PREP & SHOOT

The initial inspiration for Tonight I Strike was a feature film idea Gaud had been kicking around about a robot police officer. “My first idea was to have the robot be the star of the story,” he says, but a bit of napkin math made it clear that wasn’t going to be feasible. He’d be performing almost all of the effects work himself in his free time. With a CG lead character he estimated it would take around five years to pull off a 15-minute short.

Moving the CG characters to secondary roles, he instead set the story in a world where space travel and robots are as common as refrigerators and toasters; the lead became a young man searching for his missing sister. Gaud’s manager pulled together $15,000 to fund the shoot, and to flesh out his ideas the filmmaker turned to an animatic: a moving, visual storyboard.

Using the 3D application Softimage he assembled a rough version of the film using primitive presets to fill in for the various actors. “The character walking around is the ‘XSI Man,’ which is just a default human you can get,” he says. The rough mock up was the equivalent of a stick-figure storyboard, but it allowed Gaud to previsualize the short in its entirety.

The five-day shoot kicked off in late summer of 2011, using a RED One MX and a crew of more than 20 working for free. During production actors stood in for the various robot co-stars, performing the actions that would later be matched and animated over. “I love the way that humans move, and to just replicate that from scratch is really hard,” Gaud explains. “When you don’t have access to motion capture and all that fancy shit you just use a stand-in like I did.”