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Mac 'N' Cheese is a two minute short film that takes the
viewer away on a mini flight of fantasy. The project was a
graduation film produced by students in The Netherlands.
The project has become a favourite of the staff here
at eyeon and when we had the chance to chat with a member of
the team .... well... we jumped on it!
We spoke with
Tom Hankins about the project, his team, how they made
everything work, and what made the work so gratifying.
Read on and hear for yourselves how creative Fusion
artists around the world are and where they are going.
We spoke with Tom Hankins about the project, his team,
how they made everything work, and what made the work so
gratifying. |
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Starting
Up
Our last year of school had started and we
finally had a chance to work on a project we really wanted to do:
our graduation film! We started off around January 2011. Roy
Nieterau, Gijsvan Kooten, and I met up a few times in Hilversum,
where our school is located, to chat about what we wanted to
create in the next few months. Small ideas were discussed and we
all parted to work at home, separately.
I started the
character designs and art direction while Gijs was working on the
first storyboard and Roy started developing an auto-rigger and
some other cool toolsets for Maya. Our school did not provide us
with a place to work or even computers until the second week of
February. To us, the actual production started at that time. You
cannot really work effectively when your team is so far apart.
Working in the same room as your team is the best advice I can
give anyone who starts such a project.
The first week
started working together, we decided we needed some help. Guido
Puijk, a third year student and friend of ours, was added to the
team. We now had the opportunity to work out all the crazy and
challenging stuff we wanted to produce.
Pure
Fun
The idea to create something like Mac 'N'
Cheese started a few years ago. We just wanted to make something
awesome without a story, moral, or message. A short enjoyable
ride, without too much thinking. The idea was to focus entirely on
directing, editing, and animation.
  
The
right lighting, composition, and colors would give the film its
ambiance and feeling. Our main goal was to give the audience the
chance to have a little fun before returning to work or school,
just for two minutes. We hoped to create an internet movie for a
young crowd which would go viral!
We were very much
inspired by Team Fortress 2 as well as Meet Buck (a French short,
created by some very talented students). They use a popular 2D-ish
style none of us had done before. Everything relies on the
texturing and the use of a cell-shading technique. We had to
develop everything as we went along.
  
At
first, We focused on storyboards and concept art but the school's
deadlines pushed us to start working on the film while although we
were not sure about the actual storytelling aspect.
Nevertheless, the concept art and development was focused clearly,
also the backgrounds, characters, and global line had already been
drawn. We knew what we had to do.
Tuning Our
Brains
I started working on the 3D models for the
characters while Gijs and Guido were modeling props and the
environment. Roy was busy creating the auto-rigger for the
characters and made an easy-to-set-up car rig, ready to be used in
every scene with intense animation. From that moment on, it was
almost pure focus on testing textures, shading, and compositing
for me while Roy started working on animation tests and Gijs and
Guido did some finalizing on the last prop models. The whole
animation crew - Roy, Gijs, and Guido - were able to quickly
switch and focus on the animation. It took us about two and a
half months to animate the entire film.
As
inexperienced animators, we had some trouble working out all the
ideas we had made in our heads. It also took some time to
calibrate all our brains, get them to think the same way in every
scene.
During the beginning of the animation process, I
was editing all the playblasts provided by the others. This way I
could both direct and edit. If you do not animate yourself,
it is easier to cut stuff out. The edit changed immensely
over time! Once the first scenes were completely finalized,
animationwise, I could finally start lighting and rendering. At
this point Roy took over the editing; giving me the focus I needed
to set-up, light, and render every scene without losing track.
We had a bunch of excel sheets to keep track of all the
progression. Some shots had to be redone, others changed and some
even re-rendered. Documenting all of our progress, choices, and
comments prevented a lot of screw-ups and miscommunications.
  
