of the video reference material is that you can see all the fine little movements. This allowed us to make the animation in the film look as real as possible.

DP: What challenges did you face when rigging the film?

Carl Beauchemin: We already knew how to rig in Maya. But as we wanted to realise the project in Softimage – the programme we mainly worked with after our studies – we had to learn everything from scratch. So the first character rig was quite a challenge. It took us a month to finalise it. But after that it was just a matter of repeating the same steps. We made sure that the same parts of the rigs had the same names for all the characters. This allowed us to transfer the animation of one character to another, which sped up production considerably. This mainly concerned movements such as running, cheering or sowing. To simplify the process of animating faces and fingers, we had Visual Panels at our disposal. This allowed us to select animation controllers quickly and intuitively. But our biggest challenge was the bridge. It consisted of over 70 duplicated individual parts, so the rigging had to be well thought out right from the start.

DP: Which ZBrush tools were useful to you?

Carl Beauchemin: We used the ClayTubes brush the most, which is great for refining details, especially when used in conjunction with the Smooth brush. The brush also behaves very similarly to the one we used in Photoshop to paint our textures. Other useful brushes I can mention are Pinch and Slash3, which we used to paint all the crevices and details of the rock face or the folds in the clothing. The Decimation Master also turned out to be a lifesaver. We often had to create high-resolution set elements in close-up at the last minute. This plugin helped us to export meshes that had a lot of detail but could still be rendered quickly. ZAppLink also proved useful in our painting process, as it allows you to seamlessly integrate image editing software – in our case Photoshop – into ZBrush.

DP: How did the work with Sony Vegas go?

Carl Beauchemin: This editing software was used for the entire editing process. We updated the edit almost every day. That was brilliant for keeping an overview. We always knew exactly what had already been done and what hadn’t. We stacked many video tracks on top of each other: 2D animatic, film references, animation captures and final renders. When we added a new clip, we could play the whole sequence to make sure everything ran smoothly.

DP: Which renderer did you use?

Carl Beauchemin: Since we didn’t have the resources to render complex shaders and lighting, we used basic shaders, mostly surface shaders and lamberts. All the details were in the painted textures, so we didn’t need anything more complex than that. We even faked the subsurface scattering in some textures, such as the ears of the characters. Rendering was done in Mental Ray, the default renderer in Softimage. The renderer did a good job and produced our frames at a decent speed.

DP: How long did the rendering take?

Carl Beauchemin: We rendered frames every night and at weekends – for over a year. I can’t tell you the exact number of hours, but it must have totalled around 15,000. We couldn’t use the services of a render farm for budgetary reasons.

DP: How did Kickstarter help you in the end?

Carl Beauchemin: This crowdfunding platform was our last resort – and our best decision during the entire project. We ran out of money in mid-2013 and were looking for ways to pay our musicians and sound designer. This meant that a campaign, wherever it was launched, simply had to work. One crucial point was that we already had followers. Not many, but just enough to reach a few hundred people who shared our Kickstarter page with their friends after the launch. One of our goals right from the start was to build a fanbase. To do this, we set up a production blog and published concept art, insider information and lots of tips and tricks that we had learnt from our work there every fortnight. At the same time, we filled our Facebook page and continually posted in various CG forums. After a year and a half, we had quite a decent number of followers. But it took a long time and a lot of effort to build up this fanbase.

DP: But at that point you were already able to show your first results.

Carl Beauchemin: That’s right, we were already very far along in the film production. So, fortunately, we were not only able to show a lot of shots, but also cut a trailer that caught people’s attention. It was also very obvious that we had already invested a lot of time, effort and money in this project. So the message was not: “Give us money so that we can realise our dream”. Rather, it came across that we had already done everything we could on our own. Now it was just about that little push we needed to complete the project. I think this approach touched people and helped make this campaign such a big success: With 711 backers, we raised a whopping 24,155 Canadian dollars instead of the planned 5,000.

DP: Looking back, would you do anything differently?

