A SCAD Capstone Film
Poster credit Alexa Arostegui
Watch the trailer!
Out of Place is the Animated Capstone film I worked on during my Senior year at SCAD. It is a hand drawn 2D/CG 3D hybrid short about a ghost whose life gets turned upside down when an old lady moves in and starts rearranging all his belongings.
Total production time was about nine months, divided between Preproduction, Production, and Postproduction. The setting, props, and secondary character, Granny, were created and animated in Autodesk Maya, with textures done in Photoshop. Our protagonist, the ghost Eggmund Earl Grey, was animated traditionally using ToonBoom Harmony and TVPaint - composited together in Adobe After Effects.
Major Responsibilities (click to jump): Producer/3D Technical Director, Character Artist, Rigger, Modeler
Other Work: Concept Development, Rendering, 2D Animation Cleanup
Studio: Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah campus
Director: Molly Caruso
Supervising Professor: Greg Araya
Date: Sept. 2019 - May 2020
Most of my time on the film, when not fulfilling Producer duties, was spent on the character Granny, our 3D deuteragonist/antagonist. Every step of her production was done by myself, including model, UVs and textures, and rigging.
Final 2D Character design done by our 2D Lead, Abbi Davis
Character Artist
Wireframe Turnaround
Textures Turnaround
Rigger
I was the sole member of our team who had strong rigging experience, so I ended up as our only rigger! That meant not only Granny's rig, but any prop or piece of the environment that needed to move was my responsibility. Everything from the doors and cups to the multi-version tea set.
Granny was my first full-fledged character rig. For the most part, everything went smoothly, though I had to troubleshoot the face a few times. In the end I'm happy with the result, especially since she has slightly abnormal proportions.
The Tea Set was one of the more complex and challenging models and rigs I worked on. It needed to have each piece move individually, but parent to the tray for Eggmund to carry. On top of that, each piece needed a broken version (most modeled by Sarah Buckingham), and a set key for the animators to easily swap between them for the relevant scenes.
Producer / 3D TD
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"3D Issues to Address" spreadsheet
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"Rendering Checklist" spreadsheet
I assumed the role of 3D Production Manager at the beginning of the Production stage of the film. I also rose to a Producer role as a result, working directly with the professor to plan, manage, and track the progress of the team overall, meet with other classes, recruit volunteers, as well as handle some publicity elements. When we moved to online collaboration for Covid-19, I made sure to keep everything organized and as on track as possible.
My duties included scheduling, production supervision, managing team deliverables and deadlines, running weekly meetings, and troubleshooting ("tech support").
As we rolled through Production and Postproduction, organization of our Master files, as well as progress scheduling/tracking became extremely important. Two of the pivotal tools I created to help us tackle problems and make sure everything got done were the "3D Issues" and "Rendering Checklist" spreadsheets.
The first was a simple way for the 3D team, no matter which step of the pipeline, to log and address errors, missing assets, etc. It made things a lot easier than word-of-mouth and memory.
The second, and most important, spreadsheet was what we used as a whole crew to ensure all elements for each shot were completed and composited.
Nearly every shot had our 2D character either animated over, or (more often) interacting with 3D elements. This meant we had to render multiple passes of each Maya scene, with many of them transparent, taking care to figure out exactly how many individual renders were needed, both with 2D and 3D. Sometimes we had ten or more total layers in one shot composition!
It took a week, but I figured out how to render transparent TIFs!
Environment/Prop Modeler
In addition to the work on Granny, I was one of the team who worked on the environment and prop assets for Out of Place.
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Lamp designs based on body silhouettes from our character concepts. I wanted each character's props to reflect their designs/personalities.
2D Cleanup Animation
One of my final roles working on Out of Place was supplemental 2D Cleanup, in order to relieve some of the work load on our 2D team and make our final deadlines for the end of the year.
Included here are some of the frames from the main shot I worked on.
Programs: Autodesk Maya, ToonBoom Harmony
Compiled in AfterEffects