Interview on Sunknapping

I just noticed today that an interview that I gave in february was published since march ... Better late than never.
It is on Anisecond.com, a german cg portal, here is the link of the interview : http://www.anisecond.com/artikel/interview-esma-produktion-sun-knapping-schattenballett/1857.html .
If you don't understand german well like me, here is the interview in english like I sent to Anisecond's owner :
(I assume some questions or answers may differ)

What can you tell me about your own inspirations and influences for the story and look of „Sun Knapping” ?

I joined the team of Sun-Knapping when the idea and the story was already in place, more or less. I had the choice to join the group that I wanted (because my previous group was splitted), and I liked Sun-Knapping because of the refreshing style of the story, the challenge and innovation offered by animating shadows, and the Tim Burton style at some moment, even if it is less present in the final movie.
I tried to keep the movie close to the idea I had at this moment, but in the end I think that we could more clearly see the touch of Deborah Yver, who did most of the designs and the storyboard.

The ESMA must be a very, very inspiring place. Do you see all the other great production at the ESMA as a motivation and inspiration – or is there also a lot of competition. Why did you choose this institute for your educational path ?

Yes it is inspiring. Especially when you are in 1st or 2nd grade and you enter the magic room of the 3st grade and see all the project in progress. Each promotions want to do best that the previous one, and have a movie that stays unbeaten for many other years.
There a a competition in the sense that a team want to be the best by putting work and talent in the project, and not by destroying those of the others.
At the ESMA there are a lot of sharing and mutual aid, even after in the professional life.
I choose this institute because it is one of the best in France and the one that I managed to get into.

You did the film with your team-members Martial, Boris and Déborah. What skills brought each of you into this production ?

Martial did animation, rigging of the shadows, and also layout, modeling.
Deborah did character and set design, storyboard, animatic and animation.
Boris did texturing, lightning, compositing and animation.
And I did my part with character modeling and rigging, dynamics, and animation.
As you can see we all wanted to do animation, therefore this work was split in four.

How important was a good storyboard for „Sun Knappin”, I mean, there is a lot of tricky interaction with the shadow and the main characters ?

Given that Deborah did most of the storyboard, I asked her if she could give you an answer.
Deborah : Indeed, it was important. We wanted to create a real relationship between the girl and her shadow. We had to be precise enough on the board, in order to avoid any surprise or doubt during the animation process. We had to find suitable camera angles to get the two characters together on the screen (the shadow on the tree, on the ground, on the wall, etc.).

The story is huge – almost 6 minutes long and you have quite a bunch of characters. How long did the whole production take and what are your basic software tools that you are using? Was there any helping tool that speed up your workflow a bit – something that made you animation-life easier. Or was it at the end just a lot of hard animation work ?

6-7 minutes is the average length of the movies at the ESMA, and there are films that contains much more characters, so I don't think we were the most badly off.
Here we have one year to produce the movie, but we work on the concept and the story since the middle of the 2nd grade.
We work mainly with Maya, Digital Fusion and Photoshop, but we are free to use the software that we want, for example RenderMan for rendering. I think that teams already worked only on linux (for the 3d part at least).
As for myself, knowing mel, as soon as I see an opportunity to script something I do it, and put the result in the "very powerful scripts" folder :)

Could you tell me something about the most challenging technical aspects in terms of the character design and animation of the girl Cyprien (and I maybe also love the little Maxine with the huge braces) ?

Actually, Cyprien is the boy and Maxine the girl ...
It made me laugh because I imagined the girl with the big brace (yuk !).
So, one thing about Maxine is that she have her bag where she put all the shiny things. When the bag is in the shot it require an additional animation pass, and some shots where there is big interactions (for example when she kidnaps the sun) were very tricky to animate. The bag is a part of the Maxine's rig, however there is a independent bag rig.
As for Cyprien, he have his big scarf which is simulated with nCloth in big moving shots, elsewhere it was animated by hand.
Another problem we encountered was the large size of Maxine's head : because of that some movements and postures was impossible, or the framing was not good because of it. So I implemented a head/body ratio setting that was tweaked when needed, without being to obvious to the viewers.

How challenging was the animation of the very important dynamic shadow play? Did you add all the shadow-animations later on with a certain compositing tool ?

At the beginning, we planned to make all the shadow animation in 2d (traditional animation), then we decided that it would be more efficient to use a flat 3d rig, projected in Maya with real lights (I mean, lights of Maya, not projecting drawings on the screen with Maya open on it).
Martial took a long time building the most complete setup for the shadow of Maxine and Cyprien. It was important to have a lot of control to fit the storyboard's needs, even if it can't be as flexible as a 2d drawing.
Furthermore, extra shadows were made in 2d and then projected in Maya.

I really love the scene when the girl Cyprien kidnaps the sun in her bag. It’s also a very elegant sequence and the lighting is great. What was your generally intention in terms of the lighting ?

This time I will let Boris answer because he's the one who did the lightning of this scene.
Boris : When doing the lighting and compositing for this scene the main thing was to have a nice transition between day and night.
The two lightings are totally different as well as the shading.
I wanted to give the impression that the light was sucked in Maxinne's bag, and then have this slight glow shinning through.
It's one of the most important moment in the movie so it had to be impressive and poetic at the same time.

