Indian Animation veteran Siju Thomas, now part of the creative leadership at Technicolor India Team presented Technicolor‘s maiden IP venture Pete & Pickles. This is a proposed TV Series based on a bestselling book by Pulitzer Prize winning author Berkeley Breathed.
“I‘m not talking Art today or character design, I‘m talking method, I‘m talking pipeline design.” He began. “We have a unique set of rules when it comes to designing a pipeline for content creation. You have a finite budget and finite time, You have a creator who has done concept art in 2D painted form, your team is going to bring it alive in CG and make sure it is unique to its‘ market and is creatively satisfying”
“There are certain pre-conceived notions about a CG pipeline. It‘s widely believed that the pipeline is kind of assembly line and the way one goes about producing different shows is similar. However, we at Technicolor believe the essence of a pipeline is that it need not be the same on all projects. If you work on designing your workflow and pipeline just as you do the pre -production, it will be a rewarding experience in the long run,” he stated.
“We started off this pilot with making a digital maquette of the Lead Characters in a defining pose, and then digitally printed out a physical model,” pointed Siju.
“This model was not for inspiration alone, since it evolved into the final model itself…We took a call to use Mental Ray and no Renderman, no layered shader‘s, no SSS or ray tracing . We took our inspiration from next gen console games, we decided we will throw art and our best animation at it and not necessarily the most complex technology. We decided to be true to the vision of the author and deliver a very high quality product” he shared.
“The next challenge was to orient our team with this new pipeline we developed as they were used to working on a different pipeline for other High-End TV shows. The start was steady but slow and after a while we started seeing results that were in line with what this ‘property‘ is all about!”
“Once the texture artists started gaining confidence the work started to rock! We started knocking down the render times. Each fully lit frame was being rendered at 40 seconds per frame. We managed to wrap this whole thing up in a month and a half. Meanwhile the Animation Team was working round the clock doing some kick-ass work, And the result is there for all of you to see!”
We were then treated to 1 ? minutes of amazing animation from Pete & Pickles, which is the trailer shown to an Indian audience for the first time!