Wylder Production Diary 06

After a busy week for service work last week, we are back on our animated short film Wylder, all guns blazing. We’ve tied up a couple of big projects and can focus some more of our time on working through both the shot list and asset list.

In our time working on client projects, we have a lot of experience dealing with challenging deadlines. Because of this, we have developed a pipeline that allows pre-production and production to run alongside each other. By creating the props that are interacted with or that push the story forwards first, it means as shots are laid out and animated, we can continue working through props for the next shot. 

This is an extremely prop-heavy project. There are only two characters and a few environments, but a lot of set dressing is used to bring it to life. The true scale of this has been revealed as we work through the animatic shots and list both those that are integral to the story, and those that help create the mis-en-scene and recreates the picture book feeling we are aiming for. 

Moving interactive props come first - the bow and arrow Dad uses, a backpack, a walking stick… Then later we can look at the flowers growing in the garden, the birds pecking around the veg patch. 

We’ve also been finishing off the characters, including the costumes throughout the story. Let’s play dress up Dad!

Throughout the short, we see the seasons change. We have various versions of the environments, but the characters also need to reflect this. These cute outfits also help set the mood and tone of the piece - how do we know how nice the Dad is if we don’t see him in a fluffy jumper?! It’s these small details that make so much difference to how characters are perceived and the story is taken in by the audience. 

Meanwhile, the finished characters have been rigged and are now being brought into the scenes. As models are imported and passed between artists, sometimes we do run into unexpected little problems along the way. This week was one of those, as Dad’s great big bushy beard wasn’t reacting quite right if his head was tilted backwards. Possible culprits we'll need to investigate are collision meshes affecting the hair physics, issues with bone scaling, or the groom binding inside of Unreal.

Filmmaking is often an exercise in solving problems!

Only a brief update this week, it’s wall to wall carrot modelling here. Until next week, when we start animation proper.