All Aboard!

All Aboard! is an animated short film aiming to tell a story with a purpose. Frame after frame, we follow the story of Ray, a little chromosome, trying to find a place on the Nucleus Express. His journey does not go as planned, but turns out to be the adventure of a lifetime, making friends along the way and learning altogether, that with a little effort, everyone has a place.

Ray's journey to find his place on the Nucleus Express mirrors the journey many individuals with Down Syndrome and other differences face in finding acceptance and belonging in society.

By focusing on such themes and highlighting the experiences of a character like Ray, we want to raise awareness and foster empathy and understanding. It's through storytelling like this that we can inspire positive change and encourage inclusivity.

Film Teaser

The Short Film

Concepts

LookDev

RIGGING

For Copper and Ray's facial rig, it was done in two stages. First, we worked on skinning deformations of the lips, cheeks, eyebrows, and eyelids, with a consistent weight distribution, allowing movement of a set with details. For example, when moving the three top lip skin controllers, it moves the entire lip consistently. This initial skinning work then allowed us to sculpt precise shapes for the expressions of our characters, which were further refined using the BCS. This tool enables more complex and efficient combinations of blend shapes than Maya's native tools. The final result provides us with controllers that activate precise blend shapes in the character's specific expression, and the initially created skinning controllers enhance the deformations of the blend shapes, as each unique deformation of a blend shape controller has its counterpart in skinning.

Some Stills

Compositing Breakdowns

GlassMaker

Our main character, Ray, has magnifying glasses, an interesting question raised : How can we avoid rendering glasses in every shot and have an optimized workflow that gives us flexibility in choosing what we see through them and what we don't see ?

The answer is simple : the GlassMaker !

It is a Nuke gizmo designed by one of our team member, specifically for Ray's sight.

To make it work, you will need: the camera of the shot, the animated 3D object, both character and environment renders and an ST map, created on nuke, based on the glasses' UVs, and defines their deformation.

With a switch, we can define whether we see the character in the refractions or no.

For example, if a character revolves around themselves, at some point we would be looking at the environment through their glasses, and in this case, we just want to see the environment and not the character anymore. This is when this switch becomes really useful :

And here is a 360° turn with the switch animated :

And finally the glasses frame, with and without the J_GlassMaker effect :

Besides the different 3D elements imported as inputs, the gizmo, the setup and the STmap are fully done on The Foundry Nuke.

Magical Rails

We needed to create the rails for our magical train. We wanted to create something fancy looking, yet that is completely time-saver and fully done on Nuke.

take a look :

The goal was having the rails appear in a magical spark out of nowhere before the vehicle arrives and disappear after it, leaving some particles behind.

Here is a close look on some of the big steps I went through to create them :

First, we created a roto, growing over the UVs of my model, and using an STmap, making the rails appear and disappear with the right speed and timing :

From left to right :

1) the white base filling (shown in the video above)

2) Noises, applied using the Position Aov (_Pworld), with different scales, intensity and values, to bring variation to the different strings of the rails and creating the sparkly aspect thay got.

3) Color grading the different strings.

4) Isolating the edges of the rails, and then using their position information (thanks to a PositionToPoints node) as a particle emittter.

Talking about particles, here are the three particles I shaped using nuke flare node. They are the 3 variants I am emitting from the isolated points, in different sizes, shapes, colors and intensity :

On the right, the first layer of particles sparks out as a magic flicker triggering the apparition of the rails.

On the left, the second layer of particles, acting like fairy dust left after their arrival :

Last but not least ; assembling all the different layers, grading dome parts and making some other glow in give the whole as much magic as possible !

The final scene of the film, is shot in Live action, here's the raw plate and the final composited version :

To thank you for going through our entry, here's a behind the scenes look at our day on set !

Credits

All Aboard! 

Directed by : Joe Azar, Sasha Grandet, Sami Haouas, Camille Lecour, Julie Marquet, Anaïs Mascherpa and Christina Varlokosta.

Original Idea : Joe Azar

Original Soundtrack : Matthieu Monot

Mixing : Studio des Aviateurs 

Interns : Anaë Duquenne, Camille Lecture and Vincent Bohnert

Live Action unit : Romain Escudier - Sound Engineer, Aleks Houze - Cameraman and Thibault Sauze - Machinist

 Actor : Victor Grobon

Voice Actors : Angela Kent, Lilian Toumi and Audrey Bourgeois.

Special thanks : Vincent Drisch, Alice Drisch,  Association M21, all the staff and teachers at ESMA Lyon.

Production Roles

Joe Azar : Scenario, Production management, Compositing, lighting, rendering,lookdev, Character and Environment modeling, grooming, pipeline, RnD, surfacing and post-production. 

Sasha Grandet : Animation, Modeling, RnD, sculpting, rigging, layout, 3D animatic, concept art and editing.

Sami Haouas : Body & Facial rigging, Animation, concept art, story, modeling

Camille Lecour : Character Rigging, Animation, VFX, story, CFX, layout, modeling, tech anim, props rigging.

Julie Marquet : Compositing, Texturing, Shading, Post-Production, concept art, modeling, lookdev, 2DFX, mattepainting , editing, rendering, layout cameras, FX alembics, grooming, gestion.

Anaïs Mascherpa : Concept art, Modeling, story, RnD, lookdev.

Christina Varlokosta : Lighting, Compositing, Storyboard, texturing, lookev, modeling, grooming, rendering, concept art.