Stiff - Short film by Michael Tiedtke

“Just because you’re stiff, doesn’t mean you’re a stiff.”

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Hi! 👋 My name is Michael, a soon graduate from Visual Magic in Sweden. A CG Artist focusing on Lighting, FX and Compositing. I wanted to write my first short film about a story that focuses on a single character and work with emotions around this without telling the viewer how to feel through dialogue. I wanted to practice creating visual storytelling through deep and relatable characters.

MY 5 PROJECT GOALS 🎨

1. Complete a CG short film from start to finish.
2. Create a character driven story with all elements I’ve learned of how to structure a story (character development arc, protagonist vs. antagonist, macguffin etc)
3. Use visual storytelling and not dialogue to drive to story forward and convey emotions.
4. Plan the shots in layers, creating each element based on importance and screen size, such as characters, hero assets, backgrounds etc.
5. Try all aspects of an animated film - from script and storyboard to animation and editing.

NOTE: Below I'll discuss spoilers for the film, so if you like stories unspoiled I highly recommend watching the film above before proceeding further down. 🙂

STORY & PREVIS 🆕

I wanted to create a character driven short film and do all aspects of the process on my own. To do this, I wrote a character-driven story with all the essential elements of how to structure a story, including character development arcs, protagonist vs. antagonist, and the use of a MacGuffin etc. Throughout the script and design process, I used visual storytelling techniques and avoided relying on dialogue to drive the story forward and convey emotions.

To plan out the shots, I developed a layered approach, creating each element based on its importance and screen size, such as characters, hero assets, and backgrounds. I started by writing and iterating the script using StudioBinder. I then created the storyboard and base for the shot list in Storyboarder.

If you're a fellow artist I can't recommend Storyboarder enough (Storyboarder, not Storyboard Pro). This is a free software from the folks at Wonderunit in which you can basically create storyboards. However the main thing that makes it great, is its built in 3D workspace that lets you place 3D assets, build your storyboard and pose characters without having to draw a single line (if you don't want to). In here I designed the entire short film, shot for shot, and since I could place cameras I could so quickly find angles that worked in favor for the story. Over the course of the project I iterated several times on the order of the shots and also made a completely new ending. 

When I had everything locked in I recorded all shots with Stiff using myself as an actor. It was a simple setup with only a mirrorless camera, no lights etc. This footage I later used as background reference when animating, and it did help a lot! 

Summary of the story and previs:

- Script written in StudioBinder, iterated over time.
- Storyboard using the free 3D app Storyboarder.
- Shot all “character animations” using myself as an actor for reference when animating. 

CHARACTERS 🦕

The film revolves around "Stiff" who is an old, unsold and broken wooden mannequin. He lives in an Art & Crafts shop in London.  An unknown incident a couple of years ago has left Stiff without an arm, and as a result, he has been excluded from the group of other mannequins on the shelf and been placed in the discount corner. Despite the discounted price, no one has bought the Stiff mannequin for years, as they can buy a complete wooden figure that works better. He has long admired humans ability to express themselves through art and visuals, and has therefore been eyeing the various paintings on the walls of the store. Stiff dreams of being a painter and creating colorful works of art. He doesn't want to be a stiff, just because he's stiff.

Summary of the characters:

- Modeled in Blender.
- Rigged using Auto-Rig Pro add-on with some custom controllers for the mannequin base etc.
- Special detailing on textures in Substance Painter to show wear and tear, scratches, paint stains, dust etc indicating none has bought Stiff for a long time.

PRE-PRODUCTION & SHOT MANAGEMENT 🗓️

To keep track of my tasks, important dates, links to all documentation such as script, storyboard, shotlist, asset collections and more I used one of my favorite new tools: Notion. This free task software is amazing and made it so easy to quickly get an overview of my work. 

ASSETS 🍩

My main focus of this short film wasn't to create everything on my own as I knew very well that doing so (with the quality of the assets I was looking for) would postpone any deadline for several years. Therefore I made a collection on Sketchfab and started browsing for high quality models, free under creative common licences. I quickly gathered a huge library of assets I could choose from to decorate my scene. And what I couldn't find on Sketchfab I instead found on Quixel Bridge directly in Unreal Engine. 

