minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

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

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.“

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

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