: Eureka

Sep 7, 2011

This was one of the best projects I’ve ever had the opportunity to work on. When Lewis Kofsky told us we landed this gig, Mark Corotan(art director) and I were on cloud nine! We were both big fan boys and the chance to produce a fully animated episode at Curious Pictures with all our friends was simply amazing.

As the plot progresses in the show, the characters deteriorate into increasingly simple animation styles.

• first act = CG animation
• second act = Stopmotion animation
• third act = Cell animation

Because of limited space in the studio we only produced the stop motion and cell animation inhouse. The CG was subcontracted to another studio. I think, we could have produced the CG also, but the director didn’t much like our designs / style for the CG.

I was playing lead compositor and 2D pipeline lead on the project. Most of the compositing work centered around rig removals, and set extensions.

One thing that I liked about this project. It was the first time we managed to get the flash animators working within the pipeline and rendering on the farm…and all the benifits that came with it, like automatic quicktime generation for editorial and clients etc. They resisted a bit at first, but grew to like it:) I had fun writing javascript for Flash and integrating it into our Rush (render farm software) api.

The video below is some timelapse me and the animators took during the production. I built a motion control dolly robot for task. It was super fun to make. Used an arduino, stepper motors, and the EZstepper driver by sparkfun. Learning to program and interact with hardware (motors) was a new and amazing expierence. I would love to do more of it, but work as always becomes consuming as we produce new and cooler projects!

Below is a gallery of images showcasing the different animation styles we created for the show! I wish I could have make before and afters of the crazy stopmotion rigs we cleaned!