Red Rover Animation Studios: “Plumber”
“Plumber” is the story of an old man’s insane fascination with an annoying drip in his bathroom sink faucet. Watch as he takes an obsessive journey that will test his plumbing skills, and more importantly, his sanity…
“Plumber” was featured in last year’s Nextoons: The Nicktoons Film Festival, and was a big hit there. Richard Rosenman, co-director, and a principal at Red Rover Animation Studios let me in on how exactly this fantastically animated film came to be.
“Plumber was our first fully computer generated short film produced over a six month period in association with Bravo!Fact. It was directed by myself and Andy Knight and produced by Randi Yaffa. The purpose of producing the film was to introduce Redrover into the short film production industry as well as to push the studio’s creative and technological experience to the limit. The film was completed in February 2003, making it a six month project from start to finish.”
Here’s where I get a bit “techie” on everyone, because I think it’s important to know about all of the resources that go in to making a CG short of this caliber.
The melding of many cutting edge CG animation programs gave “Plumber” the realistic look and feel that many of you have responded very positively to. Discreet’s 3dsmaxwas used for all modeling, texturing and animation. Adobe Photoshop was used for texturing creation/editing, Chaos Group’s Simcloth for dynamic clothing, and Next Limit’s RealFlow/RealWave for computational fluid dynamics. Chaotic Dimension’s VRay 1.09 for lighting and rendering, Discreet’s Combustion for compositing and Avid for editing. “Plumber” was rendered on 20-30 Intel machines ranging from dual P3’s to 2GHZ P4’s, each with 1GIG Ram over a duration of about 3 weeks to a month.
This was a terrific short, both for its story and for its technical aspects. Thanks guys!
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On February 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I really enjoyed this short when i saw it on tv! When i first met with Fred, i told him how i really like this short and how it was animation, graphics and the story and how it was pretty funny. I loved it and cant wait to see more work of theirs on tv.. well, i did see that pepsi commercial where they’re in like a 7-11 after closing time.. that was also very good and funny!!!! -Steve
On February 26th, 2006 at 12:00 am
i thoroughly enjoyed this short too, the graphics were amazing and so was the plot. The water though looked a little thick
On June 11th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
[…] Thanks so much to everyone involved with the making of and submission of this film. Truly outstanding. To read more about this film, click here. […]