Over 50 High-End
Shots!
We quickly realized we had to step up our
game if we wanted to roll with the big boys out there. After
Effects was not going to cut it for us, we needed a program more
stable, more powerful, and more reliable. I had been working with
a little program called Fusion, at a compositing job I was hired
for a few months back over at House of Secrets, a Dutch animation
and VFX studio. These guys have amazing technical skills, so I was
able to pick up Fusion quickly. I had only been using it for a few
weeks but the node-based setup and capabilities made the choice to
use eyeon Fusion an easy one. We had also been working in
Maya, for our 3D department; modeling, rigging, animation,
shading, lighting, and rendering, with the help of Mental ray.
I was able to create nice shading networks and work with
lots of render layers and passes I could eventually use in Fusion
to composite all the shots. Both of the characters have 3 shaders
on 3 different layers. The first layer was a simple color pass
with just the hand-painted textures, also outputting the
motionblur pass, RGBA 16bit float, like all the layers. The second
layer was the shadow, lit by one light, rendering a single RGBA
pass. The R channel would have soft shadows (controlled by a
ramp), the G channel would have hard shadows, and the B channel
would contain the ambient occlusion. The third layer we
had output was a falloff pass, the R and G channels
respectively containing a soft and hard falloff, the B channel a
mask, hand painted in Photoshop based on the color texture.
Some scenes also had an extra rimlight layer. The
environment was set up quite the same, only using one shader
containing shadow, falloff, and ambient occlusion. I also used a Z
depth for the depth fog. The cars are basically set up the same as
the environments. All the elements had to influence each other,
shadow wise. This was a pretty tough job to set up as some objects
would cut in front of others. Creating a simple cut-out shader
would take care of everything fitting together in comp. Even after
motionblur, everything would work properly. The hardest part was
probably working with objects that change position and actually
come from behind another object to then cut in front. As I stacked
all the layers up, this caused some problems here and there. Some
extra mask passes would often fix these issues.
This was a
lot of hard work, but the intuitive way of setting up and
recycling scenes within Fusion is extremely powerful. Almost every
shot in our film had two characters, cars, a back-and-foreground,
plus some extra particle elements. The shading method was
specially designed to be assembled in compositing. All of these
renders went through a series of individual nodes before being
composited together. You do not want to create a new comp for
all of these elements in all of the shots, we had over 50! Working
with Fusion gave me the opportunity to easily clone all the
previous setups and make everything work with minor adjustments.
The instancing feature was amazing too, without going
through the entire comp looking for all the corresponding nodes
when I needed to change a value, I could just change one and hook
up to the other, similar, nodes. A huge timesaver!
  
Making
Choices
I chose to
I chose to use Motion vectors instead of 3D motionblur
within Maya, this way I could control the amount of displacement
at every frame. It is also far more economic when rendering.
This is actually why I chose to render everything separately, when
post motion blurring the program does not know what is behind
certain objects, this causes artifacts. If you stack all of your
elements together you can blur them separately.
Setting up
post-motionblur was easy as Maya outputs a 2D motion vector pass
which Fusion understands. When switching inputs from vector Y
and Z to Red and Green you will get the result you want. It just
melts everything together and the entire dynamic is more
understandable. Now, it’s always easy to commit so-called
'shuttercrime', so we had to watch it with the motionblur. It
is a fantastic technique but you do not want to overdo
it. Also, with the 2d-ish painterly style with snappy animation,
sometimes the least amount of motion blur would do the trick.
Another wonderful filter is the erode/dilate, you can use
it as a 'median' to reduce noise and artifacts, extend or subtract
your edges, or use it, as I did, and create a painterly style. We
used this in every shot on all of the backgrounds. Gijs would
sculpt the rocks and ground in Zbrush, then use decimation because
triangulating the mesh gave the wonderful result we were looking
for. My shader made use of the unsmooth surface, with a few ramps
controlled by falloffs and the scene lights, we got a great
effect. Once rendered and sent off to Fusion, the dilate filter
smudged all the triangle shapes together making it look like paint
daubs or strokes, this was really cool and superfast!
We used
the last week to learn TVpaint and paint in all of the 2D effects
in every shot. Smoke, dust, sparks and speculars for the eyes were
hand painted every frame. This created a very nice effect, giving
the movement a little more charm.
Staying On
Top
We are not writing our own macros at this
point Roy, our TD, is working on it. We chose Fusion for the
future; we'll be using it a lot. Fusion provides you with the
opportunity to work under the hood, artists and TDs have the
freedom to create whatever they need within the package. You get a
great start, a great base, and if you want, you can extend/expand.
  
