YOU SHOULD READ THIS!
I got hired last year to develop a creative team for Carril Agency, a small design start up building an online service that provides design services using a product subscription model, it sounded like a novel and interesting idea and I was more than down to build with the founder.
Within the next few weeks, I had to build my super team, alongside the founder, we hired a small team of artists, each person with specific roles and talents to build our animation team, with me acting as Creative director of the Animation team and Head Animator.
One of our first projects was a small animated short showcasing the core values of the agency; the Journey to great design. It was a spark of inspiration from one of the members of the team that I helped shape into a great story told in a few shots. After drawing a storyboard and pitching the idea to the head of the company, we went straight into preproduction . We developed a visual style for the short, modelled our assets and made animation tests as our little in house proof of concept, ironing out the technical kinks as we moved forward.
Because of the groundwork we had set, and the incredible talent of the team, actual production was a breeze, we smoothly went through layout and animation using an iterative and modular system, with both processes working simultaneously, and after lighting and setting up the camera, we shipped our shots off for rendering.
Now this story should be rolling into its happy ending, right? Unfortunately, I had more lessons to learn.
We finally hit a technical roadblock during post production, with all our troubles coming from the implementation of the sky. Now I have to confess, I had never worked on a project with an open sky before, so I didn’t account for it much during production, I had known that I wanted to matte paint the sky and add it into the shot, but I didn’t think about the camera shake and how it would affect the tracking of the sky, the deadline was looming, our concept artist had made an amazing sky matte painting much faster than I anticipated, I had to do something, fast!
I spent the next weekend going into overdrive, I looked at movies and outside my window to understand how the sky moves in relation to the camera and the human eye, I combed all of YouTube and brushed off on my After effects skills, and after hours of research, I came up with an incredibly simple idea that was just as perfect for the problem. I would make preview renders (which were fast) but add primitives to the sky which I could then track in after effects and match the matte painting to their movement.
And it was magical, in a few hours we had solved the problem and the short was finally ready to be shipped.
I hope you enjoy watching our short as much as we did creating it.
You can see both the short and our RND process on Behance here:
Thanks guys! 🌻 We enjoyed so much making this one! ;)