What are your own future plans now? Do you would love to join the industry and trying to get a position at one of the big companies or to set up a own studio or projects in France ?

Ola, I don't think I have enough experience to set up my own studio yet, but maybe one day. There are already a lot of studios, big or small, all around the world.
For now, I worked about one month on a tv advertising, but I would be excited to work on all kind of projects, from cinema to tv, and maybe interested in video games too.
I think the most wonderful for me is to be a part of the making of a universe / story that I love, it would be the kind of project that I will join with pleasure.

How to change Maya's ViewCube

Did you know that it was possible to customize the aspect of the ViewCube in Maya ?

You just have to replace two images files in one folder of Maya : VCfacemap.png and VCfacetext.png in Program Files\Autodesk\Maya20**\resources\AutoCam\Textures\  (replace ** with your version of Maya).

Here you can download the funny SpongeBob ViewCube, but others are available on the web, and you can make one of your own too.

Photography

Few years ago, I had a photography period, where I was carrying my camera each time I was going to a new place.

It only was either a classical argentic reflex or a bridge camera (that I still have), but I had to deal with it and it was not that bad finally, when I see some kind of people that can afford an expensive camera but didn't have much of an artistic sense ...

The practice of photography is very beneficial when working is the field of CG, in my case it help me particularly for the arrangement of a picture, which is helpful in storyboarding, layout/previz, and animation. It's also a great way to learn lightning and the whole rendering of an image.


I let you browse through my albums here :
https://picasaweb.google.com/105423640554318608948

That is cartoon

I wanted to share an interview of Josh Carrey, Rigging Supervisor.

The work put in the Looney Toons shorts is really amazing, and I think everything match well and honor the original 2d cartoon, and that's not always the case from passing from 2d to 3d.

Rigging like those are starting to break the limits of 3d in terms of "cheating" and shape transformations, for example when the Road Runner switch his legs for circles when he runs.

I let you judge by yourself :

Link to the interview

Oh, and I'm a cyclist too, and I must recognize that 8000 miles in a year is also pretty impressive ...

Next project in mind ...

... and on paper, but I won't show my drawings here, because they are ugly.
SO I always wanted to do an animation, a quick story based on something really simple like ... a bouncing ball.
But once I start to think of what I will do with my character, I realize that maybe there are missing an eye. So I was happy yo learn the existence of Hobo, a free rig available on the web.

Hobo

By the way, you can visit the website of his author: http://animationscout.tv , it contain helpful hints for animators, especially for beginners.













But then I was thinking that my character was going to need arms, to do more than just bounce and hardly try to manipulate things with his body. That's where I decided to create my own rig.

And to push the innovation (because it's not funny otherwise), I wanted : eyes than can appear and disappear at will, eyes than can "roll" and move along the surface as we want, and the same for the arms. Oh, and the same for a mouth too. Well...

Those ideas came to me when I remembered the aliens in Chicken Little : they have 3 eyes and they can sort of juggle with them. We can see it at the beginning of this video.

I think the eyes (and feet) are completely separated from the body, and we don't see the junction because of the fur.

But in my rig, it will be a single mesh (except for the eyes, teeth and tongue), and then it will have a junction, therefore volumetric shaders like sss or something like a jelly material can be put on it.

For the arms, I plan to make the same as the Luminoirs in the ESMA's short movie from the 2009 promo, but mixed with the system that allow them to move across.

Luminoir Making Of


I am currently experimenting things in Maya in order to figure out how to do this. It's in a good way, I already found and tested the system for the eyes.

I want the rig to be simple or complex, depending on the features we activate or not : up to 4 eyes will be enough, same for the arms, and one mouth.

Pfiu ...I wrote too much today, think I will now sleep a thousand year (or go out buy some kebabs).

CU

Jingle ESMA

One project from the beginning of the second year of my CG course, we had to make a short fake jingle for the school.

It was an individual project so I made everything, except the music : Fatboy Slim - Praise You.

The characters are 3d, there are simple models rendered with a Maya toon outline. It was rather challenging because I had to animate 9 characters (cause of the 9 circles in the ESMA's logo), and it cames with the firsts sleepless nights of that year.

There are the normal version and the stereo version, for those who have two eyes (and cyan-magenta glasses).

Hope you enjoy !


ESMA Jingle from Guillaume Hoffmann on Vimeo.



ESMA Jingle stereo from Guillaume Hoffmann on Vimeo.

Showreel(s)

These are my reels, edited in september 2011.
The first one is generalist, I put a little bit of everything I know, while keeping it short. And the three others are for more specialized application ; in order : rigging, modeling and animation.

It includes the work I've done for my gradutation film, "Sunknapping", during my last year at the ESMA (Ecole Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques, in Montpellier, France). I have co-directed this short with 3 others ex-students like me : Martial Fontan, Boris Kaufmann and Deborah Yver. I might talk about this film later.

It also includes other of my works that I've made for the course, and one 11 second club participation.

Showreel 2011


Rigging Reel 2011


Modeling Reel 2011



Animation Reel 2011