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www.postmagazine.com 46 POST JULY 2016 EDUCATION & RECRUITMENT Tiny Dancer The aesthetic for the short film is unique: intimate, warm and soft, like a dream. However, the look changed over the course of production. Originally, Sims wanted a kaleidoscope of colors and to connect love directly to spring and the budding of new life. "I even considered having flowers spring from the ground as the puppets danced around. This was all very much inspired by the painting The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, for which the film is named," Sims explains. "Klimt adorned his figures in beautiful shapes, colors and gold leaf, to illustrate love and bliss. I thought it was powerful that his figures were literally wearing certain aspects of their role in their union. I wanted these things physi- cally represented in my film, as well." In execu- tion, however, so many col- ors interacting on screen, while visually engaging, became hard to control and were distract- ing, Sims says. "It was easy to lead the eye in a still image, but once the cam- era, butterflies, and puppets all started moving, it wasn't as easy to digest as I wanted it to be," he notes. "I began pulling saturation and colors out of the film until, eventually, it became black and white. This was too far, however, and I began looking at more photography and visual reference so I could decide which colors I wanted to reintroduce." Because the puppets were dancing on a stage, Sims looked at a lot of stage lighting and was intrigued by the atmo- spherics used in theater. This led him to push for dense particles, dust and light fog. "I decided to go with warmer parch- ment tones because the puppets and but- terflies were made from paper and I want- ed them to feel old and wooden," he says. "The colors were no longer reminiscent of spring flowers, but the high saturation still kept the film feeling rich." Technical Steps "The Kiss" (which is two minutes, 51 sec- onds) was created using various software. The modeling, texturing and lighting were completed in Autodesk's Maya. The deci- sion to keep the puppets identical to one another — neither being more masculine or feminine — not only better served the story, but also actually made the model- ing and rigging process much easier. Thus, there were only two character models in the film: the puppet and the butterfly. For the dance sequence, the butterfly was animated by McWethy in Maya. For the conclusion of the film, however, the butterflies were simulated in SideFX's Houdini by Anderson and rendered along- side the puppet animation in Maya. Originally, Sims wanted the dancing to be a ballet. "I definitely learned a lot more about ballet than I'd ever expect- ed to learn in college, but in the end I decided to go with something of a mix- ture between Scottish folk dancing and English country dancing," he says. "The movements of those dances felt more physically plausible for what the puppets could potentially do. It took me quite a while to narrow down the steps, which were essentially isolated movements from longer dance sequences that I found on- line, which I then stitched together for the dance used in the film." The texturing and lighting were all done in Maya. "I wanted the light to feel powerful and very bright, like a stage light, so the puppets couldn't feel too dense or opaque. If they danced into the light, it was important for them to feel like they were being warmed and influenced by it," Sims says. Sims initially planned to project flat image textures onto the three-dimen- sional silhouettes of the butterflies. "I wanted them to look like paper and feel as if they'd been laid over the footage of the puppets dancing," he explains. While this appeared fine in his look-dev stills and got positive reactions, once the butterflies started to move, however, it became much harder to tell they were butterflies. "I decided to make them white and very translucent so they would catch the lighting instead," Sims says. "This ended up working really well for the opening shots of the film because the lone butter- fly really stood out from the environment." The film was traditionally lit, so there was no use of global illumination, and was rendered with Mental Images' Mental Ray. Because the film took place in one space, Sims developed a light rig that was based on three-point stage lighting and referenced it into all of the shots. "I used this as a starting point, and then went through and made adjustments to the light positions, intensities, and so forth, so that the lighting could best serve whatever the camera had been set to capture in each specific shot," he notes. "This really helped to keep the shots consistent and cohesive." The filmmaker used a combination of The Foundry's Nuke and Adobe's After Effects for compositing, where the renders were combined with footage of live-action dust particulates and light leaks and blooms to create the final look. Rendering and color corrections, says Sims, were especially time-consuming. "There were so many different ways that I could adjust the colors, so having to pick a direction and stick with it took some time," he notes. The Butterfly Effect According to Sims, the butterflies at the end of the film were his biggest "un- known" challenge. "I knew that I wanted the puppets to be completely covered in butterflies, and despite how big of a part it is in the story, I wasn't quite sure how it would be done, even pretty late into production," he says. Anderson, a friend, was familiar with Houdini, and used an animation sample of a rigged butterfly from Maya and import- ed that into Houdini. He then created particles from the sample, and Sims was able to sync his final output files with the character animation done by McWethy to create the final animation sequences. Getting the butterflies to land properly was another big challenge for Anderson. The solution was to have them on the puppets from the start and then lift them- selves off. "We played this backward in Maya, however, so that it looked like they were landing on the puppets," Sims says. "Animating them all in this way gave us much more control over their initial states." One of the biggest lessons Sims learned from the project was the value of asking for help. "There's no way the film would have turned out as it did had I done it alone, as I originally intended," he says. Sims credits "The Kiss" for helping him land his first professional position, as an artist at a video production company in Atlanta. The movie has screened at several showcases and festivals, including the 2015 SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. Meanwhile, the filmmaker is start- ing pre-production on another animated short, "The Lightsmith," which he plans to finish early next year. ■