Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/710451
www.postmagazine.com 41 POST JULY 2016 EDUCATION & RECRUITMENT into a film format." "The twist" had the Internet buzzing about the film, and it has screened at hundreds of film festivals, most of them Oscar-qualifying competitions. As of this writing, it had received 65 awards. Technical Focus Like all student projects at Filmakademie, "The Present" was done entirely as part of a classroom assignment, though the audio recordings and mixing were produced outside of school. Production started in early November 2012 and was complet- ed in March 2014, with assistance from a dozen or so classmates. From the outset, Frey was determined to incorporate high-quality aesthetics that were on par with major film stu- dios. To this end, all the characters and sets were modeled in Autodesk's Maya, although Pixologic's ZBrush was used in certain instances for adding displace- ment maps. The characters and hero elements were textured in The Foundry's Mari and the rest in Adobe's Photoshop, while compositing was done with The Foundry's Nuke, and lighting in Maya with RenderMan Studio 18. "I tried to work ahead with texturing. I modeled the entire set and started applying a temp shader to each model and created temp textures in Photoshop, which I then linked to each shader," ex- plains Frey. "That way, the texture artist didn't have to worry about proper tex- ture sizes anymore, and there wasn't any memory being wasted on 4K textures, which would have ended up being all the way in the background." Frey animated the movie in Maya, mak- ing sure that all the assets were available for those assisting on the project. "I also spent a lot of time in the animatic/block- ing phase and really tried to make sure that before I jumped into animation, most of the storytelling questions were an- swered. With the tight schedule, the last thing I wanted to do was animate some- thing just to find out later that it wasn't needed in the short." In fact, one of the biggest hurdles Frey faced was getting the short done in time. "We were a very small team, and over the course of production, it was mostly Markus [Kranzler, who did shading, light- ing, and rendering] and I who worked on the short. It was hard to find people for most of the positions we needed help for, so it was pretty much up to me to [do the work] we couldn't find help for," he says. According to Frey, one of the more valuable lessons he learned from the proj- ect was about efficiency, time manage- ment and resource management. "And, planning ahead to avoid unnecessary delays," he adds. "It also helped me figure out my skill set and what I am realistically able to achieve." On the hardware side, the students used Dell workstations with 32GB RAM and a high-end Nvidia Quadro graphics card. Fur Foray One of the two main characters in the story is a dog, which required fur. Fellow student Pascal Floerks, who was also working on his own graduation short "Baer" at the time, helped the group set up a hair/fur pipeline of their own. After using two different approaches — includ- ing Joe Alter's Shave and a Haircut and ZBrush's FiberMesh — the filmmakers tried Yeti Fur from Peregrine Labs. "It gave us great results and helped us wrangle our fur pipeline. It is node-based and easy to control, and has great groom- ing tools," says Frey. During production, Frey brought his pet dog to school, for reference and inspira- tion. "I even brought her into my gradua- tion project evaluation," he says. "The head of the animation institute told me jokingly that I may only get my degree if the dog stays. Everyone enjoyed having her around. Growing up with dogs was also a big rea- son why I fell in love with this project." Well, Frey did get his degree and is currently working as an animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, CA, on the upcoming animated feature Moana. Prior to that, he was an animator on Zootopia, where his skills — and his love of animals — once again made a perfect pairing. 'None of That' The animated short film by Ringling students Isabela Littger (now Pinho), Kriti Kaur and Anna Paddock (Group Suspific) should be called "Nun of That." It is a story of a night guard who is very passion- ate about his job and is devastated to discover that a mysterious someone has been censoring "his" precious artwork, not to mention that the "censors" had the potential of damaging the works of art. It turns out that the vandal is a tiny nun, who, driven by her beliefs, is determined to censor all the nudity she can reach. "Our film highlights complicated subjects regarding censorship, in a light- hearted manner," says Littger. "None of That" was the group's thesis at Ringling, and as such, they divvied up the work as evenly as possible, working on the story, designing the characters, storyboard- ing, modeling, rigging, animating and pulling it together at the end. "The Computer Animation department at Ringling gave us support and provided us with the facilities to produce the project," says Paddock. "Without their renderfarm and equipment, we wouldn't have been able to make this short. We also received feedback from our peers and the Ringling alumni." The majority of the work was done outside of class. After receiving critiques, the filmmakers would head straight to the labs until 2am or 3am nightly. "It was a lot of work and many sleepless nights," notes Paddock. The group started working on