THE MAKING OF "THE MONK & THE MONKEY"
Student film 4:27
Directors: BRENDAN CARROLL , FRANCESCO GIROLDINI
School: RINGLING COLLEGE OF ART + DESIGN
http://www.monkmonkey.com
Directors Brendan Carroll and Francesco Giroldini: "Once our story was approved by the college faculty we developed the characters and finessed the story. By the beginning of our final year we had the models and the animatic ready to present. Throughout the next few months we evolved the layout, finessed animation, texturing and surfacing, lighting and rrendering. The film took over a year to create in full.
"The story was easily the biggest creative challenge. When we started out we only had a loose idea of a monk in combat with a monkey. We liked this idea as it had a sort of yin-yang element. It wasn't until September we really nailed the major plot points and character designs, so there was a lot of re-working to do. Once it went from animatic into 3D form the problems were showing. We had to rework the chase scene, the cliff scene and the ending scene as we were laying out the film in 3D.
"By the time we got everything working story-wise, there was only two months before the end of production, so you can imagine how stressful it got!
"Designing the characters was also challenging. With the monkey we had to make his silhouette look dangerous and threatening while the big eyes got the viewer more emotionally involved. He also needed to look menacing at the start and lovable by the end of the film.
"A big technical challenge was to keep render times as low as possible. This led us to decisions such as to go for transparency mapped planes for the monkey's fur and the tree's leaves, to ban point lights and raytraced shadows from the production and limit raytraced reflections to the objects that absolutely needed it.
"Another trick that we used to speed up our renders was to use sets for our subsurface-scattering and our reflections and to hide anything that was not visible on camera.
"For static shots or shots where the camera was simply pulling in we rendered one still, blurred it in compositing and scaled it over time!
"From March until September 2009 we were developing characters and animatics. Layout and rigging took place from September through to October. Animation had to be almost finished by December. From January until April we were concentrating mainly on lighting and rendering with finessing like set dressing and surfacing and making sure we could refine the animation as much as possible."
Directors: Brendan Carroll, Francesco Giroldini
Additional lighting/set dressing: Shantifer Ergenian
Music: Erez Koskas Sound: Gadi Raz, Ohad Tzachar
Advisor: Keith Osborn
Voice of Ragu: Wil Gavin
Toolkit
Maya, RenderMan for Maya, Nuke, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, Tsunami