Tech Troubles

Tech Troubles

When a 3D sculpting student's work comes to life, he must catch it before it wrecks havoc.

You can watch our film below:

Character Design

The Director and Art Director worked together to find references that matched the Director's vision: a cheeky little creature desperate to cause havoc and prevent a university student from meeting his deadline. The Art Director then produced several variations of each aspect of the CG character and through the feedback of the Director, a final design was chosen.

Concept Art

Once we had decided on the final character design, the Art Director could proceed with creating concept art to help us visualise our character in the environment and confirm the art style of the film. This art was later used as a reference for lighting and compositing.

Modelling and Texturing

Next, we had the task of creating our character in 3D. We used several different programs such as Maya, ZBrush, and Substance Painter to model, sculpt, texture, and rig our character.

Animatic

From the script, we produced a rough storyboard and filmed a 'crapamatic' to get a feeling for the pace of the film and see how the action could take place. Several iterations of the storyboard were created whilst we developed the story and we simultaneously converted it into an animatic to adjust the timings of each shot. We wanted the majority of the film to be quite fast paced due to it including a chase sequence, and we used upbeat placeholder music to help us get a feel for the mischievous nature of the gremlin. Once the animatic was approved, we were able to move onto previs.

Animation

As soon as possible, the Animators began testing the rig and used it to plan out each shot in more detail. We faced multiple challenges during this stage but eventually managed to create a working rig that allowed us to properly start animating.

A 3D layout was made to scale to replicate our filming environment as closely as possible and back plates were created to import into each scene; this meant the animation would fit with the 2D footage and not cause any additional issues later on in post production.

Rendering and Comp

Here are some breakdowns of the rendering and compositing process. This shows how we integrated the CG character and props with live action footage.

Poster

Finally, we designed a poster for our film, which is currently displayed on campus at Escape Studios!

Awards

We began working on this film in September 2022 and completed the project in December the same year. As of April 2023, Tech Troubles has won three awards across Europe. Thank you for your support!

The Team

David Akinyose - Director, Writer, Animator

Louis-Phillippe Gaffney - Producer, 3D VFX Artist

Zoe Walker - Assistant Producer, Animator

Eren Arnold - Art Director, Animator

Iulineia Filip - Storyboard Artist, Animator

Anand Sembhi - Animator

James Bennet - Lead 3D VFX Artist

Danish Adeem - Animator

Samuel Parrado - 3D VFX Artist

Ishmail Kargbo - 2D VFX Artist

Henry Claud N'Guetta - Lead 2D VFX Artist, Editor

Keshava Walcott - 3D VFX Artist

Matdawna Jn Philipp - Rigger