Exclusive Interview with EXODE's Team

[ #CGRecord #Interview #Animation #Zbrush #Vray #3dsMax ]4 months ago, a student group included Baptiste Roy, Nicolas Mrikhi, Sandrine Gimenez, Kathleen Cartier and Thomas Saez has published EXODE - a great 8' graduation film about the last breath of a giant creature spurs the exodus of an entire people. And today Paul Hellard from CGRecord has an exclusive interview with the Team to learn more about how the film was made. Check it out!

>> See Also: Learn Animation

Directed by Baptiste Roy, Nicolas Mrikhi, Sandrine Gimenez, Kathleen Cartier and Thomas Saez, EXODE is the fourth year group short animated film project for these Supinfocom (renamed MOPA School) students in Arles. “The artists are from all over France,” says Nicolas Mrikhi via email, “and the project is a very much a group effort of collaboration.”
The main idea was about a civilization living on the back of a giant creature walking across the desert. On the back of every creature are other tiny creatures living their daily lives. The first challenge was to show how completely vast the desert lizard is. Their heavy, dusty foot fall. The sheer detail of each scale and ripple on its back. Nicolas Mrikhi take up the story.
“We see the landscape of seeming mountains and realise there are creatures living in the cracks on the lizard’s skin,” explains Mrikhi. “Then we asked ourselves what would happen if this creature, their home, dies?"

How did you all work together to create EXODE?
At the MOPA School, the film teams are generated around the selected student projects, so everyone could get involved depending on their preferences. For the concept development, there were no defined roles. I was the ‘original author’ but the whole group participated in the collaboration of the story and the visual style, but for the rest of the production, we had precise technical roles. Thomas was in charge of all the animation, Kathleen dealt with the cloth simulation and crowd management, Sandrine, Baptiste and I were dealing with the visual aspects (modeling, surfacing, lighting, compositing). Baptiste was also in charge of the rigging and the technical direction. Sandrine took care of the exodus part matte painting and I dealt with the previz/animatic editing.
For this project we used a workflow that was very new to us. Usually creating in Autodesk 3ds Max and Chaos Group’s V-Ray, this project was generated using Maya and Arnold. We had to learn how to use the software on-the-fly, during the production, mostly by ourselves. Fortunately, we had professionals coming regularly during the year, especially Olivier Renouard, who worked on the development of Maya to Arnold (MtoA).
Since almost everything in the movie is made of stone, we used ZBrush to sculpt every asset. The Dynamesh tool was very useful since we were defining the final shape and design of our assets directly in Sculpture. We then re-topologised the meshes and used displacement maps to get back all the sculpting details. The Arnold features (Mip Mapping, Auto Bump, Pixel Error), were great for this kind of project since we have a lot of details everywhere. We are currently working on a making of video, It will be released very soon. Our characters are silhouettes. They had to express basic human archetypes (the old one, the strong one, the parent and the child) so everyone can relate to them as part of a people. The main idea was to keep it simple, to refine them as much as we could. There is no deep psychology behind these characters because they need to represent the whole people. Their visual design was the continuation of this, the "rocky" look was a way to show that they are in symbiosis with their environment (the creature). During the refining of their character design, we gave them a more rough sculpty look with sharper edges to avoid the "uncanny valley" effect we had with the previous models. For the overall visual development part, our motto was to be realistic in the textures, but slightly stylized in the shapes.

Please talk about the texture of the clothing for the human characters.
At first we wanted a "sculpted rock" look, with sharp edges for the clothes too, but we realised that would not work on movement. So we decided to keep the rough feeling using heavy used cloth instead. Using both Marvelous Designer for the design and Qualoth for the simulation gave us a nice drapery that contrasted well with the sharp edged characters. For the texture, I used opacity and displacement maps to simulate thickness and worn fabric, especially at the borders. What was the biggest challenge for the team during the making of the EXODE movie?
Our main challenge producing this film was to manage to create a great sense of scale. We used slow-paced shots, atmospheric effects and iconic shots, like the one with the creature’s eye.
Since it is a short film, we had to refine everything, that's one of the reasons why our human characters have no eyes or mouths. That, particularly was a big challenge, from visual development to animation. The first sculpted version of our main characters were not what we expected. The concept designs of those eyeless faces worked in 2D, mostly with the light and shadow effects on their faces. But as soon as we sculpted them, they seemed like zombies with the lifeless empty eye sockets. At a certain point of the production, we decided to remodel them from scratch, this time directly in 3D using ZBrush. We gave them the more rough and sculpted look they have now, drawing inspiration from Giaccometti sculptures and the Easter Island statues. This was a hard decision to take, because we were already well advanced in the production and had not much time to lose. But in the end we were very glad we did this makeover so the audience can relate to the character and not be creeped out by them!

Making of EXODE: Previz Animation

Please discuss these animation graduate programs. What is your advice for artists producing their own graduation film.

In my opinion, the strong point in our graduation course was the group collaboration. There is a kind of healthy competition between the students, but there is also a lot of mutual assistance. The teachers and the courses are important, but you have to work a lot by yourself and be highly motivated. During our graduation year, we often stayed the weekends at school to work, very late at night. This demanded a lot of dedication to our project. It is also important to learn how to work in a team. That's a great preparation for the professional world.

My advice for someone who is going to make his own graduation film is to find an idea, a project that you really like and a team of people as invested and passionate as you, because you are going to stick with them during a whole year, almost seven days a week and 15-17 hours a day!
Many teams become a great studio so what are your plans for the future?

For now we do not have plans of becoming our own studio. Sandrine and Baptiste are working in London and Kathleen, Thomas and I in Paris, working in various VFX and animation studios. But we will not forget the idea of having other personal projects, individually or not.

Thank you the team! We wish to see more and more inspiration work from you!
Thank you Paul and CGRecord Team!

  More about CG Record Interview