My name is Jacopo Armani, I’m 31. My professional website is doctoranimation.com. I am a late runner in the CG field. I re-discovered the medium in 2005 when I enrolled into the 3D Animation and VFX program at Vancouver Film School, Canada. At school I have studied filmmaking and computer graphics, but I specialised in character animation. My graduation project is the short film Being a King, which I finished in August 2006.
This become a project at VFS, in my second semester of the one year animation program, which was devoted to the production of a demo reel. My decision since the beginning was to spend that time making an animated short film I could both use as a demo, and to showcase in festivals.
Being a King is about the unbearable lightness of power. It portrays Robb, a jester who is bored with his current life. He finds the king’s garments left unattended and he decides to try them. He then experiences what it’s really like to be a king. Eventually his journey brings him to fully appreciate his old life.
When I started to make the film the main character, Robb, was my first concern. I very quickly linked his personality to the Italian actor Roberto Benigni. His joy of life and his art of pantomime were the two traits I wanted to portray.
With the set I just tried to keep it as simple as possible, reducing it almost to a theater stage. On this aspect, the short film The Burden by Derek Rozmes has been very influential. I spent a big chunk of time developing the storyboards and the animatics. I was trying to anticipate the editing to make the story work while keeping the animation short enough to be doable.
The look of Being a King has been mostly inspired by theater. In fact I’m very fascinated by any theater stage. A stage can be sometimes a dark and infinite space full of possibilities. Sometimes it becomes a specific location, with its borders and traits. The actor is confined in this space and reacts to it accordingly. The light defines the actor/stage relationship. By casting lights on the stage the character’s attention is attracted to elements of the set, making him react to them and eventually progressing the story.
I didn‘t create the whole film myself. I got the help from some very talented artists and friends. Barbara Bernini and Jenn Zhang devoted a lot of time drawing the beautiful paintings that Robb the Jester sees in the room. My classmates Earl Brawley, Zach Miller, Bob Hermetz, Michel Bidart helped me with their critiques, suggestions and reference as well. I also had the chance to work with a professional actor, Terence Kelley, who performed the main character in an early version of the story. I was responsible for all the visuals of the film except for the paintings that were made by Barbara Bernini and Jenn Zhang.
In terms of software I used Softimage XSI for the modeling/animation part, Adobe After Effects to compose the final rendered images and Adobe Premiere to edit the film. Textures, concept art and promotional images were made in Photoshop.
XSI has been my software of choice. For this project I found easier doing the whole process into one application such XSI, instead of switching back and forth between different packages. I left only the editing and compositing stage to dedicated software.
Since I had decided to keep the project simple, I managed to keep the difficulties to a minimum. While animating, I struggled a bit with constraints. The most challenging shot was the fight sequence. I had several constraints working together to make the character interact first with the throne, then with his scepter-sword. Another issue arose with motion blur in XSI, which seemed to have some problems with my models. Moreover I recall having a hard time getting my render passes working: shadow and reflection pass were the trickiest to get right.
Handles any problems dependeded on the scope of the problem: for technical bugs or unpredictable results in the software I would try to find a workaround using what I already knew. On broader topics or techniques, like how to light properly a closed-up shot, or how to setup a render pass pipeline, I either looked for tutorials, watched the ‘making of‘ videos from other films or asked to my classmates, tutors and instructors at school.
I mostly worked in an iterative way: working out the story poses and preliminary timing in all the shots, then editing them into a rough version of the film. From there I started making the breakdowns and I edited them in again while I was progressing. This way I managed to keep an eye on the big picture and the story.
Surprisingly the most difficult effect to achieve has been motion blur. It took me an insane amount of time to figure out how to make it work in XSI the way I wanted. Beside, some bugs forced me to render again some shots because of artifacts or geometry problems in the final image.
The opening shot is my favorite one in the film. From an animation standpoint I’m happy with it. Robb’s walk cycle informs about his back story that eventually motivates him starting off his journey. He is a jester but he is not happy with what he has got. Actually he is quite bored of his life. That’s all we need to understand his following actions.
The story went through several drafts. I eventually ended up ditching a fully storyboarded version because it exceeded the maximum screen time I could afford in the project. When I finally settled down on the story, animation was the next battle. I had a lot of troubles animating the character, especially because of my lack of experience. After a lot of effort, based mostly on trial and error, and thanks to the help from animators in my class and my animation supervisor I finally got my shots done.
Moving from animation to final rendering the film has been a much smoother process, thanks to the simple approach I had planned at the pre-production stage.
During animation I worked from morning to late night. I had several shots scheduled each day. This way I was working for a few hours on a shot, say making the breakdowns, then I would switch to another to polish it a bit. It was somehow a hectic workflow, but it helped me keeping motivation up because I was constantly doing something different. In my spare time I would also light some shots that were almost finished or make some fix to rig. During the rendering period, in the last month, rhythm got faster: I spent several days working animating by day and managing my renderings by night.
It ended up taking eight months to finish the film, from story to final cut. And since it was a school project there was no direct cost to make it. School provided equipment and software licenses from pre to post-production. Also festival submissions and promotions are funded by VFS.
I’m very happy with what I pulled off. Being a King is the outcome of my learning experience at VFS and it tells a story I would like to watch. Moreover it allowed me to land a job in the industry.
And about fifty thousand people have seen it now as well.
Right now I am working full time as a character animator on the animated series the Magic Roundabout in France. It is a television series for kids based on an old stop-motion show of the 70’s.
In my spare time I’m also storyboarding my new short film which I plan to release sometime during next year. The story is focused on the life in a condo, which I know pretty well from my personal experience. The idea behind is to create an animated montage sequence of the different lives of the inhabitants of the building.
To watch Jacopo Armani‘s short film Being a King, click here
