Lost Boys Short - "Orchid and the Rose"

Greets,

I have been meaning to post for some time now... Oh how time flies.

We just picked up a Gold Award at the 39th Annual WorldFest- Houston International Film Festival which jogged my memory to get this posted up!

So a little back story, myself and friend (Dennis Tal) produced this animated short last summer with a small BravoFact grant. (About $10K CDN)

I was just coming off a teaching gig at VFS and enlisted a few of my grad students as well as the help of my old animation director.

The assets (Characters and Set) were generated over a few months while I juggled a few other responsibilities and then we had a crunch of about three weeks to get all the animation produced and the rendering/compositing completed. (Broadcast deadline looming!)

Three weeks to render about 35,000 frames elements… Rendered out on a home made renderfarm of about a dozen various machines piled up under my workbench. Pretty sure I gained a good handful of grey hairs trouble shooting render glitches… MAYAAAA!

Since our assets (Characters/Set) weren’t quite complete by the time we needed to begin animation we set up the project to use scene referencing. This really saved our bacon but it also opened up another can of worms due to my unfamiliarity with the pitfalls… (Stupid Fur on the Bee wouldn’t render!!!)

All the artists involved worked remotely with most of the communication happening through MSN and data also moving through FTP. I’ve produced projects before so I knew the importance of organization… With everyone working remotely it was even more important than ever!

Everyone involved really kicked ass and put in the hours to get it done on time. I was lucky to have had such a devoted team to support the film. Everyone shared duties to work out the kinks.

Animators:
Allen Holbrook
Cayle Hotchkiss
Bartek Kujbida
Ken Meyer

Character TD’s:
Samuel Tung (Orchid)
Pornthep Wongkitigumjorn (Rose)

Asides from Producing I built the Set, developed,the look, render wrangled and composited. Having a VFX background I pulled out the old camera mapping trick… We had the window box built as a model then I disassembled it into its component pieces and shot a bunch of high rez digital stills for the projections. I really wanted an organic and weathered look which I fell we really were able to nail due to the reference model.

To gain depth out of the scene I rendered a fog pass and added depth of field in post. (After Effects.) The fog proved to be a lot of fun… So many times I would check to see if the fog pass aligned with the Beauty passes and found them totally out of whack. (Don’t ask… I don’t have an answer. I suppose the Moon was a little out of phase…)

All in all I’m VERY happy with how it turned out. We “streamlined” the original concept just a little bit. But only in good ways! I am used to producing animation for commercials and game cinematics that had a few extra zeros in the budget so when it started to look like we were actually going to finish on budget I really felt the miracle!

It’s never quite possible to let go of the glitches that just couldn’t be fixed in time but hey that comes with the territory.

Here’s a link to the QuickTime.

www.lostboys-entertainment.com\movies\OrchidandtheRose.mov

Or just go into the www.lostboys-studios.com front page and link through to it…

And here’s some stills as an appetizer!

Enjoy,

M

BTW: I’ve been getting quite a few emails requesting the name of the music that this was animated to… It was a Vancouver based band named Hinterland. (http://www.hinterland.bc.ca/) A very powerful song, thanks guys!