Animation Mentor Newsletter





	Animation Mentor: How did you come up with the concept for your short film? Roger Gimenez: It came up from 3 different sources: First of all it came up from an old idea of a real live short film (never done) with a juggler in a park and a child. Secondly, I saw a lot of Pink Panther stories and Charlie Chaplin films in order to take inspiration from them. And third, Pepe Valencia (my mentor in the pre-production class) told us a very important thing: “If you are going to make an animation short film, you are best off creating a story that is only possible to explain through animation.” Because of this I added a dog and balls that act like bees. Animation Mentor: What important lessons did you learn from making your short film? Roger Gimenez: To sum up, I learned 3 important things: First, I learned the importance of showing your concept and your idea to a wide range of people before starting anything else. Also, it is important to extract from them the best opinions and ideas. Second, the end of the film has to be as strong as possible and all the story behind it has to bring you up, inevitably, to this end. A good script is the key of any short film. Third, planning is crucial to save time in the other parts of the production of a short film. Animation Mentor: How long did it take to complete your film? Roger Gimenez: It took me 6 months from the idea until the final animation. For texturing, lighting and compositing I used a friend of mine (Jacob Carmona) and it took 2 more months. Animation Mentor: How much planning was put into your short film? Did planning help make the process easier? Roger Gimenez: Planning is 3 months. It seems a long time but it is crucial to save time when you start the animation. Planning includes the script, the storyboard and the 3D layout and it becomes the root of your short film. So I learned to put all the effort in doing good planning. Nevertheless, I adjusted some of the camera movements once I had finished the animation. Planning was also testing the characters to figure out if they could do some of the things I needed. For example, I wanted to have eyes in the balls and I did a test to see how it would look. After seeing the result I decided to avoid this idea. I also made tests with the dog; I wanted to know how a walk looked. It worked. And finally, I tested the arms of the guy for the shot where he is trying to escape from the balls to figure out if I was going to have problems with the gimbal rotation and which order of axis would be best. Animation Mentor: Do you mind sharing some of the pre-production work with us with a little explanation of what we’re looking at. Roger Gimenez: Thumbnails: As you can see, my drawing skills are horrible. Nevertheless, it helped me out to see the camera frame and to put the ideas in order in terms of images in a quick way. Click on image to enlarge Story pitch: What I tried to do in the story pitch was to convince my mentor that the story is good and entertaining. If you see the whole story pitch you will see some differences with the final version of the short film. This is because it is the first attempt at creating the story. It had to be polished and put on paper to see what worked and what didn't. Animatic: In the animatic I tried to find the timing for every shot. I used the audio FX in order to adjust the timing. In this part of the process the story is more refined and it is almost the final version, although there are some shots that I will end up discarding in the next process: the 3D layout. Layout: For me the layout was crucial. It is the first time that you see the character in the 3D space and the main concern is to put the camera in the right angle while bearing in mind the action, and the composition. The camera movement of the last shot is just a provisional one, because it will depend on the velocity of the dog running out. In fact, this and the rotary camera around the guy were the more difficult cameras of the film. And I adjusted them at the very end of the animation. Rough passes: In Animation Mentor we divide the short film in three thirds. I divided the short film thinking about the time it was going to take me to animate it. For example, the second third has only 2 shots, but they are very difficult in terms of animation. So I calculated that it was going to take the same time as the first third, and it has 8 shots. To organize the short film in that way was very useful. With this blocking pass I tried to communicate to my mentor the basic poses, timing and ideas that I had for the short film. Thanks to the planning it worked pretty well. Final Render: I’m very glad for the work that my friend Jacob Carmona did with the textures, lighting and compositing. It gives the short film another dimension compared to the playblast. I gave him some directions of what I had in mind in terms of textures and lighting. It had to look like a nice afternoon with long shadows in the characters. Motion Blur and depth of focus were also part of the decisions for the final render. Animation Mentor: What obstacles, if any, did you experience during the creation of your short film? How did you work your way around them? Roger Gimenez: Sometimes I had problems with the rigs; I lost animation. But fortunately, the Animation Mentor team quickly provided me with some tools and Maya scripts to solve these problems and recover what I had lost. I also remember the struggle with the shot where the balls go to the guy’s feet and make him slide and fall down. Ethan Hurd (my mentor in the production class) explained to me how I could make it work. The “trick” is to put more drawings in the extreme poses because the action is so fast that you can’t read it if you make average spacing between the poses. As a curiosity, I have to say that it was also difficult to find a right title for the short film. First of all, it was called “The Revenge of the Balls” but I thought that it took away the surprise or the key of the film so I changed it to “The Park” which is a more mysterious name. Animation Mentor: Tell how your Animation Mentor experience helped you in creating your short film. Roger Gimenez: Animation Mentor was crucial for making this film possible. I wanted to apply all of what I had learned in this little short film. For this reason, I chose this story with a human, a dog and balls (bipeds, quadrupeds and alive objects). I had the chance to apply physical acting, pantomime, storytelling, personality walks, entertainment... I learned that animation is entertainment. So I put all my effort to add some entertainment in all the shots. It is amazing to have this great community of students that help you out and give you advice, and also to have these incredible mentors.