Making:
The Sweet Smell of Success
Outline
The Sweet Smell of Success was created as as final project for my BA 3D Computer Animation at Swansea Institute of Education.
The film had to go through all stages of production from the idea development, including conceptual designs and storyboarding, right through production and onto post-production such as compositing and sound.
All stages of production were undertaken by myself. Tasks such as animation and lighting were completed in Alias-wavefronts Maya with compositing and post production effects being done in Apple's Shake. Editing and compression was done with a combination of Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas Video.
The whole project was completed from start to finish in around 6 or so months, although the majority of actual production / animation was done during the last month. Almost a whole week was spent rendering the images with compositing and post production effects such as DOF and heat distortion being completed as soon as all the components of each shot were rendered.
Below are some breif descriptions and images from different stages of the project. Given time I plan to include a much more detail 'making of section' for the website.
Idea Development
The initial idea for the film was always based around a caveman and the discovery or invention of the wheel. However the final idea was quite an evolution from the original. As I plan to make at least one of the eariler ideas into a further short film I wont go into details right now!
After storyboarding three of the ideas, creating lica reels and animatics for two of them and numberous discussions with lecturers, friends and family the idea for the Sweet Smell of Success was at last decided on.
Along side deciding on the story idea concept sketches for the characters and props were being drawn. These stages of the project alone took a good two or three months to complete and a concious decision was made to not move onto any production until the design stages were complete.
Modelling
All modelling was done in Maya using polygons. Each of the characters as well as all garments and props were created from a poygon cube using a combination of the append/create ploygon tool and polygon extrude tool. Below are some wirframes from the caveman model.
Texturing and Rendering
I wanted to keep the look of the film quite realistic yet still unrealistic if im making any sense!! Anyway I I achieved the look I was aiming for through the use of a modified cell/toon shader and mental ray's contour shading functions. The cell shader was a modification of Hinako Minako's shader which he has used to produce some really awesome stills. Check out the 'Kelvina' stills on his website here.