The freedom provided within
these programs also gives room to screw
The freedom provided within these programs also gives room to
screw up sometimes, this happened every once in a while, but we
always managed to get on top. We used each software to its full
extent and built a solid pipeline and manageable workflow.
[Roy: We are really looking forward to using a
programming language that is supported by many applications, like
Python. We're beginning to dig into the use of Python in Maya as
well as Fusion and try to create a manageable pipeline that allows
for much bigger projects. Therefore Fusion, as well as Maya, both
fit perfectly into our dream of creating a feature film sometime
in the future.]
No Shame, No
Fear
We had to pull ourselves away from our PCs
every once in a while to discuss what we were doing. Kind of like
when painting, you must take a few steps back and analyze your
work. If you don't, you'll keep on going, even if what you
are doing is wrong. We'd ask each other: "What are we
telling the audience in this scene or shot, does it say what we
want it to say?"
This actually turned out to be the
hardest part in production, telling a tale without telling a
story. How do you let the audience bond with your characters? How
do you make it clear to everyone what happens in all of the shots?
Why would they care? We hit most of most bumps in the road
in this area. But still, these brainstorm sessions were pretty
inspiring and funny at the same time. Our motto actually was "Is
it insane enough?!" We got some crazy and very good ideas by just
drawing or acting out the sickest scenes or actions we could think
of and extracting the best out of every example.
 
You need to feel no shame, don't
be afraid of telling a stupid story or joke. Just thinking out
loud and debating about all the ideas at the same time made it an
extremely resourceful method for us. We chose whichever part was
doable and figured out the rest. People passing by must've thought
we were having psychotic breakdowns or something but it really
paid off. If you make your idea 200% insane, distilling it to 100%
is perfect and most importantly: doable within the time limit.
A Quick Snack
Coming up with a
title probably took us the longest amount of time… ever! Our
working title actually was Eastwood Junction, the village where
the short starts. We were convinced this probably was not a good
idea and experimented with many names, some food related, some
drug related, and many more.
Eventually we chose Mac
'N' Cheese, it simply sounded right. It is not based on
the characters, but more on the idea of simplicity. Our film is
simple and easily digestible, a quick snack. Plus it's easy to
remember and fun to say!
Future
Plans
I started the company Colorbleed with Roy,
we will be working alongside House of Secrets. When we get
assignments through Mac 'N' Cheese we'll put the team together on
a short term basis. We would, of course, love to create and direct
full length movies or even shorts, but we don't have the resources
to pull that off at this point. We're very much interested in CG
and live action integration, as well as full 3D productions.
Hoping the future will provide us with some nice offers! For now,
all of us will be working commercial jobs for TV and internet. The
big dream is to eventually own an awesome studio, working on
projects in film and TV.
  
We are all pretty much
self-taught 3D artists at this point, our school merely served as
a platform over the last few years, a very resourceful platform
for a crowd with the same interests. You learn the most from the
people you talk to and share with every day. This is why we deeply
care for the CG community out there, pretty much everything we
know comes from the artists who share their ideas, experiences,
and knowledge. We want to pass this along and keep on sharing.
Even though our mailboxes fill up pretty fast every day now, we
still try to make time to answer everyone properly.
We
want to keep the community alive, so don't hesitate when you have
a question! Contacts us via: info@colorbleed.nl.
Thanks for giving us the chance to
share our production with the world!
~ Tom Hankins
Visit the Mac 'N'
Cheese website and watch the video here. Enjoy!
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