Carl Beauchemin: No, I don’t think so. The biggest problem for us was that we misjudged the time. It took us two years to produce the album instead of one year as planned. Looking back, there was no other way to achieve the quality we wanted. Basically, our naivety and enthusiasm were an advantage. Because if we had known beforehand that it would take two years, we might have waited a few years until we had more money together. One of us would probably have changed our minds and decided to call the whole thing off. “Le Gouffre” probably wouldn’t have turned out like this if we had waited longer.

DP: What’s next for you?

Carl Beauchemin: The film has finished its festival run and is now online. It has been incredibly well received and we couldn’t be happier. From the beginning, our goal was to get the attention of people working in the film industry. We wanted to show what we can do as a team. We hope that this project will lead to new partnerships. As Lightning Boy Studio, we want to develop and direct projects. However, we are keen to work with other studios that take on the administrative parts such as renting space and hiring staff. We also all have our own jobs: after completing “Le Gouffre”, David and his wife founded “MrCuddington”(mrcuddington.com) and now create illustrations for board games from home. I now work as a 3D artist at Pascal Blais Studio(www.pascalblais.com), which specialises in animations for commercials, and Thomas works as a director and VFX artist at Hibernum Creations(www.hibernum.com), a mobile games company.

The post The power of the crowd first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: As part of our recurring weekly series “Animago Afternoon”, we present pearls, treasures and other gems from last year’s Animago film festivals at the best time of the afternoon. This time we are showing you a short film nominated in the “Best Advertising Production” category, salvaged from the Animago archives in 2015: “Supermoine Holypop” throws the bottle cap for the lifestyle drink Holypop . The action-packed short film was realised by filmmakers from Supamonks Studio in Paris.

Click on: You can find the full-length link to the fast-paced short film with plenty of comic splatter below. Our serving suggestion: Take a deep breath after watching the film – and enjoy a freshly cracked bottle of Zuckerbrause?

SUPERMOINE HOLYPOP (le gardien du secret)

 

The post Supermoine Holypop | Animago Afternoon first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: As part of our recurring weekly series “Animago Afternoon”, we present pearls, gems and other gems from last year’s Animago film festivals at the best time of the afternoon. This time we’re showing you the short film nominated in the “Best Visualisation” category, salvaged from the Animago archives in 2015, which addresses a sensitive topic: “Young Heroes” deals with organ donation and was made by Robert Pohle, Ronny Schmidt, Maurice Mersinger and Jochen Mader from Uhsless (now Studio Streckenbach). Uli Streckenbach is the man behind Uhsless, who was awarded an animago trophy for his graduation film “Ending Overfishing” at the Kunsthochschule Halle in 2012, as well as for “Let’s talk about soil” a year later (which we presented to you on 25 May this year ).

What is “Young Heroes” about? All people are united by mortality. This is often suppressed. People are also very reluctant to think about the reuse of their own organs after death. The “Young Heroes” organisation advocates an individual and considered decision on the subject of organ donation. To this end, Uhsless from Berlin produced a five-minute 3D animation film explaining the organ donation process – step by step, step by step.” This is how Mirja Fürst’s magazine article on the film project, published in DP 03 : 2016, began.

Click further: The highly relevant short film is linked below in full length. We say: Watch the film – and consider an organ donor card? Join in at junge-helden.org or get involved in the good cause.

Young heroes: The process of organ donation

The post Junge Helden | Animago Afternoon first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

It seems that chimpanzees have made an impression – and six students from Supinfocom Rubika took that one step further.

DP: Just to satisfy my curiosity: Did the ape at least know he reached 700 mph in the final seconds?
Team 400mph: Maybe. No matter how fast he goes, to him it will always feel like he hasn’t managed to exceed 400 mph.

DP: Considering the basic story line: How did you get the idea for that movie?
Team 400mph: The story was inspired by the attempts to break the sound barrier in the 1950s. The pilots at that time were taking incredible risks to beat this record. Quickly the lake of Bonneville became an iconical place for speed records, and it made us think of the Moebius comics, such as “Arzac Thapsody” and “40 Days Dans Le Desert B”. Having a chimpanzee as a main character reminded us of the space race and reinforced the impression of danger for our character.
In addition, we could accentuate his emotions while still keeping him very animal. He could sometimes behave in a human way and his emotions would be clear to the viewer but he also could show a primitive rage in his moments of anger.

