Ben Stern came to the Digital Character Animation program with a little CG experience and a longtime love of acting. “When I was introduced to CG, I immediately saw how my acting experience could come into play in animation,” he says.

In his six months in DCA, followed by a two-month extension on a Festival Scholarship, Ben made Cricket. “The film draws you into a world, tells you a tale, and pleases you by its ending,” says Senior Instructor Greg Berridge. “It has all of the features of good visual storytelling.”

The process wasn’t without hiccups, and Ben actually switched stories at the eleventh hour. “He made some drastic changes late in the program which saw this film come into being,” Greg explains. “He wanted to see his film made no matter what obstacles arose.”

Ben, who now works at Vancouver’s Image Engine, was kind enough to delve into the process from start to finish. But before we get to that, let’s start with the end result:

Where are you from? What drew you to animation?

Germany, but my family is a bit of a traveling circus act, so we have spent time in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Since as long as I can remember, I have loved acting and participated in school plays. When I was introduced to CG, I immediately saw how my acting experience could come into play in animation, so in a sense the desire to animate has been with me since the beginning.

Did you have any previous training before joining VFS?

My previous training consisted of CG introductory courses, combined with work at Studio Aiko, my previous employers – and good friends!

The animation is important, but obviously a great deal of care went into Cricket’s look. Why was that important?

The cartoon-meets-reality style of CG is something I have always wanted to do. I saw many many great shorts online from many different students and studios that truly inspired me and served as reference.

The animation is important, yet I consider myself a very visual guy, so I really wanted the film to have a graphic punch to it. The approach was to keep geometry as basic as possible and let the textures do as much of the work as possible.

Preproduction: I know there were some aspects of preproduction that you skipped or hurried through. Still, the character designs are inspired. Could you describe what you did do at this early stage?

This may sound a bit corny, but almost the entire idea for the story – including the look – was born pretty instantly. It was a daydream that unfolded almost seamlessly, and was accurate down to 90 percent of the shots that I ended up doing.

There were certain things that needed to be refined – the way the army was destroyed is one of them. Originally I thought they would be swept away by a broken dam, but doing water simulations was just a bit much. So initially what I did was look for reference validations. Having seen so many great videos online, I knew where it had to go and I was just refining ideas, gathering references, and had some help doing character sketches from David Sookochoff.

What were some of the important considerations with the design of the story’s hero?

Ichiro was supposed to be cute and approachable, slightly doll- and infant-like. While designing, it was imperative to keep the overall proportions intact with that concept – large head and eyes, small stature, and so forth. In terms of matching the general theme, he adheres to the same design laws as the rest of the characters and objects – hard edges, low-poly, high texture.

The army – Sendo – were supposed to be ghoulish in appearance, half-demon [and] half-metal, and they needed to breathe fire. I played around with several colour options and shapes till I was able to get them to be the way they are now.

While they were initially supposed to be completely black, I quickly realized that it wouldn’t work well and decided to go with a more “natural” approach regarding the materials. The idea for the helmet was a simple stylized skull with horns.

Moving on to the modeling and rigging… You’d worked with CG before. Did you have Maya experience prior to VFS?

I took an introductory course when I first got in to CG, but had since then forgotten almost everything. The only thing I remembered was hitting the space bar to move between windows.

Could you describe the elements of this stage – what you had to do and how you achieved it? Why is this process important to a student pursuing character animation?

Apart from skipping the initial designs and overall concept build, everything went almost as it would normally. I started out by modeling and texturing several base assets as well as my characters.

Once I had approval – thanks, Greg! – those assets were refined, and I continued building more models and textures until everything had been modeled. What I would do is make a simple sketch of the object I wanted to create and then proceeded to create its 3D counterpart. Lighting tests were ongoing throughout the entire process, but were only finalized when the cameras were in place and the shots closed in terms of storyline.

Abhijit Roy helped me create a working rig with which to animate the character, at which point I was able to start creating poses and simple animations which gradually became more complex as the course progressed and were refined and tweaked. Once all my animation was completed it was time to render out my final film, for which I used mental ray.

In my opinion the only thing important to an animator is a proper rig. However, since the point of the course for me was to make a film, I found it equally important to create something visually appealing and therefore a lot of time and effort went into creating assets which had technically nothing to do with animation.

Could you walk our readers through the actual production process of animating the film. The story’s planned out, the assets are created: what do you do when you get to that stage?

Initially I posed the characters in the three key poses of that specific shot. It should be fairly easy to convey what the character is doing in several key poses, both in terms of readability and to connect the poses later on. After I had those, I would create the in-between poses and start smoothing out the animation into semi-fluid motion, which would become my first pass.

After that point, the majority of the work went into refining and tweaking what was essentially already there. On more than one shot however, I animated without building the base poses and just went all the way in one go, tweaking and refining at a later point. This would happen on shots that were either short or where I thought the concept was simple enough for straight-ahead animation, which feels more fluid to me.

The music and sound design for the film are obviously also fantastic. Could you describe that experience?

Working with the guys in Sound Design [at VFS] was a great experience. When we sat down in the beginning, I outlined what I wanted to do with the film in terms of sound and music. Robbie Elias and Travis Cameron were in charge of sound effects and Patrick Haggart performed the music I wrote. The guys would get my animatics and would proceed to making the sound scheme, after which we would meet and discuss what changes had to be done.

The idea behind the entire soundscape for the film was to get it to sound as epic as we could make it, and I think the guys did a terrific job in achieving that. In the first version of the film, I provided the voice for Ichiro, but I wasn’t too happy with that performance and so I asked Jefferson Molinelli to do the voice for him, and I think the result was perfect. Tin Jun Niu lent his deep voice in creating the Sendo, and once again the results were fantastic.

After Robbie departed, Lin Chang and Jesus Espada stepped in to finalize the project, refining sounds, and working closely with me at the end of the production.

Overall, the process was a lot of fun, and it was due to the guys’ dedication that we were able to achieve the sound we did.

Thanks, Ben! You can check out vfs.com/digitalcharacteranimation to find out more about the 6-month program and what you will learn. For more of Ben’s sketches, tests, textures, and other process work, check out the Student Case Study on Cricket.