The Making of “A Night at the Cathedral”

When the team at Studio Lampion started preparing for the production of what would eventually become our animated short film A Night at the Cathedral, all we knew was that we wanted to create a showcase project for our prospective clients and at the same to develop an efficient pipeline for our future productions.
It would have to be an animated short film of high quality and incorporate a distinctive style, yet at the same time be as simple as possible: As a start-up company with only two core artists we realized it would be vital to start out small and within reason – especially considering the production would be 100% self-financed and that we would be working on it alongside our paying projects for clients.

Early concept art of the magnificient bell tower

Brainstorming for story concepts we came up with more than half a dozen plots in just as many different settings but soon realized they all had one thing in common: They were too complex! So we took a step back and critically analyzed all the concepts we had come up with and whether there was anything that could be simplified so much as to be realistic within our modest means.
After much back and forth we eventually decided to go with the medieval theme as this undertaking seemed reasonable after eliminating any dispensable characters, settings and subplots. Moreover, we felt a strong connection to the main character and had a vivid image in our minds of what the resulting film should look like. We were aiming to portray a painterly, traditional cartoon feel and wanted to avoid the somewhat sterile look displayed by many modern 3D productions.
Armed with a set of proprietary tools that would help us in achieving this goal and years of production experience in all areas of 2D and 3D film-making, we finally got underway with our short film A Night at the Cathedral.

At this point in the process we had concepts for the characters, the setting and a basic plot, which boiled down to “Our birdbrained protagonist Belze is on a quest to steal the golden statue of the Holy Mazioles from a medieval cathedral and, of course, fails miserably.”

Cologne Cathedral

With the story’s plot taking shape we decided to get a feel for the film’s atmosphere and surroundings and did a lot of research on medieval art and history. Unfortunately, only few medieval structures remain in our town of Berlin, so we took some time to travel to historic and inspiring places such as the Cologne Cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris, Lyon and to visit castles on the Rhine river. There we took hundreds of reference photos, many of which we later reused as textures or details in our background mattes.

Concept Art of Clara playing the organ

The various impressions gathered during these research trips were incorporated into our concept art, which we drew, painted, modeled and rendered in 3D to visualize our ideas and to help define the look of the film.
Around the same time we started sketching out ideas for the protagonist Belze, our evil but not exactly brilliant thief. Belze represents the archetype of the comedic villain: He is sinister and wicked but yet clumsy and totally useless. In designing this character we were inspired by classic Disney villains and also took some cues from the Monkey Island series.
His antagonist is Clara, a young lady playing the organ during the night our story unfolds. She is a somewhat one-dimensional plot-device in that she doesn’t have any motives of her own and is only there to react to whatever Belze is up to.

Storyboard: Belze fleeing from the Cathedral

With the characters and story roughly laid out in our minds and on paper, our next step towards the realization of this project was creating storyboards. You might say we “cheated” a bit in this phase, as we did not actually draw most of the storyboard sheets at all – instead, since we happened to already have some early models of the characters and environments underway, we used these to create mock storyboards in 3D. This of course benefited us immensely, as we are definitely better 3D artists than draftsmen and this way had more options and patience for experimenting with the scenes’ layouts and getting perspectives to work just right. Furthermore we could keep working in these initial scenes over the course of the project and continuously updated them to include our latest improvements in modeling, texturing and animation. This workflow streamlined our task of managing the huge number of digital assets a 3D film production invariably entails.

3D character model

The character models in this film consist of very basic meshes with a polygon count closer to last generation video games than most modern film productions. We opted for this route because it is well suited for our simple character designs. Their bold features helped us to focus on creating strong silhouettes that are easily read and not having to worry so much about getting the rig messed up or facing other technical annoyances.

The rig itself is quite elementary and based on one we had created for an earlier animated short film, Now That Takes The Biscuit, which was similar in style to this film. Therefore the rig lends itself well to cartoony animation and features support for stretchy limbs and basic squash and stretch effects but does not offer much in the way of fancy automation or dynamics.

Clara's facial features where rendered in 2D

While Belze’s face was rigged the traditional way using blend shapes, we decided for a totally different approach for Clara; her flat and cartoony expressions would have been impractical to model, texture and animate in 3D, so we developed a proprietary plug-in for Adobe After Effects that projects the facial features onto her face in 2D. For this to work we needed to render out UV- and ID-passes of her head so that our plug-in would know where to place the eyes, mouth and nose. As these facial features were hand-drawn and animated in 2D, it was easy for us to create custom expressions depending on each scene’s specific needs and to time and animate them accordingly.

