All images from Inspired 3D Short Film Production by Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia, series edited by Kyle Clark and Michael Ford. Reprinted with permission.

Be sure to check out the first part of the case study of Morgan Kelly’s The Terrible Tragedy of Virgil and Maurice.

Story Reel
I was concurrently creating storyboards from the vignettes and writing the script in Final Draft based on notes I had in my sketchbook (see Figure 8). The two simultaneously evolved, helping me to solidify my storyline and keep all the content organized. When I had a sequence of storyboards together, I’d scan them into Premiere for the story reel. As the story reel grew, I’d add some necessary sound effects and music for the mood. The character thumbnail drawings from my sketchbook grew into detailed illustrations. From those I made a schematic front and profile drawing of Virgil and Maurice to be scanned into Maya for the basis of the modeling. As I was modeling/rigging the characters, I was also finishing up the rough story reel. I recorded scratch dialogue of myself and a friend from the script. This was added to the story reel as I further edited the timing. For the final voice actors, I used two talented, artistic, and comedic friends of mine, Eric Malamud and Ron Yavnielli. We did some test readings of the script to get the characters’ voices worked out. The recording was done digitally in a sound studio at CalArts, then burned to a CD. I edited the new audio and added it to the story reel, replacing the scratch dialogue. Around this time I had also finished up my rough modeling/rigging. Now I could finally animate!

Modeling
The most daunting obstacle I feared was overcoming the technical aspects involved in creating a short film with computer graphics. I don’t consider myself a “technical Mafioso.” I can’t absorb a program easily by just taking a class and watching demonstrations. I have to jump into it with a problem that needs to be solved and mill around to become familiar with the program. Classes were integral for me when I’d hit a wall and then need direction with a specific problem.

[Figure 8] A few storyboard panels.

Modeling, rigging, texturing and lighting can be quite complex. But the cliché about “a complicated use of the basics” was the foundation for my CG experience. I didn’t feel that I had to have an expert’s touch in digital modeling, so when I modeled the character, I used whatever means were necessary to stay true to what made the traditional design appealing to me.

After the schematic drawing was imported to Maya as an image plane, polygons were used to model the head and limbs of Virgil. It’s an intuitive method because of the close comparison to clay modeling. I felt comfortable that I could push and pull the CVs around to find nice shapes for the character. Then I sculpted the upper body from a NURBS sphere because it gave a smoother curve when it was deforming. It looked better when I’d bend Virgil’s spine and then straighten him out quickly to reverse the curves during animation. Lastly, subdivision surfacing seemed best for Maurice’s texture and extreme manipulation for posing. I worked very hard at the shapes and silhouettes of each body part individually, and how they came to form the body shape as a whole. It was important to have smooth lines and arcs to streamline the body of the snake, and to contrast it with some harder edges on Virgil. Even on Virgil, I wanted each body part to cascade nicely into the next limb. At this point I had the rough model made up of the head, torso/neck, arm, hand, pelvis, two legs and a cylinder for Maurice. The model was made with the arm and snake stretched outward, but the body, head and legs were laid out in a natural standing pose for Virgil.