The Wingfeather Saga Short film

I had the opportunity to work on The Wingfeather Saga animated short this year. It was a great project all around: great story, great art, super talented team, etc…  The animated short was funded through a  super successful Kickstarter campaign. There were a core pre-production and directorial team composed of industry veterans. Tom Owens as director, Keith Lango as CG Supervisor, Nicholas Kole as Production Designer, and Chris Wall as Producer. This that was spread out across the United States, and then funneled the work into Magnetic Dreams for the bulk of the creation of the short.

As for my involvement, I helped out in RnD during the early phases of production, to test and define/refine the look of the show. There was a clear intent to go into a new style of the show. A style where the show would look like ” the art book of the show”. The 3D and 2D would be merged to have a great 2D style. So in the compositing, we were looking into the different techniques to bring the 3D rendered and the 2d painted backgrounds together, and figure out what the tools and visual vocabulary would be for the show.

As compositing supervisor, I would work 3 or 4 shots of each sequence to set the look and feel for the sequences. Defining what the color correction values were for the 3D characters, defining and fx looks ( particles, light rays, etc…), modifying panted backgrounds if needed. Then, I would pass on the sequence to one or two other comp artists to help with propagating the look.

This was definitely a very fun project to work on (even though it involved many nights and weeks ends) and I think it shows!

This is an example of re-usage of painted backgrounds. Instead of having an artist give us another painting, we would go through the photoshop layers in the comp department and color correct the painting to give it a night feel.