As I will touch upon more down below, optimization of the assets were somewhat of an issue for me as about 90% of the assets from Sketchfab were good looking, but either had hundreds of materials, non-logical (if any) naming conventions, trillions of polys or missing texture paths. I spent a great deal of the project simply fixing these for my project.

I had my mind set on that I wanted to create the hero assets myself though, these include the brush, book, color palette and paint cans. Due to the time restriction I had to finish the film I didn't do the color palette myself as it was kitbashed with parts from Sketchfab. 

Summary of the assets used:

- Mainly sourced from Sketchfab (with creative commons licence), spent a lot of time importing .dae and .blend files into Blender, re-linking missing textures, renaming files etc. Great assets, but painful to work with.
- Secondary source was Quixel Bridge, great assets and good naming conventions, but didn’t follow the same structure as me in Unreal.
- Brush was made in Blender using hair particle system.
- Paint can and the book were also modeled by me. 

ENVIRONMENT 🗻

For this shortfilm I had planned on three different locations or scenes. The first one would be an establishing shot outside of the shop on the cobble stone street. The next one would be the interior where Stiff and the other mannequins reside. The third and final is the kitchen scene at the end. 

Since I was looking for basically photo-realism, I wanted to build the environment in Unreal Engine 5 to fully utilize Nanite and having incredibly good looking environment assets. However I'm still very new to Nanite and Unreal Engine and did struggle a bit with optimization and while reducing the triangle count on the super high resolution Nanite meshes did help a bit I still had a working viewport FPS of around 20-25 in lit mode which did slow down my work somewhat. In the future I plan to learn more about organizing meshes, textures and shaders to get better performance.     

Summary of the environment:

- Built with Stiff at the world origin for super easy transfers of the scene between DCCs.
- Focused asset placement only in frame, so I placed cameras early on to see where I would place props.
- Made two master PBR materials and all assets use those as instances as much as possible.
- Large focus on coziness and authenticness of a London vintage shop i.e. local signs, props etc.
- I had to scrap the first scene outside the shop in order to meet the deadline.

Image description: First slide, overview of the UE5 scene in lit, detailed lighting only and unlit. Second slide, scene lighting look development.

STRUCTURED WORKFLOW 📜

A large focus of the project for me was just to work as structured and organised as possible. Except working with organisation in Notion as mentioned above, I also tried to follow the Unreal Engine naming conventions, USD folder structure for assets, keeping version numbers of everything that I iterated on and very detailed folders for renders, layers etc.

Even though it was just me working on the project, I felt that having an organised way of working with files and folders did slow me down at the start, but at the end of the project I literary flew through all the folders to find exactly what I was looking for in just a few seconds.

Image description: Animating characters is really new territory for me, but I found that having a reference plate behind the character when animating really helped with pacing of actions etc. 

Image description: After animation in Blender was done on the characters and hero assets, I rendered only those layers with alphas using pathtracing i.e. Cycles render engine to make sure where the viewers have the most attention on screen has the best quality. I then transferred USD assets to Unreal Engine and kept working on the shot there.

USD Pipeline 📘

A few months ago I learned about the USD workflow in the Houdini course at school. As I wanted to work with different softwares and needed a consistency in lighting, cameras and overall look between apps, I decided early on that I would rely heavily on USD - something that I'm super happy I did and probably wouldn't have gotten such a streamlined workflow without it.

It's not as implemented yet for Unreal Engine or Blender as it is for Houdini or Maya, but I still enjoyed several of it's benefits - such as being able to set up cameras and lighting in Blender, then transfer it with USD to Unreal Engine 5 and simply pick up where I left of with lights, cameras, focus settings and sequences already in place.

Image description: Thanks to USD, I could continue working on the shot in Unreal Engine directly after rendering the pathtraced layer in Blender. Importing animated cameras retained almost all settings. So nice! 

