Channel Frederator Blog

So you’re staring at a timelapse of decaying food, like you do, when suddenly BAM! Fuzzy old raspberries turn into a fuzzy little person… and then things go bonkers from there. That’s how “Homunculus” a short film by Humble TV’s Sam Stephens and Chris Mauch starts out. Here they tell us how the film was made, and how to get rid of that bloated pheasant carcass smell.

Channel Frederator: Where did you study animation?

Sam Stephens: NYU. Tisch.

Chris Mauch: Went to School of Visual Arts, and Came out of their Excellent Computer Art Dept. One of my most crucial teachers/Advisors was Animator Jefferey Lerer.

CF: Who are your favorite artists?

SS: Brunuel, Svankmeyer, Chris Cunningham, Gondry, Doug Aitken, Bill Viola, Odd Nerdrum.

CM: Oh, boy haha, Frank Frazetta, Stanley Kubrick, Simon Bisley, Yoshitaka Amano, Moebius, Brad Bird, Mike Mignola, Frank Miller, Peter Chung, N.C.Wyeth. That’s pretty fun putting ‘em all in a row like that.

CF: Ha! Right? What gave you the idea for “Humonculus”?

SS: I was reading some article in the Times… and it used the word Humonculous, which was vaguely familiar, but unknown enough to warrant some wiki time.
Got totally engrossed in the entry and the seed of the idea really just came from thinking about how all the different definitions of the word, from ancient alchemists to Carl Jung would work if they got all mashed together.

In the meantime, Chris and I had been really wanting to do some character based animation work… and it all just grew from there.

CM: All Sam Stephens, and his explorations on Wikipedia. I really got into figuring out how these “little humans” looked. where my main goal was to mash up a the idea of a little adorable dude, who can transform into a running set of ferocious teeth, at the drop of a dime.

CF: Was it difficult to incorporate the CG characters into the decaying food setting? How did you do that?! And also, ew.

SS: Getting the shaders right and the fur, took a while. Found a nice combination of a modified velvet shader patched over a subsurface shader that ended up feeling pretty biological. Luckily the lighting in the Vermeer-style paintings we took the look from is almost always a very directional side window… we’d shot an hdri on set, but ended up just using the mental ray sun and final gather bounce… which was cleaner than the IBL.

And yes, ew. The stuff was all in a plexi-cube for twelve days. We showed up the day after Halloween to clean it up, a bit worse for wear. We came out of the elevator and found the entire floor smelling like death. That pheasant had grown in size, full of some strange decomposing gasses. There’s a pretty funny, profane behind the scenes video of us cleaning it up. All of us wearing garbage bags, painters masks, and double fisting air freshener cans.

CF: Ahahaha - gross squared.

CM: Hell yeah, it was difficult… After sorting through the right background plate for the shot. and deciding on the action in the scene. We dropped an empty plate (plain video of the decaying still life) into a Maya scene. Starting by laying down a ground plane that lines up with the ground plane in the video.

It takes some time and fudging and maybe some playing with the focal length of the camera. You then build up from there. Import rigged up little dudes, add cheese plate, sculpt apple, etc. Do some lighting checks to make sure your shadows are landing where they are supposed to whether on the ground or onto a loaf of bread. After you’ve finished animating and lit the scene, you begin rendering in passes and “break-out” every aspect of the image. You separate each element of your 3D image. For example, one image of the Homunculi, has a Beauty Pass (basically the subject looking good with light and texture), an Occlusion Pass (the real dark shadows that hide in crevasses), a shadow and and then a fur pass… they all sit on top of each other and hopefully look like they are sitting on a real table next to your moldy asparagus.

CF: Wow. Thanks for explaining so much of that process. That might have exploded my brain a little. In an educational way. Are you working on anything new you can tell us about?

CM: I just started working with a great animation director, Alan Poon, on a project with the National Film Board of Canada and Sam just came back from directing a kick-ass music video for Wolfmother and is in New York putting it all together. In the meantime we are slowly boiling a new concoction.

SS: This was the first in a series of in house art projects our studio humble is planning to do. We’re still in the concept phases of the next one… but I can say it will be dealing with very very small things.

CF: *please be germs, please be germs, please be germs*

Thanks for the interview, guys! You can check out “Homunculus” right here on Channel Frederator!

-Bailee DesRocher