Francis
Full Film here.
Francis was an internal Superfad project to play with in our free time which became an incredible experience for the whole office who all got to work on it at some point. Our EP had heard Dave Eggars read a short story for the radio show "This American Life" on a segment called "Adventure". He decided that we should take that 6 minute story and make turn it into an animation, so we did!
I created some concept art for the forest and lake segments to help discover the mood of the whole film. My main responsibilities were lighting and shading. I painted all the textures and shaders for Francis using mudbox and vray fur. I lit all the city, boys room, and the forest shots in maya and vray, as well as created a light rig for the lake shots. I also had a lot of fun modeling and shading all the plants, leaves, rocks, trees, etc. into a kind of toolkit. Then I used vray proxies and instancing to populate all the forest scenes throughout the film. With the toolkit, I was able to build a new forest in a matter of half an hour or so.
I'd like to thank everyone who slaved away late nights with me on this thing! Kevin Walker an amazing VFX Sup and brilliant animator and fixer of broken things. Andy Kim for modeling Francis, and creating everything in the boys room, including the boy! Ian Townsend for his brilliant animation and creating all the hair and water sims, as well as the scripts which saved our butts! Sarah Wolfe and Donny Permedi for animating this whole thing! Deandre Moore for modeling so many assets I can't count them! Sarah Casillas and Darren Jaffe for producing this internally and keeping us all on task and in check. Rich Scurry and Miles Kinghorn for comping this beauty! Sid Satoskar for being the best lighting intern anyone could ask for! And of course, Richard Hickey for his brilliant vision in turning this thing from a narrated story to a thrilling animation experience! Thank you to everyone else who helped create art and turn this into a reality!
