Quarrel on Queen's Alley was the team production that my class worked on together. I came up with the initial idea to have two gentlemen having a moustache duel during the pre-visualisation assessment earlier 2017, the rest of the class agreed to continue the idea and make it into our animated short film.
Quarrel on Queen's Alley - Short Film
Behind the Scenes
I did a lot of the design work for the characters and a lot of the items. Although much of it got scrapped in the end due to story changes, it was still good practice producing a lot of work in a short space of time.
Modeling and Texturing
Some of the models and textures that I made for the production are below. I modeled everything in Maya and textured everything in Substance Painter. After there was a change in management there were two of us doing the textures while the rest of the class animated, I was tasked with doing a lot of the environment and props while the other person mostly worked on the characters. This meant creating textures from scratch along with touching up a lot of the textures that were previously made before they went in, due mostly to them not reading well in the scenes or being too dirty.
Something I found pretty difficult was keeping to the smaller scale that everything would be if it were stop-motion. I constantly remind myself that things wouldn't appear quite like they would if they were to normal scale.
Something I found pretty difficult was keeping to the smaller scale that everything would be if it were stop-motion. I constantly remind myself that things wouldn't appear quite like they would if they were to normal scale.
I set up the scene where the 'duel' takes place including setting up the lights and making sure that everything was clean (some of the models came to me unnamed). Later I also made a proxy scene as well based off of this scene as the one the animators were using didn't have the correct layout.
After I had finished all the texturing for the street external and the props, I also set up the interior window display for the barber shop. I got to model a couple extra assets for it along with use other assets that were otherwise unused and textured all of the objects within it. This all and all took me two days to do although it probably could have been less if I really wanted it to.
I actually found that for each of the fifteen textures that needed to be done they were taking twenty minutes each.
I specifically made sure that I did this to make the scene feel more cluttered behind the characters during a lot of the scenes, that and nobody had made a decision on whether or not we were going to so I just did it and figured it could be removed if they didn't want it.
After I had finished all the texturing for the street external and the props, I also set up the interior window display for the barber shop. I got to model a couple extra assets for it along with use other assets that were otherwise unused and textured all of the objects within it. This all and all took me two days to do although it probably could have been less if I really wanted it to.
I actually found that for each of the fifteen textures that needed to be done they were taking twenty minutes each.
I specifically made sure that I did this to make the scene feel more cluttered behind the characters during a lot of the scenes, that and nobody had made a decision on whether or not we were going to so I just did it and figured it could be removed if they didn't want it.
Art
While everything was getting rendered, composited, edited etc. there wasn't much left to do so I was tasked with making Caricatures for the end credits along with making a matter painting for the sky. Once I finished that I once again didn't have anything to do and ended up making the two posters you can see on either side of this section.
For the Caricatures (seen in next section), I took photos of my classmates and myself for reference in drawing them. I did sketches for each one before being happy with the distortions I'd made and rendering the images. I decided to make them all greyscale as it would take less time and it would match the old style that we were going for with everything. Looking back on them I wish that I'd spent more time on each and I think that I also could have exaggerated them a lot more too. I also with I spent more time studying the subsurface in Roman's ears because it looks far better in the original photograph (probably because of that beautiful redness that subsurface has). For the matte painting I went through the video that we had at the time and figured out exactly what I needed, thankfully there weren't any shots that needed more buildings as by this point I was getting pressured to finish everything as quickly as humanly possible. With that thought I generated the clouds in Photoshop and put a gradient over it to mimic the way the sky gets lighter towards the horizon. Finally I was left with nothing as they finished off the film so I made my own work after our tutor mentioned that posters would be nice. It only took a single class to put together the posters but it meant that I didn't have another day with nothing to do. |