Interview with La Main des Maitres Team
Please tell us about the techniques used in the making of the film and what obstacles you faced?
CaYuS: Waou.... how can I start... The big deal of doing a 2D animation short is to do a 2D animation short! In the team, there were Looky (good artist), me (good technician... well I'm trying) and Clement (mix of us, good artist and technician). No animator and more of that, no 2D Animator, so we had to find some tricks to make it works.
The second problem was to do something working as a whole film. Everything had to be at the same level, the rendering, the matt paintings, the animation, the visual effects..., even the music and the sound design. Hopefully for this last part, our friend Sebastien Renault did a wonderful work with the music, and it was the same for Olivier Michelot with the sound fx and mixing. Fort the rest, we tried to spend the needed time on each shot, hopefully it was only a four minute short film! (laugh).
About the animation, we decided to model all the characters of the short in 3D. There were rigged, animated with cloth simulations and rendered with a sort of toon shader. Looky did the design and Modeling, Clement did the surfacing, lighting and rendering. And I worked on the rigging, animation and cloth simulations. As we had a lot of characters to animate, I preferred to spend more time in developing a custom MELScript UI to manage them and easily share animation between all characters. In the other hand, I spent less time on the rigging process, as I used some automatic rigging tools. Like that, I had a same rigging hierarchy for every characters and it was easier to fix problems when I needed to. Once the characters were animated in 12FPS (remain in the 2D way and it is also less work to do....) they were rendered and then fixed in 2D : Adding the facials done by Looky, correcting the penetrations, lines, shadows...
Clement composited everything, trying to match the 3D characters with the non animated 2D characters and the matt paintings. Moreover, having 3D characters allowed us to match with the 3D visual effects done with Houdini. I exported a geometry sequence of obj and the camera from Maya to Houdini. After that, I was able to play with my particles (POP + metaballs for the smoke / POP + particlefluidsurface for the blood). Once rendered in Mantra, It could be composited with the characters and it would match with all the collisions...
Also, having the nCloth simulation was a real pleasure as they were a lot of clothes in the short and it would have been long to do it all in 2D animation.
Looky : But the biggest obstacle was the time allowed to do this short. We were greedy when we designed the project, and the planning was full... We had to fight against all shots we could cut, any frame we could save... we had to be ingenious.
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