Oktapodi
What happens when six students from Gobelins L’Ecole de L’Image (Gobelins School of the Image), Paris’ premiere Visual Arts School get together? You get Oktapodi an award winning short film with beautiful animation and a comical story line. Oktapodi was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Animated Short Film and although it was pipped at the post by “La Maison en Petits Cubes” I think it’s a beautiful animated Short Film nonetheless.
They all met at Gobelins. Julien Bocabelle, Olivier Delabarre, Quentin Marmier and Thierry Marchand had already been at Gobelins for two years when they started on the project and knew each other well. Francois-Xavier Chanioux and Emud Mokhberi had studied animation elsewhere and went straight into the third year at Gobelins, so they only knew each other for a couple of months before the team was chosen.
It’s a story about two octopi in love that get separated during their comical escape from the grasps of a stubborn and determined restaurant cook. Six Directors worked on this film. First, they had to pick their group based on the type of film they wanted to make and the medium that they wanted to work in.
They were all interested in making a cartoon-y film that had a good and fast paced rhythm. And it had to be fresh and original and up to par with the other films coming out of Gobelins in recent years such as ‘Le Building’ and ‘Burning Safari’. They were also interested in exploring 3D animation and applying what they had learned in 2D to push that medium a little bit. They brainstormed and developed the story as a team.
Once production started they divided the tasks based on each of our individual strengths, wants, and time. The only phase other than the story that they divided up evenly was the character animation; however, they would meet at least once a week to share their progress. So even though the work was done by one person, it was directed by the entire group. The only drawback to this was the amount of time spent in meetings and discussions. They spent about 7 months on the film including writing the story and reproduction.
For it to work it was very important that every member of the team was on board with what the team was trying to achieve and that everyone was mature about not having things go their way all the time. The most difficult obstacle to overcome throughout the making was the lack of time. They all decided to make a film that would challenge them at every step but they had less than six months for production, a fact not made easier by their desire to work on every detail until it was done right.
They used Maya7.5 for the 3D parts of the film and in addition they used RealFlow for the water simulations and Mental Ray for the subsurface scattering of the characters and for final gather global illumination of the exterior background scenes. They wanted to use RenderMan but it wasn’t available at the School so they did the best with the software they had. They used Photoshop for creating the textures, After Effects for compositing, Premiere for editing, Flash for the animatic and 2D animation as well as the 2D effects and finally Pro Tools for the sound effects.
They wanted to make a film that was original which is how they ended up with octopi on a Greek island. Their motivation was primarily to make a great film one they could be proud of and to the high standards set by other films made at Gobelins, those films were their main sources of inspiration. Others were Ice Age, Peter de Sevres and Pixar’s shorts.
The greatest obstacle was creating the octopi. They needed a design that was appealing, allowing the character to show emotion without a mouth. The issue of appeal was particularly important since they were dealing with a creature that is by nature slimy, has suction cups and a strangely shaped body. It’s often portrayed as a sea monster or alien and raises no immediate empathy.
In designing the body they also needed to determine how many arms and suction cups were enough. This was similar to the problem that the artists at Disney faced during the production of 101 Dalmations. Even though they did not have to draw the arms and suction cups for each individual frame they needed to consider the time required to animate them and create appealing silhouettes.
Once they had the design and a 3D model the next challenge was how to build a rig allowing the octopus to perform a variety of actions with its arms. It had to be able to use them as real arms and legs, to walk or climb walls. It had to have the ability to perform broad movements particularly to swim and fly through the air. Because of this they could not rely on traditional rigging techniques and had to find new ways for controlling their character.
Other than the octopi, they had several obstacles to overcome such as creating an entire village or at least the illusion of one. They couldn’t rely on matte paintings as their camera was rarely still but they also didn’t have the resources to design and build an entire village. In the end they modeled about ten houses and a dozen props such as chairs, plants and umbrellas and they built the background from these elements separately for each shot.
They then developed a technique for lighting those large environments along with simulating water for about a half dozen shots. They used RealFlow to create everything from bubbles for when the camera was under the water to the surface of the aquarium settling, to splashes during the swimming pool sequence and when the truck plunges into the sea.
Last but not least came breathing life into the story during the animation phase. When they began animating they were already running behind schedule so there was immense pressure to rush the work. However, since character animation is the bread and butter of what they learn at Gobelins, they understood the importance of a good performance. They had their work cut out for them when it came to the octopi.
As animators they were well versed in how to animate humanoid creatures as well as most quadruped animals but the octopi presented a different set of challenges especially with the number of arms it has. Further, in many shots they had the absolute bare minimum amount of screen time to give the necessary performance which meant that the action had to be fine tuned on a frame by frame basis. They were only able to overcome this because we had spent a sufficient amount of time locking down their cameras in the layout stage which in turn allowed them to focus on the spacing and timing the same way you would in 2D.
Post Oktapodi, Thierry worked for one year in London for Framestore CFC but both he and Julien are now working as character animators at the new Dreamworks project in Bangalore, India. Emud is working at Sony pictures as character animator while François-Xavier is in Nice working on backgrounds for ‘A Monster in Paris’ directed by Bibo Bergeron. Olivier spent one year in Nice as well working as a character designer for ‘A Monster in Paris’ but is now in Paris doing animation at Neomis. Quentin worked in a boutique house in Paris called ‘At a Dog’ as a Generalist and as a teacher in Gobelins but is looking to moving to California.
UPDATES as at December 2010
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