Short cuts
Inspired by Fabio Cavalcanti’s webcomic, Jacob Frey’s short The Present is a heartwarming look at the gift of friendship built through common ground
Feature film quality in a short
After stumbling upon an English translation of a Portuguese web comic by Fabio ‘Coala’ Cavalcanti ( www.menthirinhas.com.br), Jacob Frey decided to use the premise for his thesis short at the Institute of Animation at the Filmakademie Baden-wüerttemberg. “Seeing Fabio’s comic I immediately knew I had to make a short out of it,” he says. “The story was simple, full of emotions and had a great twist at the end. It was screaming out to be turned into an animated short.”
Taking inspiration from Pixar and Disney, The Present was Jacob and his team’s attempt at getting as close as possible to the high quality of a major feature animated film.
What was the hardest job?
Definitely managing the entire animation. To animate three minutes with two characters, one being a three-legged dog, was a challenge. You can increase your weekly animation target by dropping the quality, but that wasn’t something I wanted to do. Luckily I already worked in commercials and had just finished work on the Oscarnominated short Room on the Broom, so knew my realistic animation target. With a small team I had to plan smartly. I created all necessary assets at the start to focus on the animation.
Can you talk us through your pipeline?
We used Maya as our main software package to model, rig and animate the characters and rendered everything with Renderman 18. We used Yeti Fur for the dog’s fur and the boy’s and mom’s hair, as Pascal Floerks had already tried various fur pipelines for his own thesis short, Bär. Yeti Fur is easy to use thanks to the Node editor, and offers great grooming tools. Mari was used for texturing and Nuke 8 for compositing. Finalising was done in HIERO, which is an amazing tool; its direct connection to Nuke allowed us to render image sequences directly via the Royal Render renderfarm – a huge time saver.
What was the most impressive technical aspect and how was it achieved?
The lighting and rendering was the most technical aspect. We had fur, displacements, subsurface scattering and a huge number of objects in the scene. We also used single bounce GI and in the end a frame took roughly 60 minutes to render. To minimise iterations we rendered a simple Ambient Occlusion pass early on and had Bin-han To draw lighting moods for the key shots. With these images we already created an interesting shadow/light concept, which saved a lot of time in lighting. For the shading we used the Physically Plausible shader and the RMS_HAIR shader for the fur/hair. Most lights were simple Geometric Area lights.
What lessons did you learn?
Overall the production has been smooth. Renderman was a bit intense when setting up and seemed a bit complex for a student short, but once Markus Kranzler figured it out it was a stable and reliable tool. The Renderman support team have also been great. We also learnt it’s never good when only one person’s able to control a tool, and it’s better to go home early and start the day with a fresh mind!
The story was simple, full of emotions and had a great twist at the end. It was screaming out to be turned into a short
What’s next for you?
I just completed the Talent Development Program at Walt Disney Animation Studios in LA, where I was an animator for the film Zootopia. I’m soon moving to Berlin to work as an animator for MLP, who created the Oscar-nominated shorts The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom. Watch The Present online at www.vimeo.com/152985022