The Making of Intruder on Bride Street

Part 1

Character & Setting

Hello everybody, let me introduce you to my new short film. Its called 'Intruder on Bride Street' and its a film about an overly obsessive TV licence Inspector doing the rounds on a street in Dublin, Ireland where I used to live, called you guessed it! Bride Street. I don't want to give too much away storywise, so I'll just say that this particular Inspector bends the rules a little sometimes and ends up in sticky situations. He has no problems spying through peoples windows looking for evidence of Televisions which may not have been licenced. Then one day he picks the wrong home...

So I wanted to post a making of for the film and try to make it a regular thing, maybe once a month or something. This film is mainly a 3D animation with some elements of 2D in there. The overall look I'm going for is an Illustrated colour look, like a moving comic book or something, with nice ink style shadows and contours. There's loads of animation short films online that already utilize a look like this, but its something that I've been playing around with for years in different ways, but I finally set up a method of texturing and rendering that I am happy about. So as its the first part of the making of blog, I'll introduce you to the main character in his rigged form. 

This is a screen grab from Maya of the Inspector character all rigged up. He's got a scanner, backpack, binoculars, notepad and pen as props which he'll use in different scenes. 

This is a render from a scene in the film set at night time. The inspector character had to be rendered out into a lot of passes as I had to also get the reflection of him in the glass as well as the usual colour pass, contour shadow pass, shadow pass etc....I will go into more detail over time about how I organised this.

This is an early render (not final) of the opening scene, an establishing shot. Just to give you an idea of the look of the scene. There's a lot of different render passes to go through before it gets to this point. Each shot in the film might average out at around 20 to 30 passes/layers to be Composited together.

...Okay, so thats it for now, next time I'll go through some of the models in more detail with wireframes, and maybe some info on creating the textures and painting in photoshop. Thanks for reading!