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www.postmagazine.com 39 POST JULY 2016 EDUCATION & RECRUITMENT concept artist Kenwood Huh, who also generated the matte painting used for the backgrounds. Co-producer Kevin Roberts figured out the lighting and rendering, and handled the 3D elements in the sky — specifically, the moon and clouds. Justin Goulding oversaw the creation and rendering of the grass. Also assisting in the various tasks were Kip Atkinson, Ryan Beukers, Lindsay Bowen and Brad Horting. Instructors at the school critiqued the animations and overall story, steering the group in the right direction when they got too far off course. "They were blunt and direct with their feedback, but still trusted us to govern ourselves and make it our own thing," Bringhurst says. Bringhurst first pitched the concept in September 2014, and preliminary work began immediately after it was accepted. "But those first four-plus months were the seventh circle of development hell," he says, "lots of back and forth, inter-depart- ment politics, people joining and leaving the project and so forth." Things then got even worse, when, in January 2015, an instructor advised the group to start over. The only asset that survived was the skeleton model and rig. An even amount of time was spent working on the film inside and outside of class — with critiques done in class and the tasks completed outside of the classroom. That includes rendering, as two-thirds of that process was done using home computers. An initial draft of the animated short was finished during Halloween 2015, but the group continued to polish it until the end of the year before entering it into the Student Emmy competition, where it won third place. "The version they judged didn't have any grass, and a few effects still weren't to our liking, so we got permission from our instructors to work on one more draft before graduating," Bringhurst says. The final version was completed this past February and is being entered in various film festivals. Gloom, No Doom Because the story takes place in a grave- yard at night, the gloom element of the film was unavoidable to some degree, es- pecially since the group wanted to convey a cheerful, light-hearted tone. "When I first pitched the short, I envi- sioned it as a faux stop-motion film, done on the computer but with its frame rate, rendering and animation style mim- icking films like Wallace and Gromit or The Nightmare Before Christmas," says Bringhurst. "A few of our animators were able to nail down the look quite well, but we came to a crossroads when we started over. A lot of our team was struggling to capture the stop-motion look, and our textures and rendering weren't giving us the plasticine look we needed to tie it all together, so we made the difficult deci- sion to just go full-3D animation with no other pretense." Initially, Bringhurst and his wife, Jenni, came up with the original story, about a living skeleton who didn't realize he's an enemy character in an RPG. The filmmak- er realized it lacked heart following a few failed pitch meetings over the summer months. "I loved the skeleton character and still wanted to use him, so after a lot of brainstorming with my wife, we came up with a graveyard setting and a story about a skeleton and a ghost on an awk- ward first date," he recalls. "It still didn't have the 'soul' we were looking for, but we knew we were close." Bringhurst wrote the final version used for the completed film, about a sad ghost and a bumbling skeleton trying to make her feel better. As the story further developed in class, the team received help from Moroni Taylor, a story artist at Blue Sky Studios. "He was a huge help, especially with pinning down a lot of the essential beats, framing and overall composition," Bringhurst says. Ghostly Technology The group did all its modeling (charac- ters, props, environments and so forth) in Autodesk's Maya. "The skeleton was the very first thing I modeled, and strangely enough was the only thing that didn't end up getting re-done later on," says Bringhurst. "The ghost initially had a very different model and rig combo that wasn't working, so in early-February 2015, we had to scrap it and start over. Kenwood [Huh] did the first pass of the new model, and I added details and finalized it. But then Zach [Thorpe] had to build a com- pletely new rig." Initially, a lot of the texturing was done in Adobe's Photoshop, but early last sum- mer, the artists discovered Allegorithmic's Substance Painter, and decided to scrap all the textures and rebuild them in this software. "The biggest problem was that, as gorgeous as our new textures looked within Substance, Maya didn't really have a way to plug them directly in as materi- als, so we had to break them down and re-interpret them as Mia Material X passes. I'm relatively certain that a handful of use- ful texture information may have been lost in translation," says Bringhurst. The ghost, however, was the only ex- ception. She was cel-shaded and lineless, but with a very soft edge on the shadows. Since the character was a ghost giving off her own light, the artists wanted her to stand out from her environment. All the animation, meanwhile, was done in Maya. Initially, the crew used a small