Short Film Tests Workflow, Maxwell Renderer

Keytoon Animation recently finished work on their short film Grandfather of Soul, a hilarious trubute to James Brown (actually the piece was nearing completion at the time of the Brown's death), which allowed them to flex some creative muscles, identify the bottlenecks in their workflow pipeline and put the Maxwell Renderer to the test.

"One of the goals was to use Maxwell Renderer (www.maxwellrenderer.com) in a different way that we the regular type of project we use it for," explains directo/animator Jaime Maestro. "Even though this was a short film, it's longform for us. So it was to test the quality of it and make sure the pipeline was ready for production."

Keytoon used Autodesk 3ds Max for all the modeling and animation, After Effects for compositing and Photoshop for creating textures. But why have they settled on Maxwell for a their render engine?


"I've found that Maxwell is more physically correct and easier to use than other renderers," notes Meastro. "For people coming from the real world of film – directrs, DPs – the render engine is easy to learn. You don't have to be an animator to understand how to light in Maxwell because the parameters are similar to the real world."

But testing the equipment was just a small reason of embarking on the creation of this short.
"The main reason for doing the short film though was to internally test the organization of our work, how each department is connecting with each other, to see how we worked when different departments were working on the same character and location at the same time. How are the animation and lighting departments working together and how can we make that more effiecient," explains Meastro.


Of course with every short film carries big dreams.
"It's fine to work for others but if you want to acheive your goals and move up to the next level you have to show that you can do it. All the big companies to day, those like Pixar, started out that way with shorts to prove what they can do," explains executive producer Nina Rowan.