One intense year of study has come to a close as I have graduated Vancouver Film School and completed my animated short film ‘Growing Up!’

I hope the message of the short film is clear and that it resonates with some people.

I could not have completed this project without the help of my classmates, instructors, and support from friends and family. Thank you!

I’m responsible for all the visual elements of the film. I’m an animation student so that was my main focus in this short, but I also created the story, modeled, textured, rigged, lit, and composited everything myself as well.

I used Maya, Zbrush, Nuke, After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.

When I started this project the end seemed so far away. When I wasn’t satisfied with the initial images I was creating, I remember thinking that I knew what the potential for this project could be and that pushed me to work harder and make dramatic changes by completely remodeling the character and environment. I believe that within my capacity, I took this work as far as I could in the time that I had.

Within the last six months of the program, except for two days of break, I worked every day for the entire six months, that’s 7 days a week and typically a minimum of 12 hour work days, every day, and I don’t regret it. Despite many challenges along the way, both technical and creative, I enjoyed the entire process.

Yesterday was our official graduation and it’s definitely bitter-sweet. It was overwhelming to see my classmate’s work in rapid succession on the ‘big screen.’ I am very fortunate to have been able to work with so many great people this year and have the opportunity to pursue what I love. Thanks for watching!

See more ‘making-of’ things about ‘Growing Up’ in an earlier post here.

Graduation in a movie theatre, it doesn't get better than that.

Why?

Because 1 million dollars and Super Bowl-level exposure is at stake!

In addition, this year they are adding the opportunity to create a commercial with The Lonely Island! So you can imagine how competitive this contest is, and this year is no exception. Browse the gallery to get an idea of what’s out there, but you might have to do a lot of hunting to find the gems, but there are some really good ones. You can see all the finalists from the past here.

Here’s how the contest works:

• Judges will select the top 5 entries and announce them the beginning of January

• These 5 will receive $25k and a trip to the Super Bowl

• A public vote will determine one winner from these 5

• This one winner will be run as an advertisement for Doritos during this year’s Super Bowl

• If that winner’s commercial is chosen by USA Today (newspaper) as the best Super Bowl commercial, either on USA Today’s facebook page or using their AdMeter system, Dorito’s will give that winner 1 million dollars. If they are second then $600k, and third is $400k.

So 1 million dollars seems like a long shot, right?

Well, it is and it isn’t. Out of the 5 years they have operated this contest they have awarded the million dollar prize twice!

I have entered this contest two years ago, you can see that unsuccessful entry here. This year I didn’t want to hold back so after a mild brain aneurysm I thought of a decent idea, ran it by my friend Eric, who made it even better, then I started storyboarding it.

Let me apologize in case you're incredibly intimidated by the unmitigated talent I display at drawing stick figures, I can't help it. Also, it's pricey, but not a bad app for your iPhone, this cinemek thingy.

Then I began designing my dinosaur! I wanted a velociraptor so I did a litte research and rewatched Jurassic Park 1 and 2 for design, as well as reference for the animation. After creating the base mesh in Maya, I used Zbrush to finish off the model:

I am concurrently trying to finish up my student short film, so I didn’t have a ton of time for this project. For example, after I got the base mesh for the dinosaur done, I spent one day and completely finished modeling, texturing, and rigging this character. It was the fastest I’ve been able to work on anything, I think, just because of the time constraint I placed on myself. For that same reason, I feel I could have done better with some more time.

Also, to be efficient with my time, both dinosaurs are the exact same rig and model. Therefore, my one constraint, besides simplicity, was to make the rig scalable.

For animation, I tackled the hardest shot first, the bench ejector one, and I’m glad I did, because it made the other shots seem much easier. I also got the help of a classmate for the compositing of this commercial, thanks Marco!

I shot this commercial with my trusty Canon 7D. If you have any other questions, just make a comment below – thanks for watching!

You can watch it below or go to Dorito’s website and watch it there, so then you can see my competition afterwards:

For comparison, here’s last years contest winner, who won one-million dollars:

Here’s a 360-view I took from the top: http://360.io/AWAa2Y

The joby gorillapod was ideal for this situation, that I could hike in with a lightweight tripod and set it up where I needed it.

I wasn’t really planning on shooting this, but once I got up there and saw the logging operation with the water I had to shoot it. I just wish I had more time to spend up there to get some more footage.

Maybe some time soon, if I get back in climbing shape, I can climb up the front instead of hike up the back. Here’s a really old climbing video I made.

