Animation

All great modern day battle plans are drawn late at night in a Tim Horton’s. Spring’s writer/director, Lynne, embarrassingly acted out shots in between nibbling on a glazed chocolate donut and sipping a medium Double Double. Most big animation films have a gazillion people working on computers for years. Spring had one lone man and his copy of maya… Brian Vowles.

Production on Spring was like making two-movies, the live-action and the animation. The animation was allotted 40 seconds of the two-minute film. Before shooting the live-action, they needed to pre-determine smooth transitions in and out of the animation. Never wanting the animation to feel jarring, the entire flick was shot with a candy-coloured-cartoony feel.

Spring was on a super tight delivery schedule. Because of the lack of time, everyone took a leap of faith… the funders, the producers… no one saw the animation until the delivery day… leaving all approvals up to Lynne. And yikes, did we ever cut it close! Good thing Lynne and Brian are insomniacs who giggle at 4am while still up working.

Modeling Jay’s character couldn’t begin until beginning of November… the entire film had to be delivered by December 1st.

First Brian took reference snaps of director Lynne in the snowsuit. So actually the body of Animated Jay is the director’s and the head is the actor’s… creepy!

Modeling

Next step is laying out the UV and being textured.

then finesse colours…

Final Animated Jay

Tree Test

Trees were the bane of Spring’s existence. Each little detail on each needle takes oodles of time to render. Spring was finishing at 2K… so in geek terms,2048 x 1024, better quality than your HD tv’s. At that rate, on a regular suped computer, it took 40 minutes to render one frame of animation. There are 24 frames in a second! Egads. Even with sending the files off to a render farm in Germany (no cows at this farm), time and money wouldn’t allow for rockin’ 3D trees. To create the trees in Spring, clever Brian pasted in 2D images.

Geese First Test

Brian appeased Lynne’s desire to have a woodland creature with a flock of Canadian poopers. Here’s the trick… it’s all the same bird… talk about genetic cloning!

All this movie magic… the characters, the sets, the lighting, the camera movement was done by…

Animator/3 D Artist BRIAN VOWLES
visit Brian at: brianvowles.com

Biography: Brian Vowles has been working as a 3D Artist since 2002. During that time he has worked on various, TV, Film and Web projects. Brian worked with Lynne on both her I Love A Luger web series and Spring. He is a one man animating machine. Brian just likes making cool stuff.