At one point during the production we were considering using motion capture technology for our character animation but eventually came to the conclusion that it would be cost-prohibitive and would also most likely work against the cartoon look we had established for this film.
So everything ended up being animated by hand the traditional 3D way. The biggest challenge here was in properly emulating the cartoon animation style we had used as our reference. We soon learned that the way squash and stretch animation works in 2D may look great but is unfortunately physically inaccurate and therefore hard to translate into our meticulous world of three-dimensional space and movement.
Our solution was to animate as far as possible in 3D and to afterwards emphasize the animation and squash and stretch effects using 2D tools such as the liquify filter in Photoshop on a frame-by-frame basis.

Normality: All characters were shaded and lit using our proprietary 2D tool

This method became feasible only due to our particular approach to shading and lighting. Unlike most productions where shading and lighting are applied in a 3D application on actual 3D models, we used an in-house solution to avoid this often frustrating and painstaking task. In this project the shading and lighting was done in 2D in Adobe After Effects using our proprietary plug-ins Normality and Celulight. This real-time re-lighting solution enables us to interactively shade and light on animation sequences that were rendered as normal-passes from a 3D program beforehand.

We found several advantages in this method: All changes are applied in real-time making the process feel far more intuitive and creative than hitting “re-render” time and time again in a 3D program. As there is no appreciable delay involved this workflow lends itself well to creative experimentation. And best of all, we could view the character animations within the context of the final backgrounds in a color-corrected, composited environment, making it easy to judge the quality and appearance of our final shots.

Normality offers a vast array of tools and controls to help define the look you're aiming for

To use Normality a number of simple passes are extracted from a 3D renderer which contain for example information about an object’s surface normals and the scene depth encoded in a 2D image format. These passes render in mere seconds and require no tweaking, making it a totally fail-safe process.
This image sequence is then imported into After Effects, where Normality is applied to the normal pass. Once a light is added to the scene, Normality calculates the shading right there in the compositing environment; any changes to the lights and shaders are made visible immediately and interactively.

What started out as a set of simple plug-ins for After Effects has developed into a complex shading and lighting solution over the years – the software is no longer limited to mere diffuse or specular lighting: It currently includes support for fake reflections, refractions, subsurface-scattering, screen-space ambient occlusion and even a very simplified global illumination model, many of which were used during the production of A Night at the Cathedral. Thanks to these tools our render times were only a fraction of what a full 3D raytracing renderer would have required.

Wireframe of the cathedral split into several independent parts

While part of the team was busy animating and shading characters, others began creating background mattes for all 30 shots, which meant modeling a medieval cathedral and its surroundings from the ground up. Obviously a cathedral and its interior is an enormous and highly detailed scene which can be quite a burden even on state-of-the-art soft- and hardware. Consequently the polygon count for individual objects was kept as low as possible.
To make working with this 12.000.000 polygon scene bearable, we split the cathedral up into more than a dozen blocks, each pertaining to a specific area and which could be imported on a shot-by-shot basis.
Wherever it made sense, instancing was used in order reduce the scene’s memory footprint: For example, the side of the cathedral is comprised of a dozen identical instances of a single wall piece that are automatically repeated and thereby save a lot of memory. The same is true for benches, stained-glass windows, chandeliers and many other complex details inside the building.

Background rendered with PANDA

Both the cathedral model and textures are basic in terms techniques applied – just clean polygon meshes and medium resolution textures including diffuse, bump- and normal-maps. Our trick to creating the painterly backgrounds seen in the film was Studio Lampion’s proprietary non-photorealistic 2.5D renderer, PANDA (Paint AND Automate). This tool automatically repaints scenes using actual strokes painted by an artist by converting the location and direction of these 2D brush strokes into actual 3D space. It thereby becomes possible to automatically repaint the scene from arbitrary perspectives. The brush strokes remain coherent over time to avoid the noisy flickering effect simpler 2D paint solutions may exhibit.

PANDA was used to generate the non-photorealistic look on our 3D models

After having PANDA create a painterly base for a shot, we brought these background layers into Photoshop for basic cleanup and adding additional detail in 2D. Often reference photos of statues and ornaments we had taken in castles and churches during the pre-production phase were used to embellish the background mattes by first extracting a normal-map from the photo and then conforming the colors and overall lighting to the background environment’s.

Finally, everything was brought together in After Effects where we added special effects such as fire, snow and fog to the shots and integrated characters and backgrounds by making the lighting match using Normality.

The production of A Night at the Cathedral was finished in November ’08 after about eleven months of work. Studio Lampion is currently refining certain elements of the film based on the feedback we received from our screening audiences.

Article first published in 3D Artist magazine.