"Dragon Slayer is a 9,5 min. short film that I realised
in a 2 years period of time at the filmschool FILMAKADEMIE
BADEN-WÜRTTEMBERG. This is one of the most famous film
and animation schools in Germany, where I finshed my 5
years of study with this short film as my final project.
The story is something between a comedy and a drama. It
is about a man who is somehow unhappy with his life but
he doesn`t know what to do about it. One day something
happens that forces him to change his life. At the beginning
he wants to avoid the change, but he finds out in the
end that fortune has brought him just what he was missing
in his life.
CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE DRAGON SLAYER WEBSITE
Over
the two years it took to make the film, several people
worked on it, some longer than others. I performed duties
as director and animator. There was a screenwriter, a
producer, and a musican/sound designer. There were also
3 other 3D artists who worked between 2-3 months on the
movie. Most of the people who worked on the film were
students, including me. Some of the artists were professionals
who helped me in there spare time.
In order to find an interesting style for the film, I
looked through the internet and studied a lot of great
work from other artists. I kept a lot of it in mind when
I was making the movie, but I'm not aware of having been
directly inspired by anything in particular. But because
I like Shrek, Ice Age and Monsters, Inc. so much, I'm
sure those films have influenced me and my work in various
ways. In fact, this version of Dragon Slayer is actually
the second one I've made. In the first version, because
of some of the visuals, people were saying that the film
looked like Ice age. Now, after reworking some of the
textures, they say that it looks like Shrek. Either way,
I feel that is a huge compliment!
|
"This
version of Dragon Slayer is actually the second
one I've made. In the first version, because of
some of the visuals, people were saying that the
film looked like Ice age. Now, after reworking some
of the textures, they say that it looks like Shrek.
Either way, I feel that is a huge compliment!"
--Robert
Kuczera
|
After
making the movie, I feel that in the ideal situation for
film production, you would have a specialist for every
field. For instance, you would have someone who only makes
tests for the look and so on. But of course, in this instance,
many people wore many hats.
The preproduction took about 9 months and mainly includes
the development of the story and preparing the storyboard
and the animatic. Near the end of this phase, we developed
the designs, models, textures and tested the rigging.
The characters were all modeled with polygons because
I feel working with polygonal models is just more flexible
than other options. If you need a wrinkle you just model
it. If you work with NURBS you need a lot of curves to
produce one wrinkle. The polygonal models are mostly done
with the box method. You begin with a very low resololution
object, like a box or a sphere and then you add more and
more detail. At the end you put a smoothing, tessellating
function over the low resolution model, and thats it.
The texture first is projected onto the model and then
converted into a reference file. Then you can work over
it in Photoshop or 3D Paint and make it more detailed.
The production phase took about 12 months and included
the creation of the final models, textures and rigs. But,
of course, the main focus of this phase was on the animation
and rendering. The main tools we used were Maya, Photoshop,
Combustion, Premiere, Avid and ProTools. Working from
the storyboards, we made a 3D animatic. Next, we rough-blocked
the animation and massaged that into its final form. In
animating the characters, we kept in mind the basic meaning
of each scene and just dived into it, changing it over
and over again to get a better result.
All the facial animation is done with blendshapes. They
have been divided into the eyes, the mouth and the eyebrows
area. And left and right side are also separate. I made
sliders which I put on the head, eyes and mouth controls
so I could animate very quickly. I find it very circuitous
to use Maya's blendshape editor, and so I decided to built
up my own Setup.
As for the lighting, I first tried to work with real Global
Illumination but it took too long to render. So I decided
to use a GI fake by using light domes, and it worked very
well. All the lights use pixel maps as shadows but the
mainlight has a raytraced shadow This shadow simulates
the sunlight.
I also toyed the the idea of using HDRI, during the preproduction
testing phase. But at the end we didn`t use it, because
the look was too realistic. But it is a very good method
to work with and you can have a very fast light setup,
just by using the colors of the pixelmap.
Finally, the postproduction phase took about 9 months
and included the comositing, color grading, music and
sound design. When it was done, I sent the movie to a
lot of festivals and I hope that it can win some awards.
I am already thinking about a second part, but I first
have to find a good story for it.
My future goals are travelling around the world and working
for some big companies like PDI, ILM, PIXAR, Weta and
so on. Pixar would be my first choice to work at, but
let's see what the future will bring. Anyway, I will work
on developing my new movie and learn everything I can
about animation in the meantime.
Short films are a good platform to show your skill at
making movies. The problem for short films is that mostly
you only can show them on the festival circuit, and festivals
themselves want to see movies that are different to the
movies you can see in the big cinema. On one side, it
is very good, because you can show new and different styles,
you can be very experimental. But in my eyes these movies
can be overly artsy and only made for a small amount of
people.
For me there is a difference in making a movie for a big
audience or making an art film for a small amount of people.
Both is an art, but which is better?"
--Robert
Kuczera, May 2004
