Bolder - Student Animated Film

Bolder - Student Animated Film

Film Trailer

Characters

For our characters, instead of keeping the usual pointy hats and long cape, we gave them shorter capes adding symbols on them. So, we didn't remove all the things that will make a mage unrecognizable.

As for the golem, we went for a creature that has lived long in the forest underneath the ground. And our goal was to make the golem look threatening and evil. For the concept, many things had been removed and changed as we progress to the story.

Golem

Luna and Leo

Character Expression Sheets

Environment

Concept Art

We wanted to go for a magical forest that still look realistical and believeable but have a sense of mystery and magic such as colour depth and fog as well as glowing mushrooms and flowers. Frozen 2 was one of our references as well as some mix of god of war freja forest concept.

Environmental Elements

Layout

Houdini was used to scatter points along the ground plane, these points were then used to create instances for the assets, randomizing attributes such as rotation and scale to create variation in the environment the path where Leo and Luna travels are masked out using vertex painting to mask off these areas. the aim was to keep the layout easy to edit as our film went through many changes through the film creation process. In the layout process, instancing was heavily used to reduce the rendering time in the final shots.

Breakdowns

Visual Effects

The fx artist learnt through watching tutorials for the grainx fx, and also looking through references.

The fx artist also had to work with the layout artist and texture artist to decide how the grain look and behavior, i.e. is it dry, wet, mix , clumpy, etc.

And for Luna's and Leo's magic, is also a simple smoke and particle sim.

Compositing

Animation

Here are some animation breakdowns. Most references were done over the circuit breaker in our homes.