Yesterday I received my copy of 3D Total’s “Shorts Drawer” DVD, which has turned out to be absolutely wonderful!
Obviously I’m pleased that my first short film, “Bagel 2″, was chosen to be featured on the DVD… but WOW, some of the other shorts featured are absolutely stunning! Top quality stuff.
Why not go check it out at 3D Total for yourself, they even offer a trailer for online viewing!
This evening I finished writing the script, which is good because I can now start getting some real work done. The story has changed from what I reported last time, but the premises remain the same and the protagonist is of course still my little dragon. Some of the storyboards are already done, and with just a few left to draw I’ve already started designing the characters and the environment.
Expect a highly stylized appearance with a very cartoony main character… lots of work to animate this beast! On the other hand the backgrounds will be fairly simple, I’m still experimenting with a sort of “watercolored” look…
After what seems like a thousand sleepless nights of telling insipid stories to myself, I think I’ve finally come up with one that I like. It’s the short and fairly humorous tale of a lonesome but annoying dragon on the lookout for someone to call a friend. In hindsight, I find that Bagel 2’s storyline was perhaps a bit too convoluted, which is why this one will be very straight forward, more along the lines of Pixar’s For the Birds or perhaps Geri’s Game.
Now after some thinking I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably unwise to publish details about the plot here on my Plog, because after all, I don’t want to spoil the fun for anyone when the film is finally released. You’ll be left in the dark as to what exactly I’ll be producing, but I don’t see that as a drawback at all. The gist will reveal itself though my postings here anyhow.
Since I currenly don’t have any concrete ideas concerning the storyline, my next steps will be as follows:
Obviously my schedule will depend wholly on the type of story — the number of characters being a crucial criterion — and of course the visual complexity of the project. I’m aiming for a 3 – 4 minute film this time, and it’ll probably have the look of traditional animation, think Disney’s “Jungle Book” or “Snow White”. Whatever may come in terms of story and design, I can already state that next summer will be the absolute deadline, because that’s when I’ll need to get started on writing my diploma for uni.
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
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
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
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
