Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/565118
7 2 0 1 5 E D U C AT I O N & R E C R U I T M E N T S P E C I A L Altman, noting that he and his partner visited a local magic store and photographed some of the props for reference, and spent a good deal of time watching YouTube videos of magicians performing their acts. Another Pixar short film, "Geri's Game," influenced the character design for grandpa in the student production. Other visual inspirations include Sylvain Chomet's films (such as The Triplets of Belleville), ParaNorman, and various stop-motion shorts. The modeling, rigging, and animation for the piece was done using Autodesk's Maya, with some concepting with Pixologic's ZBrush. "We wanted a cartoony style with really bendy limbs," says Altman. "This was the first full character rig I built like that, so figuring out how to use all the rigging techniques was interesting. I also spent some time tearing apart rigs that I liked to see how they worked and used that as reference." The short contains a number of simulations, which were done in Maya and Side Effects' Houdini. These include shots of confetti falling and a house of cards collapsing. A friend, whose study focus was dynamics, ran the simulations. Compositing, meanwhile, was done with The Foundry's Nuke and lighting with Chaos Group's V-Ray. Rendering was done using PipelineFX's Qube render manager. Yang also wrote an organization script for Maya that set up Alembic caches in the shot files. While many student animators encounter a variety of technical hurdles while working on their projects, Altman and Yang hit a bump with their story and had a difficult time coming up with an ending to the 3-minute 13-second film. "We were making story changes up until a few months before output, and then we focused completely on finishing the piece on time," says Altman. But that is not to say that the project was without tech- nical struggles – in particular, the characters' hair. "There was an issue with the normals in our Alembic cache that ended up interfering with the hair dynamics. That was a head-scratcher for me for quite a few months," says Yang. Indeed, there were many all-nighters spent working on the project, followed by early-morning trips to a local diner with friends. During the production period, Altman and Yang learned firsthand about planning and scheduling a production. Altman, in particular, learned how to streamline his animation and rigging processes in order to work faster. Yang, meanwhile, learned better planning skills, composit- ing techniques, and how to take a project from concept to completion. The result of that work, the award-winning short "Broken Wand," is the duo's calling card in the industry. And some- thing they can proudly call their own. "It was a great experi- ence being in charge of a project and having the freedom of making our own story and design decisions," says Yang. Altman adds, "Our thesis film is one of the few times we get to work on something all our own. Once you graduate and get a job, you start being paid to make other people's projects come to life. The latter is still fun, but our project is ours." ■