I also tried to get the miniature, tilt-shift look in post with the help of Magic Bullet Looks.

I recommend watching it in HD so you can see all the little detail. I didn’t even notice there were men walking around the logs until I put the photos into a timelapse.

My dog enjoyed the view while I tended to the camera.

My take on it was a guy trying to catch a lightning bug, or as everyone else I’ve talked to that’s not from Kentucky, knows it as a fire fly.

First, we shot reference of each other and did multiple takes to see what was working and what was not. It helped to have my classmates there, thanks guys, to give me feedback and even try to act out my scene for me the way they would do it.

Next, I thumbnailed out the basic poses very rough to see lines of action and see my keys. Then I exaggerated those thumbnails in some more rough sketches.

Then I took it into Maya, using my reference to get my key poses blocked in, and timed out roughly. Then another pass to get the ‘extremes,’ and then yet another pass to get the breakdowns, which is more about timing. Then the final couple of passes were for polishing.

My reference footage cut next to my keys.

I added an entire section at the beginning when I was adding the breakdowns where he misses the bug and gets angry. It was fun to diverge from the reference and make the animation work better than what I shot of myself doing in the reference.

For next term I’ll begin animating my short film, which has undergone countless changes. I think I’m working on animatic number 7 or 8 this week, I’ve lost count. We’ll also be doing a lip sync assignment as well.

You can vote by going to the contest’s YouTube page HERE. Then click the “Vote” tab, and look for my video in the “Vote for these Videos” window to the right of the current video that’s playing.

I created this short mainly between the hours of midnight and 3am for about a week and a half since I am a full time student at Vancouver Film School. I just couldn’t pass up this opportunity with the skills I’m learning here.

I always find it interesting to see how far I can push myself and see what quality I can produce in a short amount of time, especially when others are given the same task and I can compare what I’ve done with what is possible. Maybe it’s me living out some subconscious desire to be like MacGyver, but in a film contest: okay, you have 30 seconds to create something with the theme of escape, go.

I chose this story because I could get the animation done in the amount of time given. They are simple shapes, easy to model, rig and animate, relatively, but the relationships implied create a deeper story. So even though they’re simple, the story doesn’t have to be sacrificed.

There are three rounds to the competition, with only one winner that gets flown to Sydney for their short to be screened at a festival and also awarded $20,000. The top 10 winners for the first round will be announced July 25th.

I also just cranked out a short hang gliding video from a recent flight. I was going to hold onto the footage to use later, but decided it might get lost in the shuffle of school work so I just needed to cut it together and get it out. Hope you enjoy, that day was a great flight, although I’m a little rusty on the wingovers they’re always fun:

Run with wings WIP

The biggest news from me recently is I placed 3rd and won $3,800 in the Brisk Tea animation contest. I created this animation concurrent with my school assignments so I didn’t have a ton of time to put into it. I wanted to use it as a platform to take a project from start to finish. Thanks to Tongal and Brisk for putting on the contest and congrats to the other contestants!

Currently, I am restarting a run cycle/jump animation and just finished a short lip-sync below. I finally got around to learning how to composite in Nuke for the lip-sync. I really enjoyed the control over having all the passes in one flow down the node tree where in After Effects I’m trying to manage countless layers and precomps and how they’re interacting.

The audio for the lip-sync is from my favorite ‘break up’ movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” I have another lip-sync I did for this assignment using a “Dumb and Dumber” quote, but haven’t taken the time to polish the animation, texture, light, render, and composite it together.

(Click to see larger)

This one could still use some work, but just wanted to get it ‘shipped’ in the words of Seth Godin.

I also recently attended a screening of Thor with Digital Domain presenting their work on the ‘show.’ I found it interesting when they talked about the movie they called it a ‘show.’

What they did on the film is very cool and was more interesting to get first hand accounts of with working with Marvel and all the shots that did and did not make it and to see all the original footage. It was like a special features DVD on steroids. They basically made two movies because half of their shots made the film and half did not.

For comparison to using Nuke here's After Effects

Almost all the green screen shots with people in Frost Giant suits were not used, so Digital Domain replaced the actors in suits with 3D animated models. There was one guy, the presenter joked, who spent months building 14 different bridges (digitally) for the frost world and none of them were used in the movie.

It’s awe-inspiring to get a behind the scenes look at how much work goes into these films. It really makes you appreciate the film on another level and that’s what would make me a horrible film critic, because I respect the hard work that goes into making films too much to be able to tear them down.