DP: How big was the team and how long have you worked on this movie?
Team 400mph: We were a team of six and worked on it for a year and a half, even a bit more for the original storyteller that came up with the original idea.

DP: How did your team get together?
Team 400mph: Each student presents a project, then there is a selection by teachers to keep the films that seem the most different but also feasible and interesting with the knowledge we have acquired in school. Then each student decides the stories he/ she wants to work on the most and makes a list of the projects that interest him/her and the role he/she wants to play. We all try to shape complementary teams based on each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This helps us form a balanced group that can work on all different aspects of the creation of a 3D animated movie.

DP: Can you tell us about your pipeline?
Team 400mph: We mainly worked in Maya, the rendering was done with Redshift and for the FX we used Houdini. The monkey was sculpted in ZBrush, his hair was done with Yeti, and for his textures we used the Substance suite and Mari, the modeling and simulation of his clothes was done in Marvelous Designer. The compositing was done with Nuke.
Finally, for editing, sound design and calibration we used Avid Media Composer, Pro-Tools and Resolve. We used a pipeline tool called Pipou, developed by Fabien Meyran for their film “028” (see page 80) – it would manage the shader exports and animation as well as all the hierarchy of the files. As hardware, we had six working machines and in addition to that we had access to 3 machines with more RAM for Houdini and Marvelous simulations. For rendering, we had six other computers equipped with GTX 1080Ti as well as a server with 4 Quadros.

DP: Any special tools, plug-ins or scripts besides those?
Team 400mph: We created several more scripts, in the beginning for the animatic and the forecast in order to update the editing more easily. Then for rig and clothing simulations, especially for baking simulations onto the low-poly model. For the animation, we used AnimBot and Studio Library to make the general process easier and more time-efficient. We also had some homemade camera shaking scripts to make the shots inside the vehicles as intense as possible.

DP: And with that setup, how long did the render take?
Team 400mph: It depends obviously on the shots, but generally speaking the shots outside were delivered in a few minutes by frame. For the monkey shots it would range from 15 minutes to an hour. Except for a few very close-up shots, we tried to never exceed one hour of rendering.

DP: The protagonist’s face is awesome and on par with the work done by Weta and ILM. How did you do that, and could you describe your design approach and the underlying rigs, textures, and muscle systems?
Team 400mph: Thank you for the comparison! The making of Icarus was a huge process that involved a big part of the team through the concept phase of the movie. For the design of Icarus, we really focused on the chimpanzee’s characteristics by watching many documentaries and photos dealing with the ape’s appearance and anatomy. The only difference with reality is that we wanted our character to be able to express his feelings the way humans do, while still having his animal side (for example by moving his eyebrows more than a regular chimpanzee would).
After the drawing of the 2D concepts, Julia used Maya to model the skeleton of Icarus to have the correct proportions and make the whole structure credible. Then she used ZBrush to add the main details such as wrinkles on the model. For the facial setup, she created many blendshapes for the principal expressions. Then Lorraine, who was working on the rig, added a joints system to allow the animators Alice and Quentin to bring deformations to the face of our monkey. Meanwhile, Paul-Eugene was working on the texturing of Icarus with Mari to give this particular skin aspects that make the chimpanzee realistic, and Natacha worked on his eyes to get a chimpanzee/human look as realistic as possible. We really wanted to have a very characterized chimpanzee.
For the character FX, Lorraine dealt with the cloth modeling of the clothes Natacha had designed, textured, and simulated in Marvelous Designer, as Julia was establishing the fur of Icarus with Yeti.

