Overview
This short, 3D-Animated film is about a janitor who works his night shift at a bank and unexpectedly loses his keys. This was a co-directed piece with a good friend and peer in the MFA Program at RIT. We naturally split up the workload to meet our deadlines and project goals over the 24 week period. My responsibilities in pre-production included storyboarding/animatic, character design and creative direction of the environment.
During production, I modeled and rigged the Janitor, Thief and Police Beans as one model/rig with built in switches for easier maintenance and animating later on. In addition, I facilitated the project management and production-workflow to aid in keeping the project between Meghdad and myself fluid and concise, especially when we brought on a Clean-up Animator to help. I animated the Janitor, Thief and Police characters and some environment rigs that Meghdad created. A special light rig was also created for the beans to help separate them from the environment a bit. I also developed some specialized MEL tools to alleviate routine scene setups, create UV transfer information for characters, quicken blendshape development and to help resolve some scene issues when they arose.
During Post-Prodcution, we both worked on Foley for sound effects. Rendering was a shared process and since we crafted mental ray procedural textures, we were able to easily separate out passes for each scene. I worked on compositing the renders using After Effects and later worked on the editing for the project.
The following are credits to our production crew.
Film by: Raymond McCarthy Bergeron & Meghdad Asadi Lari
Music Composer: Benjamin Shaw
Clean-up Animator: Vijay Kumar Madurai Chandrasekher
Illustration Artist: Brett Wilson
Voice Actress: Colleen Horan