Anyways, I’m separating my YouTube channels from here on out. I’m only going to be putting hang gliding videos on alta8bird and put my animation and other work on LucasRidley.

For this animation I went to a bar and took a photograph of the pool table and shot an HDRI by taking different exposures of a chrome ball, like this and used it to light my animation within Maya.

But, with some new knowledge acquired during my short time at Vancouver Film School so far, I wanted to try out a few things. The first contest I entered recently was for Dairy Queen. Unfortunately, I did not make the finals in that one, but I’m getting fairly accustomed to that at this point.

A quick update on school is that I am about halfway through the program and am storyboarding out my final animation piece that I will spend the next 6 months creating. My inspiration for my animation has been the work Meindbender studios has done, as well as the short ‘For the Birds,’ and the short film created from a children’s book “The Gruffalo” (among many others).

The vending machine and all the cups that come spilling out of it were all created in 3D:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MNGYZ3OTFY

The most recent contest I did was all 3D animation. So it was good practice to see a project from start to finish (while still trying to keep up with school work). I did everything, modeling, lighting, animating, compositing, sound, etc. The winners of this contest will be announced in one week:
http://tongal.com/work/1ghcuf?sc=wj0t

The second, of 6 terms, at VFS are complete and you can see some of the major assignments I completed in the video on this page. Some of the assignments not included in the video are:

- life drawing: I might post individual drawings later, but once a week we had a 3 hour class with a nude model. It was a great addition to the other course work to understand posing and volume in form.
- Visual Storytelling: we were given a very basic animation in Maya, and we were delegated into groups of three to create an interesting short film from a rather bland animation by putting the camera where we want it (it’s 3D after all so we can do anything with the camera, but that doesn’t mean you should . . .) and editing. We used a lot of Hitchcock films for reference in our editing and camera angles.
- Classical Animation: not included is a weight lift animation of a farmer pulling a very large beet out of the ground. It’s not included because it was stolen by a crack head, seriously. I went to see Sucker Punch and left my school bag in my car. A crack head broke the window of my car and stole hundreds of pages of drawings for my classical animation class, and everything else that was in my school bag they took. (I know he was a crack head because he dropped his crack pipe right next to the broken window of my car). The biggest loss was 4 months worth of notes I had.
- 3D modeling: female sculpt
- 3D texturing: a semi truck that I textured with an American theme . . .
- 3D lighting: we had several in-class exercises to light a set

So even this short video doesn’t encompass all of the work that was done over the last two months, but most of the big assignments.

I think I’m going to create a separate post about the Woody model I did to show the evolution of it’s creation if I find time to take screenshots of the files I had saved along the way. (I save a separate file each time I save in case one file gets corrupted then I don’t lose everything, only until the last version of the file before it).

But he’s special to me because I spent a lot of extra time on him. We were only supposed to model a ‘super hero,’ but I really wanted to texture, rig, and animate him as well. So I did. I also didn’t include the extra animation I did with him just because it’s not very polished. But it took quite a lot of work to do the texturing and rigging of him.

Funny story: For any project, animation or modeling, we always use reference. I found many photographs of Tom Hanks and many caricature drawings of him as well to use to help meld Woody and Tom together. Of all the caricatures I saw online, I found one very useful more than the others.

So I emailed the artist of this caricature to let them know how helpful their art was in creating my model. I received a reply from this artist I found online a day later. They could have been any where in the world for all I knew, Thailand, London, Argentina, any where! He responded to let me know he is down the hall from me in my same exact building in Vancouver, enrolled in the Classical Animation program at Vancouver Film School. That is one of the more bizarre things that have ever happened to me. Here is his caricature that I found so helpful as a reference for my model:

The video below shows some of my work from the last two months. We’ve spent a lot of time drawing and in Maya. I’ve done so much work in Maya at home, I’ve worked my way through 3 seasons of How I Met Your Mother. The next term is apparently even tougher, and I’m looking forward to all of it!

Anyways, I was determined to get something productive done. Since the instructor was struggling to teach us Flash, I grabbed a book about it and limped along well enough to make this video using that program.

This has been hiding on my computer for years and I thought I might as well share it since YouTube didn’t even exist when I was in that class 7 years ago!

Since I’m posting something that I made 7 years ago, I thought I should also post something I just made.

Below is a still image of a 3D model I made of Flash, the superhero, using only Maya. I started out with a single 4 sided cube and was able to make this:

Here’s a work in progress shot of it from last week: