Thomas the Bluesmobile is a project I worked on for ANIM 211 (Animation I). The assignment was to take a 30-second scene from a movie and recreate it shot-for-shot, mimicking the cinematography, environment, and actors; the catch is I had to replace the actors/environment with inanimate objects, in a way that the scene still made some coherent sense.
Initially I struggled to wrap my head around this assignment. I started with a different concept: the cop chase scene from the Blues Brothers movie, but instead of the Blues Brothers in their Bluesmobile, it’d be OJ Simpson escaping in the white Bronco. I drafted up a rough storyboard of that idea, which you can see here:
My professor enjoyed the idea but said I had to make my changes more drastic. He suggested I replace OJ with a box of orange juice, have it set in a kitchen or something, and brainstorm from there, but I wasn’t really into that. I’m not sure why I struggled with the concept for this assignment at first; I guess animating an inanimate thing to represent something animate didn’t really make sense to me, but limitations give way to creative solutions.
Eventually I settled on my final concept: the bridge jump scene from the same movie, but recreated in a kid’s bedroom with Thomas the Train and Devious Diesel on toy train tracks. I was picturing a kid that watched the movie with his dad or something, and now he’s playing with his toy trains to recreate the scene in his imagination.
I went back to the (literal) drawing board and created another storyboard animatic for this revised concept. This set me behind schedule a bit, but you can’t skip the storyboard!
Our first deliverable was a greybox pass of each shot in the scene. I didn’t manage to block out all the scenes, but I did get a lot of the modeling work done on Thomas and Diesel.
Next was the full material pass. I focused my efforts here on fleshing out the models and materials for everything in the scene. Once again I didn’t have all the shots set up, but this way all I had left was to set up the cameras and render all my shots the following week. At this point I was quickly aborting the traditional animation pipeline (doing a greybox pass on every shot, then taking the beauty pass with materials/lights/remodeling). Drexel’s 10-week quarters really don’t accommodate that workflow.
This was the final stretch: my last week to work on the project. I had to make the most of my time, setting batches of renders to process on my desktop overnight (the loud GPU fans made sleeping rough). During weeks 9 and 10 you could find me in the animation labs, hopping from computer-to-computer kicking off renders around the clock. Spreading the workload across multiple computers was the only way to meet the deadlines.
In this next benchmark I re-rendered some of the shots with a depth-of-field effect to drive the viewer’s eyes to the subject. I also started testing out the faces on Thomas/Diesel, which you can see for a split-second in one shot (the frames weren’t finished rendering when I made this clip).
(Fun Fact: You can see here is where I realized that I mixed up the positions of Thomas and Diesel. Glad I fixed that before the final cut!)
The soundtrack for the week was Flying Lotus:
And this is the final cut!
Compared to the original scene:
I’m very proud of what I came out with! This was an interesting look into the 3D animation pipeline, and it’s always nice to have a further understanding of how things are made. I now have a much stronger appreciation of the work done by my 3D colleagues!
closing note: I am tempted to re-render the animation with sunglasses and hats on each train