October 11 2009

The Making of “A Night at the Cathedral”

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When the team at Stu­dio Lam­pion started prepar­ing for the pro­duc­tion of what would even­tu­ally become our ani­mated short film A Night at the Cathe­dral, all we knew was that we wanted to cre­ate a show­case project for our prospec­tive clients and at the same to develop an effi­cient pipeline for our future pro­duc­tions.
It would have to be an ani­mated short film of high qual­ity and incor­po­rate a dis­tinc­tive style, yet at the same time be as sim­ple as pos­si­ble: As a start-​​up com­pany with only two core artists we real­ized it would be vital to start out small and within rea­son — espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the pro­duc­tion would be 100% self-​​financed and that we would be work­ing on it along­side our pay­ing projects for clients.

Early concept art of the magnificient bell tower

Early con­cept art of the mag­ni­fi­cient bell tower

Brain­storm­ing for story con­cepts we came up with more than half a dozen plots in just as many dif­fer­ent set­tings but soon real­ized they all had one thing in com­mon: They were too com­plex! So we took a step back and crit­i­cally ana­lyzed all the con­cepts we had come up with and whether there was any­thing that could be sim­pli­fied so much as to be real­is­tic within our mod­est means.
After much back and forth we even­tu­ally decided to go with the medieval theme as this under­tak­ing seemed rea­son­able after elim­i­nat­ing any dis­pens­able char­ac­ters, set­tings and sub­plots. More­over, we felt a strong con­nec­tion to the main char­ac­ter and had a vivid image in our minds of what the result­ing film should look like. We were aim­ing to por­tray a painterly, tra­di­tional car­toon feel and wanted to avoid the some­what ster­ile look dis­played by many mod­ern 3D pro­duc­tions.
Armed with a set of pro­pri­etary tools that would help us in achiev­ing this goal and years of pro­duc­tion expe­ri­ence in all areas of 2D and 3D film-​​making, we finally got under­way with our short film A Night at the Cathedral.

At this point in the process we had con­cepts for the char­ac­ters, the set­ting and a basic plot, which boiled down to “Our bird­brained pro­tag­o­nist Belze is on a quest to steal the golden statue of the Holy Mazi­oles from a medieval cathe­dral and, of course, fails mis­er­ably.“

Cologne Cathedral

We trav­eled to Cologne Cathe­dral to gather ref­er­ence pho­tos and inspiration

With the story’s plot tak­ing shape we decided to get a feel for the film’s atmos­phere and sur­round­ings and did a lot of research on medieval art and his­tory. Unfor­tu­nately, only few medieval struc­tures remain in our town of Berlin, so we took some time to travel to his­toric and inspir­ing places such as the Cologne Cathe­dral, Notre Dame de Paris, Lyon and to visit cas­tles on the Rhine river. There we took hun­dreds of ref­er­ence pho­tos, many of which we later reused as tex­tures or details in our back­ground mattes.

Concept Art of Clara playing the organ

Con­cept Art of Clara play­ing the organ

The var­i­ous impres­sions gath­ered dur­ing these research trips were incor­po­rated into our con­cept art, which we drew, painted, mod­eled and ren­dered in 3D to visu­al­ize our ideas and to help define the look of the film.
Around the same time we started sketch­ing out ideas for the pro­tag­o­nist Belze, our evil but not exactly bril­liant thief. Belze rep­re­sents the arche­type of the comedic vil­lain: He is sin­is­ter and wicked but yet clumsy and totally use­less. In design­ing this char­ac­ter we were inspired by clas­sic Dis­ney vil­lains and also took some cues from the Mon­key Island series.
His antag­o­nist is Clara, a young lady play­ing the organ dur­ing the night our story unfolds. She is a some­what one-​​dimensional plot-​​device in that she doesn’t have any motives of her own and is only there to react to what­ever Belze is up to.

