Tell us more about the workflow of the movie. Which software tools did you use?

Jamaal: We adhered to most of the classic framework for production workflow. I began on the story, as well as the character designs, years ahead of time. When I got the story to a decent place, that’s when I started searching for story artists. During the search, we got our first character modeled. With the character being ready, I was able to convince a rigger to come on and throw something together that could be roughly animated. The animation tests and the promise of a decent idea got us our lead story artist. Then we got to work.

We worked on story, character development, and modeling at the same time. Sitting on a lot of content for a while, we didn't push forward hard until we felt like the story was in a great place. Once the story was around 70% refined, we began sending things to the layout artist. This is when things got tricky because as we evolved the story, we were NOT going to re-send things to layout and have this massive back and forth. It would have slowed down things immensely. So for any changes going forward, we’d just add them to the animatic, and address them in animation production. Once the animatic was pretty solid, and certain shots were locked down, I began to animate. At this time, we still had no surfacing artists or lighters. This is the part when non-conventional kicked in. I was using milestone success as leverage to gain confidence for people to sign on to help. Usually, in production, all of these things are set.

Once I had a few shots animated and the story was solid, we were able to show a WIP of the short, which attracted Nikie Monteleone to the project. I was also finally able to show it to my friend and old colleague from Imageworks, Eric Warren, and he was more than excited to help the effort. Since much of the modeling work was complete, Nikie had a chunk of work to attack for us. So we didn’t go the traditional route where the models are completed in a few weeks, then sent to the surfacing department. We spent time making assets beforehand, because I didn't want the modeler to have to wait. Eric helped us get the CFX pipeline going for cloth and hair, which Nikie also helped us refine. The Substance team was pulling double duty on many fronts.

With the team in place, we set up our pipeline through Google Drive, and stayed in sync using Google Backup and Sync. Using the storyboard, we’d alter the layout accordingly, or start it from scratch; finished animation shots would be sent to CFX for cloth pass and turned into alembic files, and then I would assemble and send the shots for lighting.