Critical Hit

Critical Hit

All of the production of our film was done by students as part of the BA Animation course IADT, Ireland. The 3 directors, Siobhan Hardt, Sinead Keane and Bobby McCune did the majority of the work with some help from 1st, 2nd and 3rd year animation students. Production took place between September 2018 - June 2019. 

We are very proud of what we accomplished with this film. With only having received 2 modules in 3D that were mostly just 3D animation we had a lot to figure out and learn on our own. 

Concepting

The film’s theme surrounds the medieval fantasy genre and tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons, so we decided to lean into these visuals and tropes. The concept art was created alongside the script, so that both the story and the visuals could support each other. We collected many reference images and our main source of inspiration was Sea of Thieves, particularly the hand-painted textures.

For Rey, our goth cashier, a severe haircut and makeup with a sullen expression were to exaggerate her sour demeanor and act as a contrast to Chester. Originally Rey’s “fantasy form” was a princess, however we decided this was too passive for her personality, so she was redesigned as an elven ranger.

We had some fellow classmates do some colour test and environment design for us.

Storyboards

We went through many different iterations of storyboards before we were happy. Our film went through significant changes to the story during pre production. We had issues with our characters being perceived differently than what we wanted so we changed dialogue and the interactions between Chester and Rey to make Chester a more likeable character. 

Modelling and Texturing

All of the modelling in the film was done in Maya. This was our first time modelling human characters with correct topology so that was a challenge to get correct. We tried to keep the background objects relatively low poly to keep the scene manageable.

All of the texturing was done in Photoshop. This was the first time for all of us to do any texturing. We had a lot of objects to be textured in both environments so we tried to recruit as many students as possible from the years below to help. This included teaching students how texturing works as it is not something that is taught in our course. We ended up with 240 handpainted textures at the end.

Rigging

Rigs were created solely in Maya with no additional third party plug-ins. Character rigging was a challenging but rewarding part of the production; the two lead riggers of the project, Bobby and Siobhan, had some prior rigging experience from their previous year of college, and got by a lot on self learning through online resources and books.

Due to time constraints and the uncertainty of how long certain processes would take, certain tasks were cut as much as possible while retaining quality. Rigging was dictated by the needs of the animation, but also by the desired learning outcomes of each rigger where possible; for example, Chester provided a valuable chance to practice joint-driven facial rigging for Bobby, while also providing an expressive rig for the animators on the project. The rigging production plan was updated constantly based on ongoing progress, and a referencing system was used in Maya so that rig updates could be easily applied, even when animation had begun. 

Voice Acting

We put out a casting call online and held auditions to find the perfect voice for Chester. We chose Aaron Edo and recorded his voice with the help of some sound design students from IADT, using the college's recording studio.

Animation

Our biggest inspiration for the animation was Sony Animation, in particular the exaggerated style of "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" and "Hotel Transylvania". We wanted Chester to move in big arcs, while Rey was intentionally stiff to act as contrast.

Lighting, Rendering and Compositing

We rendered our film with Arnold. It was a challenge to reduce render times and we had to cut quite a few corners. We tried to have 4 lights or less in each shot and only used simple shaders to keep render times down. We added in a lot of lighting effects and depth of field effects at the composting stage rather than having them in the render. We were lucky to have some free computers that we could render on during the day and often let the PCs render over night. It took roughly 2 months to render our film.

We did all of our compositing in After Effects. We heavily relied on the compositing stage to add things we couldn’t in the render. We also added some 2D effects at this stage, this was inspired by the Spiderverse film. 

Festivals

Critical Hit has screened at IADT’s graduate show and six Irish film festivals since June 2019. It was nominated for two awards, Best 3D/CGI and Best Animation, in the 2020 Animation Dingle student awards. We were delighted to share our film, take part in Q&A’s, and meet fellow short film creators thanks to these festivals.