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www.postmagazine.com 37 POST JULY 2016 EDUCATION & RECRUITMENT greenlit, the pair also worked on a com- pletely different thesis pitch. "During pre-production, we were challenged with coming up with multiple pitches. In order to create ideas we were passionate about, we gathered and stored all of our favorite inspirations. We drew from film, art, life, and anything else that inspired us. We made cheap, cardboard 'corkboards' and hung up anything we liked or that was meaningful to us," ex- plains Lutz. "The ultimate aesthetic of our film was made from our favorite things: stark contrast of light and color, vintage times and vintage art (specifically, the UPA style of animation) and love stories. There was a moment when we both sat down and decided we had gone too big and that we didn't know how to bring this film to life and do it justice." Momentary doubt, though, turned into action when they had to get the ball rolling, so their design choices came from their own personal art styles in the end. "The characters became so personal that they ended up looking and acting a lot like the both of us," adds Norman. In Style The style is indeed unique and compelling, and the imagery based on news typogra- phy, newspaper sections, news stories and news makers. "We had discovered that we both used to save our parents' newspapers to read the comics. We loved how they covered a whole world's worth of information. It made sense that this would be our 'world,' and fitting a story within these mechanics just felt natural," explains Norman. "Once we locked into using a newspaper world, we dissected the structure of the printed text, symbols and images to set up a playground for our characters. The contrast of black and white vs. color helped us to form our col- orful comic gal and monotone journalist guy. We added some conflict, multiple acts and boom! The film began." For the content creation, the filmmak- ers utilized software they were familiar with, rather than spend what limited time they had researching new programs. To this end, they used Autodesk's Maya 2015, Pixar's RenderMan Studio 19 (RIS), The Foundry's Nuke 9 and Mari 2.6, Pixologic's ZBrush 4R6, Pilgway's 3D-Coat and Adobe's CC Master Collection. As for hardware, the filmmakers used the lab computers at the school, which included an SGI Octane III and HP Z820 workstations with Nvidia Quadro K4000 graphics cards. They also used Wacom Cintiqs and Intuos tablets. Due to the time crunch, the filmmak- ers made a lot of the design packets in conjunction with the story creation, meaning a lot of their first ideas were fully designed and cut later in production. The character models were started the sum- mer before their senior year and tweaked in the first couple weeks of production. The environments, props and sets were built as needed, depending on the needs of the shots. "We were designing as we were mod- eling, making assets that could read at as low poly as possible and made sure they could each be kitbashed together to appear as an entire populated city," Norman says. Lutz describes the design process for one scene: "For the letter bridge in the Obituaries, I had a simple sketch on a Post-it where I described what I was envisioning, and that was about as far as our design process had time for," she says. "Luckily for us, we understand each other very well." Letter By Letter In this newsy world, many of the textures include type — single letters, words, para- graphs. The majority of the textures were created in Mari 2.6, with Photoshop used to paint in specifics or to color tweak on the fly. All of the buildings were stamped with "paragraphs" that the women typed up utilizing elements from photo textures they made themselves. "If you look through the film, you may spot a lot of 'articles' that are made up nonsense — this helped keep things fun during the long work hours," says Norman. The bumps, displacements and normal maps were all created in ZBrush. "We saved out a 256, 512, 1K and 4K map for almost everything in our shots, and swapped the texture resolution per scene in order to save on render times," Norman points out. "Our girl character gave us some creative challenges, with her halftone texture. We wanted to give her textures the same quality as printed ink, but not have it be distracting. We wanted Frank, our male character, to gradually become more colorful as he changed throughout the film, which required five separate texture maps that were incre- mentally saturated for his hair, face, hands,