CGSociety :: Tutorial
18 March 2010, by Holger Schoenberger, Bernhard Haux and Goro Fujita.

"Descendants" is a 14-minute animated short. The two main characters are flowers who grow on the edge of a clearing next to one another. They are voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Christy Scott-Cashman. One is old and jaded by a mysterious history -- the other one still young, vivid and curious. The wish to attain the unattainable: something good can evolve from something evil.

Destiny has brought these two together and it seems as if they would exist without possibility for change, until one day a visitor to the clearing brings something unexpected to their lives.

This short film started as a diploma project by Heiko van der Scherm and Holger Schoenberger at the Institute of Animation (part of the Filmakademie Baden-Werttemberg).

In 2005 Heiko van der Scherm started working on the script. He invested months in the story structure, how the multiple setups and payoffs could work.

Heiko also worked as Production Designer along with Christian von Bock during that time. With the first drawings of the characters, Heiko started to model. But while he translated the 2D drawings into 3D models, he realized a problem. The impression of the personality of the character to the viewer was not kept. So he invested a lot of time evolving the final shape/look of the the characters directly in 3D trying to keep the personality of the 2D drawings.

Holger Schoenberger, himself being responsible for all technical aspects, began shading in a staged scene. At the time of the Diploma they had the whole preproduction, script, animatic, models and renderings finished.

Holger and Heiko were confident about the story's potential, but during preproduction they were also aware of the many challenges that lay ahead. Eighty percent of the film was to be shot in the same location, with most of the story being driven by dialog between two stationary main characters. A scenario typically avoided at all cost and scornfully referred to as 'talking heads'. And to make things more challenging still, they were extremely complex heads, talking in an extremely complex set.

Despite all of this, Heiko and Holger still managed to persuade the Institute and received the board's admission to continue the project. Once green-lit, they approached future team members with all challenges in mind.

Bernhard Haux joined the team for the main character rigging, while soon after, Goro Fujita (supervising animator) and Felix Graf came onboard too. At that time they had just graduated from German Film School with their diploma topics being 'FLip-Sync Animation' and 'Believable Eye Animation'.

One important aspect of the team was how the power of decision was handled. Usually in animation shorts you have one director who decides everything or you have multiple directors, who have to come to an agreement. In this production different production parts have been split across the team members, the decision was handled by the person who is specialized in it.

For example Goro as animation supervisor had to get approval for the play of the characters from the director Heiko, same as a actor has to get approval for his play from an director. But the animation itself, how the animation was done was more his decision. So if Heiko animated for example some Insects, he was "degraded" to a simple animator who has to get approval from the animation supervisor Goro. Same for the look of the short.

The Shot Manager

Although Heiko took a large part in developing the mood boards, colors and look of the short during preproduction, the final decision on shading and look was then Holgers department.
From Heikos article "Thoughts of the director": "Don't try to tell the animators how to animate. Start over and try to explain again the feeling of the scene, the goals and the mood, give easy examples, and stay away from comments about the animation timing,"
(Ok, this sometimes produced some struggles if e.g. the director likes his animation, how the play is seen by the viewer, but the animation supervisor rejects it because the animation lacks naturality of movement.)

Because of the small team size and the project's distinct challenges, they needed to come up with a row of clever technical solutions.

Usually student films at the Institute use an Excel document to organize the shot list but Holger had more in mind. Because the film had a very tough deadline, he did not only require a table tracking shot length, the person working on it and the approval status, he also wanted to be able to automate a lot of tasks, such as creating compositings, starting renders and executing scripts in multiple scenes.

As a result of these requirements, the 'ShotManager' was born - first planed to be open for any kind of project, but then customized for this project only. Since the whole film takes place at the edge of a clearing of a dark forest, the set had a fixed size. Splitting the set into about 6 multiple reference models has made it possible to set the scene layering inside of the scene manger (enable/disable what's required)

The Shot manager had also other nice features. If we had to make a change for all scenes (which happened a lot of times), we have just done it on one scene, copied the script log and put it into the Shot Manager. It then generated a script which opened every scene and made our changes. We let it run overnight and all scenes had been updated.

Reference model setup

Heiko did the modeling and staging, but after some test renders we realized that the set did not look good from certain angles. From some angles you could see the end of the set between the trunks, or the sky above the main characters who should stand in a deep forest. Holger and Heiko started to rearrange the trees but realized that every shot had to be checked to be sure that there were enough trees filling the empty spaces.

However, adding too many trees and plants with their huge amount of detail would increase the scene size; and therefore memory usage and render time significantly. Another problem was that nature itself is a total chaos and by 'imitating' it you tend to loose track of what is really used in final renderings.

So Holger applied some random colored textures on the reference models, selected all scenes in the Shot Manager and rendered the whole film. With low resolution models it took only a night. The color was random, but the texture was coded for each reference model (main stage, clearing, deer, back, right, left forest)

Staging colors.

Because of the 'talking heads' nature of the film, it was obvious that the faces needed to be believable and visually captivating. The articulation needed to be complex enough to support the refined animation the animators were aiming for.

Face and Body rigs were built from scratch - with the face rig being part of an evolution of rigs Bernhard developed on previous films. Jason Osipa's 'Stop Staring' and Gary Faigin's 'Facial Expressions' were sources of inspiration and starting points for the rigs Bernhard wanted to provide.nderings.

Instead of confronting the animators with a row of blendshapes, he consolidated the facial animation controls into a visual interface that resembled the face of the characters.

In addition he offered the animators a couple automated controls to get lip collision as well as automated eye lid deformation to respond to the gaze direction and the bulged out shape of the cornea.

Both were made automatic by choice and could be turned off by the animators, if desired.