Check out Pythagasaurus is a funny tale about two cavemen and a dinosaur with a penchant for trigonometry
Pythagasaurus is a charming story staring two cavemen who seek the advice of a ‘clever’ dinosaur after a volcano appears in close proximity to where they live.
The production quality of Pythagasaurus is exceptional – as you would expect from Aardman. The characters have been well thought out and the landscapes featured are unbelievably detailed, and then there’s the fabulous story with a twist in the tail.
The short is a self-funded Aardman film, directed by Peter Peake, and features the voice talents of Bill Bailey, Martin Trenaman and Simon Greenall. We hope Aardman have some more downtime soon so that we can experience some more shorts of this calibre.
“The look for Pythagasaurus began as concept designs I put together in Flash and spent quite a long time working up with colour and texture,” explains director Peter Peake.
“It was great to have the luxury of spending a lot of time on these visuals to really nail the look I was after and also to provide a very specific reference for the CG team I’d be working with. I wanted the landscapes to look bizarre and otherworldly.”
When Peake was happy with the design, the team started production. “The characters and environments were created in Maya by 3D modellers Steve Roberts and Tanja Krampfert,” he says.
“I created 2D artwork for a range of different equations that would be floating through the environments. Pascale Bories animated the characters and enhanced the humour in the voice tracks with her own typically hilarious and sensitive performances.”
The next stage was compositing. “Once the individual scenes were rendered, they were exported as layers to our compositor Jim Lewis, who painstakingly interspersed and animated the equations among them,” says Peake.
He explains that the idea was to create a kind of mist with the equations, using the 2D elements in 3D space, and to integrate this into the environments without it being distracting. “Jim’s keen eye and perseverance ensured we struck just the right balance and hopefully created an overall eye-catching and original look,” he says.
Posted on Friday, November 25th, 2011 at 3:18 pm under Shorts, Showcase. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: Animated short, CG, short
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