COMPOSITING ✨

Compositing was done in Blackmagic Fusion. In there I set up the node tree for the first shot, comping elements such as the UE5 rendered background together with the pathtraced render from Cycles, adding anamorphic lens artifacts, barrel distortion, film grain, the stop motion look and more. When I felt that the first shot was working out, I then simply copied this node tree for all of the other shots, only replacing elements that needed change for each shot.

Here's a summary of what went very well during the compositing in Fusion:  

- Background was rendered in 2048x858 in UE5 and upscaled to 4096x1716 before adding the native 4K layers on top - making renders/iterations in UE5 blazing fast.
- Used a lot of Reactor plugin nodes, such as Nuke nodes (Grade, ReGrain etc).
- Stop motion effect using TimeStretcher node with custom expression.
- Layer based color grading.

FX

I would like to add some information about the liquid paint dripping off Stiff at the end. As I'm very new to CG and VFX I did struggle trying to find a solution for how to do liquid simulations in such as short period of time, and I'm honestly really happy with how the final liquid paint turned out in the film - as it was done not using any liquids or simulations at all. Instead I figured out a way of animating height displacement masks on the models UV map. These animations I created in Fusion with various noise textures and masks. The masks then drove a number of different shaders in Blender, with different properties and visuals. It's probably not the correct way of doing this effect, but I did find it really fun to discover this technique on my own. 

Other noteworthy visual effects include the dust particles, which I made using Niagara in Unreal Engine 5. Finally the aspect ratio for the film is 2.39:1 (or 21:9) and I wanted to not just crop the frame or add black bars, but rather have the film authentically in this ratio. Therefore I set up the cameras in Blender and Unreal Engine to render using 2x squeezed optics. I then also researched lens imperfections and barrel distortion on real Angenieux and Panavision anamorphic cinema lenses and emulated that look on the comped footage.

Image description: Slide between pictures to see my fluid fx using displacement on the height map with animated masks. 

3 THINGS THAT DIDN'T WORK OUT?

The three key lessons I learned by doing this short film would probably be:

1. Doing a team-based project on my own, responsible for every dept, took a massive amount of work and dedication.
2. I was unprepared for and unfamiliar with animation (took longer than expected).
3. Unoptimized textures and shaders in Unreal Engine 5 gave me low framerates and a slow pace whilst working.

3 THINGS THAT DID WORK OUT?

Even if I encountered several problems and issues along my journey these are the three key takeaways from this short film that worked extremely well:

1. Learned a lot in different disciplines, especially animation.
2. Scalable project and the most organized and well structured project I’ve done to date.
3. Full ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) color management workflow from start to finish, on all textures and in all DCC apps, really made an impact on realism and color grading.

8 MOST VALUABLE LESSONS 🎓

I really learned a lot during this project, about so many things. If I were to summarize my experience and what I will remember for future projects, regardless of scope, these are the eight most valuable lessons for me which you can hopefully benefit from too:

1. Doing an animated short film of this scope is a team effort when time is against you.
2. Planning for how each shot will look like in pre-production, including separating each element to different layers and software is a massive time saver and will be my go-to approach for all future projects.
3. Background elements can totally be lower quality than the hero assets.
4. USD is the future. Embrace it now.
5. Animators are the real MVP.
6. Reference video for animations help a lot.
7. Noise modifiers on keyed channels can really speed up the animation process, subtle animations as "breathing" for example.
8. Stick to the planning, don’t go off on side-ventures such as minor background details.

TECHNICAL SPECS 🎥

Master resolution: 4096x1716
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1 (shot in 2x anamorphic)
Working Colorspace: ACEScg
Deliver Colorspace: sRGB

I've spent hundreds of hours on this project during my last semester at school (mostly evenings and late nights haha), but I feel it was worth it in the end. I hope you enjoyed my film - and remember, always believe in yourself, especially when facing doubters!  

Thanks for reading and watching! ❤️

Best,
tiedtke.

QUESTIONS? 💭

Drop me a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as possible!