Download the hi resolution short HERE – 20 MB download Watch it at youtube here at extremely low quality – not recommended 
Here’s the deal on this one: Since at New Bulgarian University I needed two short movies to graduate, I needed a second one – and I needed something that I could do really fast and somewhat convincing – so I could call it a short movie and look my professor in the eyes I mean. I decided to use this old script I wrote for school on an assignment – the topic was “The Little Prince meets the computer”. The Little Prince is the name of Antoin De Saint Exupery’s great novel, but if you don’t know what it’s about, you wouldn’t get the movie anyway , cause it’s based on its character – a magical boy, who interprets the world in a magical way, finding meaning/symbols in everything. Well, more than that, but that’s what is important in this case. I made this short literally in 5 days. It is named “The complex semiotic aspects of modern day non-verbal communication (DVD_SCR)” and is not to be taken seriously. Here’s some more info you might find interesting: The whole movie is 3D, nearly everything was done in 3D Studio Max. The textures were mapped on simple planes and on more complex but just as flat shapes. The shadows are integral part of the textures, embedded in the alpha channels. If you note how the little stars rotate, you will see that the shadow rotates with the star as well. This was done to achieve faster render times and I believe is almost unnoticeable – and very worth it in terms of speed. The whole compositing part, including the credits’ ink effects, the mixing of focused/defocused parts of the image, the light effects at the rose part, the monitor and everything – all was done and composited in 3D Studio, using a single camera that renders the whole thing from start to finish. 
The camera shake was done using mouse motion capture controller, I remember I had problems getting that to look right, but in the end it does look convincing. Looking at it now, it can use some slight zoom in/zoom out effects. The main texture is a tiling one of wrinkled ( argh, what was the word for that in English… ) paper, which I’ve “aged” with coffee and coca cola stains and then scanned. 
The props and characters themselves are drawn in Photoshop using two brushed I did made to resemble a pen and a pencil. If you look closely, you can note guest-starring Yoda, Bender and R2-D2, as well as the symbol of a famous beer brand. Everything was great fun doing, and doesn’t claim any serious artistic achievements, though there are certain aspects of the movie I like very much and will probably use again on occasion. The music I used for the outro is Joe Satriani’s awesome track “Theme For A Strange World”, and for the intro the theme music of a 70’s sci-fi series’ named “Buck Rogers in the 25th century”. |
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Posted by: Paul Townsend Email: paul@projectairbrush.com It took a while to download and went quickly, but it was COOL! Lot's of subtleties, I had to pause it a few times to catch them. So cool. |