Tall Tails

Tall Tails

Written and Directed by Grace Barnfather and Alannah Meek.
A student film from University of South Wales.

Synopsis

Meet Gerald, a gawky giraffe who does not fit in and so is ostracised by the haughty Snobsters, who take every opportunity to show their disdain towards poor Gerald. Life is difficult alone on the harsh savanna with predators and little food. Things look bleak for Gerald until he meets Angus, a short giraffe, who just like him is an outsider. Together they demonstrate how friendship can conquer all.

The Film

Read on to see the break down of how we made Tall Tails.

Pre-Production

Story, Script & Storyboarding

By making the storyboard into an animatic, it was easier to see the pace of the story in the film and edit or remove scenes that did not work accordingly. There were several iterations of the storyboard animatic until we reached a version that we were happy to start production with. For example, we ultimately decided to cut the scene below despite its humour, because we felt that Gerald's struggles prior to meeting Angus could be presented in a more succinct way, preventing the story from lagging in the middle.

Character Design

Initially Grace completed a significant amount of research into anatomy, movement, appearance, habitat and diet, predators and behaviour that could be shared with the whole team. From here, she also looked into existing characters in order to avoid anything that had been done before. Then Grace completed many rough sketches playing with proportion, features and colour until they were refined into the final designs. Some of Grace's process is shown below.

We wanted our story to be a funny one and so a more toony style of character design would be most appropriate to convey the exaggerated poses and expressions needed. Grace took the lead on this while Alannah led the storyboarding, to be efficient with our time and strengths. We knew that it was crucial to have the characters (and the story) ready for when the animators and artists could start.

Pre-Visualisation & Layout

The Pre-Vis completed by Alannah was critical preparation for the film, and was especially useful for all the animators that joined our team, to enable them to understand what their shot would contain, its length and beats, and the camera movement required to ensure each shot flowed into the next flawlessly. A free giraffe and cheetah rig was used for this, whilst the actual rigs were being created to prevent an early bottleneck in the production phase.

Production

Models & Texture

These are turnarounds of our character models. These include: Gerald, Angus, the Snobsters, the cheetah and we also had a zebra to put in the background of wide shots.

Environment

For the environment we had a large 1km by 1km terrain which we dressed with low poly barren trees to show there is little food in the savannah. We used low poly grass and larger rocks and pebbles to further dress the environment. The most important pieces are the two Speedtree generated trees. One was rigged and used for the tug of war scene at the end of the film and one was needed for the cheetah to lay on.

Rigs

Gerald needed a bespoke rig, made from scratch to allow for his bendy neck and toony expressions - this was done using a ribbon. The other characters used the Perseus Rig as foundation on top of which specific features were added, such the facial joints and controls, set driven keys (SDKs), and blend shapes for expressions.

Animation

We had a great team of animators from the University of South Wales who brought our story to life. We assigned everyone around 4-5 shots each and reviewed and gave feedback on everyone's shots to achieve the toony and fun style we wanted.

The animated shot below by Grace demonstrates the collaborative nature of our team - wherein Sophie Burt animated the generic run cycles of both Gerald and the Cheetah for her opening sequence, which Grace could animate on top of, for this specific shot, through animation layers to create a sequence that flowed all together.