Francis

I was very fortunate to be involved with the short film Francis, story by Dave Eggers. This film is not officially released yet, so I have to limit who I show it to for now. This is also still a work in progress due to the fact that the studio was going through some rough times, and eventually closed before we could finesse much of the film. So you will see motion blur things, flickering, noise, strange color corrections, etc. please try and keep an open mind.

The first time I heard about making an animated version of this 6 minute story, and working with Richard Hickey who will be directing it, I was very excited to get started immediately. Richard and I started putting together mood boards, and style frames to establish a feeling for the film. I started working on some environmental concepts, and character sketches. Richard drew up storyboards for everything, and some of the other staff started modeling assets in their spare time.

Projects would come and take us all off of Francis for long periods of time, and we'd drop in a few hours here and there, but 8 months went by and we didn't really make any progress. Then we got a little break between jobs, and everyone wanted to pitch in and start bringing Francis back to life. We started generating tons of content, artwork, concepts, character models, forests, young Dave's room, rigs, animations, the works! Then those projects came in and took all but 6 of us off of it, so we kept going. This became the core crew with Kevin Walker freelance vfx sup, animator, and full time leader for the team. Also joining the team Donny and Sarah, animators of awesomeness.

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My main tasks were lighting, shading, and rendering. I also had always wanted to build a toolkit for a forest, and I needed a good reason to do so, this was it. I modeled a lot of assets for the forest, and used soft bodies with turbulence to distort their forms a bit giving me many variations. Then connected it to a shading network which would randomize their color slightly across a large area. I then pulled all these unique assets into a master file, and exported them all the vray proxies from there. I would also instance leaves into little piles, and export that group as a proxy. Same with trees, rocks, etc. I'd reference that file into a new scene, and instance the proxies all over the terrain using "spPaint".

creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/utility-external/misc/c/sppaint3d

The last scene of Francis, in the daytime, that forest was built with these tools, lit, and a final still rendered in 4 hours. I was also responsible for painting the textures for Francis herself which I created mostly in mudbox and photoshop. For the hat fur I used vray fur with opacity maps going along the length of the strand.

For lighting, I built a light rig for each environment, with a few options to make enhance lighting here and there. I then lit the boys room, and all of those shots. I lit all the forest shots as well, which was really fun and rewarding to find creepy mood lighting in something like that. I also lit the city scene in the beginning, with the train and young Dave's house. I lit a few of the shots on the lake, which I've put into my reel. Our great intern Sid lit many of them, and our friends in the Seattle office helped us light the last 15 or so lake shots so we could wrap up.

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I've been told there is a better version somewhere out there, I'm trying to find it. Anyway, thanks for watching, please feel free to email me if you have any questions. I am putting up a new website soon called Lightbleed.com where I will be posting video tutorials for maya and vray, and compositing in AE. I'll also be posting some 'making of' videos for Francis, and my entire forest builder scene and textures so you can make your own forests!

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