These are some rough sketches from the preproduction week:

Planning is everything; I had around 4 weeks to produce this short film, maybe 5 if I count the week dedicated to the development of the concept. (script, characters design, etc). I allocated 1 and 1/2 weeks to modelling, mapping, rigging and texturing. 2 weeks for animation, render and sound (I was hoping to work with someone to do the audio), and then 4 to 5 days for editing, compositing and exporting everything.

Here is how I did the compositing for most of the shots. Since the time was very limited I had to test different ways of rendering with passes to achieve the look that I wanted. Knowing that I had 2 weeks for rendering approximately 2:40 minutes of full HD I had to cut down the render time and the way I did it was rendering 3 very simple passes. I didn’t have access to a render farm so I had my laptop, a MAC computer at Uni and eventually my computer at work, I was working part time and half of the day I was at the studio so what did was to get used to a strict routine for 4 weeks: animate at the studio and before going home leave one or two renders, at home keep animating and before going to bed leave a render, before leaving my house in the morning to go to work I was leaving the heavy reanders so they could have the whole day to render. Finally after work I use to leave one or two simple renders, then go to the studio and pick up the renders from the previous day and start the loop again. It sounds a bit difficult and it was but again it’s just a matter of organize everything from the beginning.

So the render passes were:

1. Color_pass (basic surface shader with alpha) less than 13s per frame
2. Mental_ray_physical_sky (i tweaked some setting like gamma and gain etc. But im pretty sure that the default setting would’ve worked just fine) between 2 min to 7min per frame. This one was very important because from this one I can split out 3 more passes: shadows, ambient occlusion and key light.
3. Depth_of_field (with the default camera settings) around 3 or 4min per frame but this one depends pretty much on the shot. I used the DOF for my lens blur and also to correct some secondary source of light and reflections.

Here are some of my tracking sheets and notes:

In the image above I have most of the documentation that i used for this short from the beginning: at the top there is a rough storyboard in thumbnails to help me remember where i was I guess I have a more visual memory, in the middle there are a couple of my beat list simply describing the actions in the shot, on the left side there is the “story_spreadSheet” that helped me to remind the emotional state of the character in relation with the point of the story, on the right there is my tracking list where i was basically highlighting every render or scene that I was finishing and finally at the bottom there are some pages of my shot list where I had the description of every single one of my 39 shots (it became very crowded of notes towards the end as I started to make decisions and cutting off thins to meet the deadline.

You can find the video here: http://www.pablander.com/website/video.html

or here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFaeNnFMPLo

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by the way, if you are reading this is probably because you read the whole entry and probably because you were more or less interested in it and if you like working with sound and want to give it a go and make some music/sound design for this piece please contact my at Esta dirección electrónica esta protegida contra spam bots. Necesita activar JavaScript para visualizarla

I am also looking for someone to work with me in my next short film (stop-motion) to help me with the sound (for this project I have more time some hopefully it will be something more polished).