It’s been a long semester, but we did it! We want to thank everyone who helped us produce Collectible. We’re thrilled with the result and we couldn’t have done it without you!
Note: The video is on lockdown for now so that we don’t loose our eligibility for a number of film festivals. As soon as deadlines have passed, we’ll open it up for general audiences.
Ladies and Gentlemen, hold on to your (metaphorical) hats and prepare yourselves for Collectible: the Trailer
How are you? It’s been a while. We’ve been working the kinks out of our pipeline and now have some things to show. Is it rough? Oh yes. You’ll see a mix of final, rendered animation, rough preview renders and (tiny) storyboards. This is the scary part of the timeline where everything is in various stages of broken or not doneness. See for yourself:
You can also compare the rough cut to our storyboards here.
Do you know about SIGGRAPH Dailies? Imagine the coolest image makers (moving and otherwise) you know talking about how they do what they do. It’s an awesome time, and Stoveghost wants to be there.
Great dailies stories are all about the unexpected. In our case, it was a rigging challenge with a surprise solution. We had a dress that exploded into a tangled mess of polygons instead of animating smoothly. Our TD Andrew predicted it would take a week to fix.
Not great.
But! Andrew recalled that but a few short days ago, he had created a prop distortion tool to save on modeling time. The tool uses a lattice and control points to allow us to squash and stretch any mesh with out rigging or remodeling. A few button clicks later, the lattice was applied to the dress. It now animates beautifully and saved Andrew and Patrick days of work. Check out the video below to see the tool in action.
We’ve chosen Cartoon Modern as a render style, now it’s time to get what we want out of the computer.
Here’s the art we showed at pitch along with the (very early) visuals our computers are producing:
We’ve got a ways to go. We need richer colors and more natural outlines, but we’re on our way!
Take a look at this! Patrick has taken his first crack at animating Andrew’s rig. We’re exploring how Lenora’s personality comes across through her actions. Birdlike? Heavy? Fragile? We’ve got to explore them all!
In pitching Stoveghost Studio to the faculty, we had to come up with an appealing, but doable, visual style.
We started with research. We looked at 3 main visual styles:
Hand crafted
Think Aardman claymation.
American Regionalism
Think Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper.
Cartoon Modern
Think 50s cartoons and movies like 101 Dalmations.
In the end we went with Cartoon Modern. We like it’s potential for dramatic lighting, low render times, and overall visual appeal. The faculty agreed!
How did Lenora get where she is today? Take a look at this concept art!
Cruise on over to our video page to see the work we’re doing on our storyboards. Our goal is to hit 3:30 for our final short length. We’re also working on increasing shot variety and solidifying pacing.
Stoveghost Studio aims to simulate a professional feature animation studio environment culminating in a polished CGI animated short with a unique visual style and an engaging original story.
The team started pre-production in summer of 2010, focusing on story, visual development, asset creation, and scheduling. This semester, Stoveghost will focus on animating, texturing, lighting, rendering, scoring, mixing, and editing the final piece for submission to film festivals. Artifacts created in this project will include a five minute short and the protocol and documentation required to help future teams use the ETC render farm.
