Study Task 3 - Animation Studio Research

For the 'animation studio research' study task i researched a small animation studio in Edinburgh called 'Interference Pattern'. Interference Pattern are a very general animation studio, they do a lot of different work such as 3d, photoshop and motion graphic work and have a combined experience of over 20 years in the CGI animation production industry. The reason i picked them is that although i am interested in specializing in 3d, i also like to be experimental with animation and explore different mediums.

They are located at a place called Techcube which is a creative hub for the arts with studio and workshop spaces which provides a very creative working environment. The studio was founded in 2008 by Tom Bryant, Tom Bryant started out doing a bachelor of science on Astrophysics for 4 years before studying 3d motion graphics and virtual prototyping at the Glasgow school of art. He has produced work for axis animation, Passion pictures Australia and django pictures. His experience ranges from lighting and FX TD(technical developer) to lead 2d/3d artist. He also has worked on some of the Gorillaz music videos.

They do a lot of commercial work but amongst this is a short film they produced in collaboration with passion pictures called 'The lost thing', this is based on a book by Shaun Tan. The lost thing won an array of awards including best animated short, 2011 academy awards.

As they are a small studio they dont employ programmers or write that many custom scripts besides a few project management and pipeline naming tools, for this they usually use python.

Because they switch between mediums to fit selected briefs, If they feel the need to, they hire freelance riggers. Otherwise the rigging is done in house by their generalist artists. When employing riggers they look for examples of good production ready rigs. Not overly bothered about super complex setups, main thing is that rigs need to be bullet-proof. Although it's always good to see examples of more complex items rigged, such as clothing, tails etc and for these to have the capability to be both hand keyed and simulated.

They don't use Maya at all in the modelling/rigging process, they use a piece of software called Softimage for the modelling/rigging and animation pipeline, which is a computer animation software used in a lot of films such as titanic, happy feet, 300 and Charlotte's web. Also in the production of some games such as metal gear solid 4.

For shading, lighting, rendering and FX they use Houdini which alone could be used for the modelling, rigging and animating also but those features are weaker in Houdini whilst the rendering related features are much stronger than other computer animation software.

I gathered some of this research from the internet but a lot of the information is informed from direct contact with the studio through email, below is a screenshot of the email.