The story of two plumbers on a mission to fix a dangerously explosive boiler...
Tarnation is Strangetown's first company short film. It took 2 years on and off to complete. Production was hindered by client projects running alongside. Tarnation originated as a piece of work produced for a client. We approached the client after completion of the project and requested re-use of the same characters + 20 seconds of the animation for a short film. They had no issues with us re-using the characters or the animations so we then went on to develop the short film.
Considering we were re-using the characters + some animation and set/prop models developing the short was no easy feat. There were a lot of improvements + extra sequences to produce in order for the new piece to work as a short film. For the film compared to the client piece we felt the need to go a different direction stylistically. The client piece featured more muted textures + simple lighting for a very cartoon look. For the film we put a lot of energy into making the textures much more detailed and lighting more sophisticated for an advanced aesthetic appeal.
One of the biggest challenges was creating a story around the 20 second action sequence we had produced for the client project. It wasn't too difficult to come up with initial ideas because the characters had a sense of story to begin with but coming up with a complete story was difficult. As production progressed the story kept evolving. Running time went from 1 minute to nearly 3 minutes. Obviously the more the story evolved the more work needed to be done.
The next challenge was improving the animation pass by pass which involved analyzing every shot and listing possible improvements then working on them. The last major challenge was the rendering process which was very taxing in time. Tarnation was rendered in three stages and then composited together. The most time consuming render process was the ambient occlusion pass which could take 24 hours for a few seconds of animation. This process is very time consuming but the improvement in quality is worth the wait.
Overall we are very happy with how the film turned out. It serves as an entertaining little film that showcases our ability and the experience of making a short film while working on client projects was a great learning curve for future endeavors. To note Tarnation on the site is a cut down version made for Virgin Media Shorts.
