Graduation Film
I had the chance to work on Coin Coin (2023), a Graduation Film made with power of friendship. My 4 teammates were Solenn Lelaisant, Anouk Archambault, Amélie Frit and Lucile Grunder and I invite you to check their works too!
Concept
In the team, we all wanted to have a strong base for the lookdev and the ambiance of the film. We all begin the film production by doing ambiance reseraches and illustration with our characters interracted with each other.
I did some concept but at first it was a bit too gloomy for the mood we wanted.
Then I did some happier concepts of them playing. At that moment, Anouk was still working on the chara design part and we had not choosen the final proportion of the characters.
We wanted to have something which looked simple and cute but it was not that easy, Solenn was the head of our concept researches and she proposed lots of illustrations which helped us defined our style.
After doing some illustration we wanted to define what kind of ambiance we wanted. Solenn and I did some objects design.
Storyboard
At the beginning of the project I did some situation researches and some storyboard.
Some reconciliation/ ending idea.
We also had to quickly install the friendship beetween the Rabbit and the Duck.
Here is when the Rabbit met a new friend, a cool cat with a gameboy.
Colorscript
At some point, even if the whole storyboard part/ 2d animatic was not finished, we had to begin the texturing and do some render and compositing. To define the ambiance and color we should use and how it should evolve in the film, I made a colorscript based on the version of the storyboard we had at this moment
Modeling
We have 5 characters in the film : A cat, a rabbit, a duck, a fish and a butterfly. Most of the modeling parts were made by Solenn Lelaisant and I only helped a little by doing some assets and the rabbit's modeling. Here is the wireframe of our little rabbit : Chocolat!
We really wanted a cute mascot look with big head and little legs. For this little rabbit, the legs were separate from the body to help with the animation/ rigging work later!
Texturing and shading
I did most of the texturing and shading in the film. I had to find a way to make our environnement possible in our characters' world. For this I used procedural pattern in Substance Painter with an alliance of handpaint pattern which looked organic and natural.
Our texture had to be simple so as not to overload the film (since there were many assets and it was colorful).
I also did some special AOV for the characters or for some props such as ID's mask or spec handpaint mask in Substance and used in Guerilla Render as extra AOV so we could use them in compositing.
We used AOV in Guerilla Render such as Fresnel, which can be used to have a line inside a character and not just outside. It actually use the volume of an object, so the problem was that our characters had big heads and small bodies so we had to create special ID's to have a different grading of their fresnel and use it as an inline sketchline (which was useful as we did a 2d stylisation)
Here is the teturing of the previous character : Chocolat
Here you can check some environnement on which I did the texturing and shading (check Solenn Lelaisant's work for more cute modeling) :
And some cute props :
Render and Compositing
The compositing was a big part of our production. Lucile Grunder was the one who did our compositing tree. Solenn, Lucile and I did the lighting and compositing parts of our Film. Here are some render I did :
Colorcards
Like I did the colorscript, I also designed most of the moments whith intense emotion. We chose to have a simple color background for these moment.
We really wanted this anime look we grew up with, so we decided to use the kind of background you can see in japanese animation. A simple background to focus on the characters.
I think we managed to have a cute nostalgic look in these moments!
All year I had the chance to learn many things by myself but also thank the help of others! I really liked working on a stylized production and hope I will do it again. The fact that we worked in a little group gave me the confidence to stand up and speak up what I think. I love working in a group and love this moment when everybody bring up ideas, the emultion this gave us. Overall I am really happy whith what we created : a cottoncandy kind of world with a little acidity! I'm so thankful for the team I had the chance to work with and the result that our teamwork brought!