"Cold Fronts" is an animated short based on recorded interviews with Margaret Austin. Margaret honors the memory of her late brother Robert, from their childhood together on the farm to his mysterious death in 1947.
"COLD FRONTS" INTRO
Responsibilities
Storyboarding
Production management
Modeling
Texturing
Prop animation
Pop-up house rig
Lighting
Compositing
Tools Used
Autodesk Maya
Photoshop
Nuke
Adobe After Effects
"COLD FRONTS" CLIPS

3D animations, lighting, and compositing by Freddy Bendekgey

Character animations by Janhavi Parekh, Raven Campilan, and Jenny Park

Character designs by Janhavi Parekh

Atlanta and WWII 3D props modeled by Freddy Bendekgey and textured by Janhavi Parekh


Lighting and compositing by Freddy Bendekgey

Animation, wave texture, and character art by Janhavi Parekh

Character animation by Jenny Park

Boat model and texture by Freddy Bendekgey

BREAKDOWN
Overview​​​​​​​
To create "Cold Fronts," we drew the film’s assets almost entirely by hand with markers and pens, then modeled and animated them in Autodesk Maya. We rendered the film in Maya Arnold. Characters were animated in 2D through After Effects. We then composited the render layers into the film via After Effects and Nuke.
I managed the film’s production schedule, modeled most of the assets, and lit the entire film. I textured and animated about half of the film’s props and backgrounds. Animating and lighting 3D scenes to look like a pop-up book made traditional backlighting and atmospheric effects difficult to implement. I organized tests and drafted a texturing guide to simulate these effects with paper.

Original "Cold Fronts" Style Frame

Creating the Pop-Up Book Aesthetic
From the beginning of production, we set out to create a 3D animated film with materials that looked and felt like thick, pop-up book paper. Many of our prop textures were hand-drawn with Copic markers, then scanned and added as textures to 3D objects in Maya. Sometimes we modeled the assets, printed the UV maps, then colored them in and scanned them; in other cases, we drew the designs first, then 3D modeled around them. I modeled 91 out of the 111 assets used in “Cold Fronts.”

Paper texture

Pop-up house with the paper texture applied to diffuse roughness

Sample Textures of the props inside the pop-up book house. For these assets, I printed the UVs and drew them by hand.

We originally created height maps to create the bumps and ridges of paper, as seen in the style frame. This was intended to break up the flat surfaces, but it made the materials look too pock marked. I created a style guide for the prop materials, which included using scanned paper textures for diffuse roughness rather than height maps. This made the effect subtler and more realistic.
One major challenge for the film was creating depth and dynamic lighting for flat, paper-like objects. In place of traditional backlighting, I lit the paper textures behind objects to create a halo effect. To simulate atmospheric depth through the materiality of paper, I increased subsurface scatter on objects that were meant to be in the distance. This made the background paper objects appear thinner and allowed light to pass through, which helped them fade into the background.

Example of Subsurface Scatter used in a “Cold Fronts” scene, used in the texturing style guide that I created.

"Cold Fronts" explosion still frame. The objects are lit entirely from behind, highlighting the contours of the paper-like objects and bringing out the subsurface scatter in the distant buildings and smoke props.

Production Management
We spent ten weeks creating the style frame and animatic for “Cold Fronts.” We then produced most of the animated short over another ten-week period. This included much of our modeling, prop and character animation, lighting, and compositing. To complete production on schedule, I created a Gantt Chart breaking up production into five two-week phases.

Section of the "Cold Fronts" Gantt Chart

With only ten weeks to produce the film, we had very little room for delays. To get ahead of any production issues, I organized “test scenes” for us to produce ahead of schedule. This helped us to identify problems in advance, giving us the time to experiment with different solutions without falling behind schedule. A few of the issues that we were able to address in this way included atmospheric depth, backlighting, and compositing 2D character animations into 3D scenes. This also helped me estimate the length of time required to render the completed film and reserve enough computers on SCAD’s campus to locally render “Cold Fronts” in its entirety.

Screenshot of the pop-up house rig that I created, on top of the rigged book created by Lyndon Fan. Testing these rigs in advance was crucial for finishing the opening scene on schedule.

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