BFX Competition 2016

Finally with the film released I can talk about my part in creating a 30 second short film for the charity Create, as part of Bournemouth's BFX competition.

 Here is the final film my team made:


 Alongside 4 other team members, who I had not met before, two from Bournemouth University animation, one from Arts University Bournemouth and a Falmouth Graduate. Over the course of 7 weeks we created a 30 second short for the charity Create. We had to take the film from the pre-production and initial animatic stage, through to final product.

 The design style was abstract, and mixed media. Bringing together a real life set, 2D animated characters, several 3D animated characters and props in a 2D render style, and 3D simulated paint.
My role on the project was look development, compositing and rendering. I also assisted generally with pipeline, and with operation of cameras. Getting the look of the concept art was very important, so developing the 2D render style was one of my biggest and most difficult challenges. I referenced 3D, as well as 2D animation, for inspiration. I came up with a nice way to light and composite the 3D scenes to match our very flat 2D art style, with flat character highlights, similar to what you might see in 2D animation.

 The compositing stage was also very involved as there were a lot of different elements to bring together, and make feel like they all exist within the same world. To help I made use of shadow passes to help the 3D character nicely with our backplate, and used god rays to get some interactive lighting between the backplate and 3D character. I also had to bring several render layers to bring together, I opted to use several so that we were able to re render separate elements if we had to. But it also allowed me to render aspects of the film early, without having to wait for all parts of the scene to be complete, this meant I could start comping earlier and save render time.
I really enjoyed the project as a whole, it was a big challenge to achieve the 2D render look and bring the comp together, I was happy with the result and look we achieved, and how close we were to our original concept art.

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