Vue for Short Movie Sam & Piccolo |
Sam and Piccolo was a studio project, principally funded by Adam Walker Film with the assistance of the state government film funding body, Screen Tasmania. The 15 minute animated drama is a culmination of several people’s ideas and creative talents. The total production time was about 18 months.
Director Adam Walker shares with us a bit of his technique and how he got to know and use xStream for this project.
The Story
"Sam and Piccolo have always been friends.
They live in an isolated valley where every day they work the land together, but when Piccolo discovers a trick to make his favourite treat grow in plenty, he is overcome by something that threatens their very existence."
The story started to be developed in 2003 by Adam Walker and the writer Briony Kidd.
Production began in January 2004 and wrapped in October 2006, during which time the project was put on hold on several occasions for commercial projects.
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Trailer of Sam and Piccolo |
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The project gave Adam Walker the opportunity to produce high quality CG animation in conjunction with a narrative that had strong universal themes and emotional impact.
Design and Concept
The script for Sam and Piccolo was first based on a project called Deus ex Machina. Sam the farmer evolved out of this project that began earlier that year. And eventually, after several evolution steps, Adam chose an acquaintance of his to model Sam's head.
As for Piccolo, his design comes from the imagination of Chris Downes, the team illustrator, who inspired himself with African Nubian goats. "The design of Piccolo's head and basic skeletal make-up was developed with the help of a plasticine maquette conjunction with a relatively primitive CG model. This enabled the team to better visualize how this fictional creature would move and what the limitations of his facial expressions and physiology were."
"The tree design was styled on an oak tree that starts off small and got bigger and bigger.
The role of the tree can be described as a "super-villain with giant grotesque rippling muscles", and each time the tree grew, it would get chunkier and chunkier, producing more nuts, seeding more blinding greed."
"Chris Downes and myself did hand-drawn storyboards, which we then gave to our team members, Trent Leighton and Daniel Graf, to do the 3D layouts.
This gave us an idea on how everything would fit into the shots and also gave us a better sense of space that is often quite hard to get in 2D.
The storyboards took us about six weeks and the layouts took about another six weeks."
Discovering Vue
The fact that there are millions of trees in the valley where Sam and Piccolo lived posed a huge problem with rendering to the Adam Walker Film team. They had initially thought that normal-mapped billboards would be a possibility, but the trees looked awful. But when they discovered Vue xStream, most of those problems disappeared almost overnight. "I saw Vue on Max Underground. I got pretty excited because it allowed us to easily integrate it into the software that I was using and I jumped at the chance!"
The Adam Walker Film team spent over six weeks in the beginning of the project working on a system of particle billboards with hand-painted normal maps for trees in the valley where the characters live. Once they got Vue xStream, it took them a little under two hours to get a better-looking render (including a matching camera). "We were very excited, but more than a little miffed about the amount of time wasted on a second rate alternative!"
The multi-pass rendered approach used to reduce render times meant that the compositing was particularly complex for a small studio.
The biggest shot had 81 different passes, in a composition with over 250 layers.
"I couln't work without Vue xStream because it allows you to work with the best of both worlds. And I couldn't work without the EcoSystems and the procedural textures and shaders because it gives you the ability to edit the materials through the function editor and nodes."
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Left: Vue scene used in final film / Right: billboard forest |
About Adam Walker Film
Adam Walker is a thirty-year-old Australian, running a small digital animation studio called Adam Walker Film in Tasmania.
When he graduated in 1999, he moved to Sydney and found himself working on a range of film and theatre projects, including being a part of the set design of the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremony.
During this time, he realized that the tools he was using allowed him to create his own completely digital animation studio.
He went back home to Tasmania and brought together a few other digital artists in 2001, which evolved into what has become Adam Walker Film.
Since then, Adam Walker Film has worked on short films as well as commercial projects ranging from multimedia productions to cinema visual effects."
Why Is Adam Walker Film Choosing Vue:
"Other programs and vegetation population tools generate random object plantation coverage, but EcoSystems take it way beyond that, allowing almost total control. It is amazing!"
Adam Walker Film is now working on two animated short films (one very action based, the other a cultural-fusion drama), a live action short (with lots of CG elements), and a feature length animated drama that will include Vue trees in a photo-realistic environment.
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