DP: The rig for that face must have been detailed and extremely fine-tuned. Could you describe that setup?
Team 400mph: We first focused on creating a generic yet detailed deformation system that is close enough to what we could expect on a common human face, implying jaw/lips, eyelids/eyebrow controls. The biggest difficulty came when apprehending the deformations and their impact on the other controlers, especially around the mouth. That was built in two steps: the first one implied a complete skin weight based deformation with multiple bones around the lips and the cheeks, which are driven by the jaw control to redistribute the weight of the skin, when the chimp opens its mouth wide enough, and is complemented with corrective blendshapes. This system let us have rig based controls above for animators to tweak on the same skin weights distribution. Above this was added sticky lips setup, specific blendshape deformations and sticky clusters.
The eyes’ regions had to be so expressive, we worked specifically on them based on the animated shots and rendering requirements. We weren’t sure yet if the chimp was going to be faithful to a real chimp’s muscular movements or if adding human type expressions would deliver a good impression. We finally did add them, step by step, adapting the deformation blendshapes for nice rendering shapes and expressions based on the feedback of rendering for the closest shots.

Finally, it’s a rig based setup mounted with corrective blendshapes and sticky clusters, with maximum control over each stage of deformation, to get all the subtle movements right.

DP: And how much research did you need to do to get it just right?
Team 400mph: For the rig: It’s hard to get specific information on a chimp’s muscular motions, so the research mostly implied searching for human anatomy specificities to translate to the chimpanzee proportions. Drawing helped a lot in the process. For the animation, we watched a lot of documentaries and scientific videos, even some films like “Planet of the Apes”. We also shot a lot of references in order to see exactly how we wanted Icarus to move and react.

DP: The cars in the beginning: Were they based on the Saltlake Tests from the 60s? If so, how did you put them together and how did you make them look iconic, but not just a copy?
Team 400mph: The cars are actually based on real iconic models, which are in order of appearance: the Indian Scout of Burt Monroe, the Thunderbolt of George Eyston, the Challenger 1 of Mickey Thompson and the Spirit of America of Craig Breedlove. It was our intention to stay as close to reality as possible, but we also needed to adapt a little bit – for example, adapting the car cockpits to the shape of a chimpanzee driver. We also chose an angle of view which is made possible with the 3D techniques but generally not possible in reality. For example the last car is more like a rocket than a car, so our originality is in our camera choices.

DP: And what have you been working on since?
Team 400mph: We’ve all started working in different studios, some in Paris, some in Brussels and even some in Sydney.

The post 400 MPH first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mirja Fürst.

In nuce: As part of our weekly recurring series “Animago Afternoon”, we present pearls, gems and other splendours from last year’s Animago film festivals at the best time of the afternoon. This time, salvaged from the Animago archives in 2019, we show you the awesome short film “400 MPH”, realised by graduates of the VFX university “Supinfocom” – with branches in France and India.

What is “400 MPH” about? Let us quote from our interview with the film team, published in DP 06:2019– not a bit self-centred: “When was the last time you identified with an animal? And not in a “I want to sleep all day like my cat” kind of way, no, when was the last time you identified with an animal in a meaningful way? Probably in one of the Planet of the Apes remakes?”, was our opening line at the time, because in “400 MPH” the ape is your favourite!

Ancient myths in a monkey’s fur: in the short film “400 MPH”, the foppish title hero is on the trail of Greek myths: the film’s plot about flying high and speed fanaticism is inspired by the story of Icarus.

The makers behind it: The creative minds behind this rousing short film are: Julia Chaix (CG Generalist at Ubisoft), Alice Lefort (Set & Animation Production Manager at Illumination Mac Guff), Lorraine Desserre (Rigging TD at Eisko), Natacha Pianeti (VFX Artist at Untold Studios) and Quentin Tireloque (3D Animator at Stratosphere Games). As you can see: The former Supinfocom students have found a professional home.

Click further: The short film, which (it feels like) breaks the sound barrier, is linked below in full length. We say: film off – and don’t go to the centre of the sun! Find out more about the educational programme at rubika-edu.com .

400MPH | Court-Métrage | RUBIKA Animation 2019

The post 400 MPH | Animago Afternoon first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.