Playtime Animation

Lights. Camera. Action.

A student project. The animation originally began as an Honours project for myself and three other computer science students in 2009.

About 50% of the intended film was completed for submission.

A remake in the making. I resumed working on the animation independently in March 2010, with the intent to deliver the film as originally envisioned. All 3D models and animations were completely redone.

Learn as you go. Work on this film was done without any prior art, 3D modeling or animation training.

I approached it from programming and computer graphics principles, with the goal of submitting it to a film festival.

Jack-of-all-trades. I completed the entire animation pipeline from concept art to texturing, rigging, animation, compositing, sound mixing and the final cut.

Behind the scenes. All 3D modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, staging and compositing was completed using Blender on macOS.

Photoshop and GIMP were used to edit textures. Final Cut Pro was used to stitch everything together.

Do the math. The average render time per frame took 12-15 minutes. At 5825 frames, it would've required ~1465 hours of render time.

A custom Python renderfarm script was used to distribute frame rendering across a fleet of iMacs, reducing the render time to ~58 hours.

Let's go to the movies. The film was submitted to SIGGRAPH 2011, SIGGRAPH Asia 2011, Flip! Animation Festival 2011 and SICAF 2012. The animation was nominated in the Best Animation category at Blender's Suzanne Animation Festival 2011.

Play it again, Sam. The film was screened during CreateWorld 2011 at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. It was reviewed by a layout artist at Pixar as well as a compositor at Pixar.