Storyboard: Belze fleeing from the Cathedral

Sto­ry­board: Belze flee­ing from the Cathedral

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August 14 2004

The Making of “Bagel 2”

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The idea for my ani­mated short film Bagel 2 was first con­ceived by my friend and col­league Matthias Koenig and myself shortly after see­ing all the news about the Euro­pean space mis­sion “Bea­gle 2″ in Decem­ber of 2003. We found it quite amus­ing that while all one ever heard of the Euro­pean Bea­gle were mes­sages of fail­ure and tragedy, the Amer­i­can mis­sion at the same time was doing a much bet­ter job.

We soon real­ized that the story could make a cute ani­mated short film and started sketch­ing out our ideas.
Sadly, Matthias dropped out of the project early on due to him work­ing on another per­sonal project.

In the begin­ning, there were sev­eral dif­fer­ent designs for the pro­tag­o­nist Bagel 2, some of which you can see sketched out below. Only a sin­gle day before the modeling-​​phase started, the look for Bagel 2 was final­ized.

Concept art for Bagel 2

Con­cept art for Bagel 2

The Sto­ry­board

For­tu­nately, the story itself was already roughly fixed when I started draw­ing the sto­ry­board, but now the time had come to judge for every sin­gle shot, whether
a) it was required in order to tell the story
and
b) it was pos­si­ble to imple­ment in the rel­a­tively short time­frame of about 4 months.

I was aim­ing for a two minute film, and so I added, removed, changed and swapped shots until I was happy with the story and the length.

The sto­ry­board was then scanned, cropped and inserted into Adobe Pre­miere to cre­ate an ani­matic. This can be use­ful to see if a story really works, in that it helps in tim­ing the length of shots. Also, when peo­ple ask you what you’re doing all the time, it’s always nice to have at least some­thing to show them!

The first shots from the short as envisioned in the storyboard

The first shots from the short as envi­sioned in the storyboard

Mod­el­ing

By early April, all pre-​​production work had been com­pleted and I could finally start mod­el­ling the “char­ac­ters”:

A quite simple model was used for the robot Bagel 2

A quite sim­ple model was used for the robot Bagel 2

As you can prob­a­bly see, the mod­els fea­tured in Bagel 2 are rel­a­tively sim­ple, so the con­struc­tion process didn’t take too long. All ani­mate objects are mod­elled using NURBS, only the ter­rain and rocks are made of polygons .

Take a closer look at Bagel’s antenna (or tail) in the above image: In the film, there was a shim­mer­ing light where here is only a lit­tle green dot. This was done because it’s much sim­pler to add glow­ing lights in post-​​production than to ren­der them in 3D. In After Effects, all I had to do was to fil­ter out that spe­cific shade of green and apply a glow effect there, giv­ing me great con­trol over the look and inten­sity of the light.

Inter­est­ingly, one of the only stored tex­tures used in the film is the body of the Amer­i­can space ship, “Bob”. The flag and the details on him were painted in Pho­to­shop.
Most other tex­tures are cre­ated using pro­ce­dural shaders, mean­ing that they are not stored in image files but are cre­ated only through math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las directly at render-​​time. I pre­ferred using pro­ce­du­rals because even though the orig­i­nal tex­ture for the Mar­sian land­scape was huge (around 300MB), it still wasn’t large enough for close up cam­era views.
Pro­ce­du­rals do not lose qual­ity when zoom­ing in, so they were the obvi­ous choice here.

Procedural shaders were used wherever possible

Pro­ce­dural shaders were used wher­ever possible


The detail on Bagel’s tires and Bob’s thrusters are cre­ated via dis­place­ment shaders . These are applied like bump-​​maps, but with the dif­fer­ence that they actu­ally move the geom­e­try instead of just the nor­mals of the sur­face. If you look closely at the depic­tion above, you can prob­a­bly see that the tires on the left are com­pletely flat, unline those on the right.
Dis­place­ment shaders are great when you want to keep your mod­els light and still retain a high level of detail. Beware though, cer­tain ren­der­ers take much longer to ren­der dis­place­ment maps than bump maps! I ren­dered most scenes using the free RenderMan-​​compliant ren­derer 3delight, so ren­der­ing dis­place­ments wasn’t that much of a prob­lem in my case.

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