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  • {digg}
    As a bunch of 14 year olds, People’s Republic of Animation (PRA) founders Eddie White, James Calvert & Hugh Nguyen began experimenting with a Super 8 camera under the name of ‘Dabble Animation’. Their first short film, ‘Natural Born Animators’ (1998) was made two years later and achieved some international festival success. With the addition of animator/sculptor Brodie McCrossin and producer Sam White, The People’s Republic of Animation was officially formed in 2003. It wasn’t long before the young crew succeeded in gaining their first government grant for a stop-motion production and their first paid job producing VFX work for a music video in the same year.

    The PRA crew working through the storyboard at the concept meeting.
     
    Having worked on the first official Australian-Chinese animated co-production, titled ‘Sweet & Sour’ (2007), PRA is currently expanding further into Asian markets. The studio is currently co-developing a new feature film project with the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, a 60-year old state owned studio that they collaborated with on ‘Sweet & Sour.’

    Additionally, PRA has brought its unique style to the advertising world, having produced lasting promotions for brands such as Converse and Solver Paints. PRA has recently branched out into new media formats producing ‘Errorism: a comedy of terrors’ (2006), an animated series of short episodes recently licensed to SBS TV Australia. Also in 2006, the PRA began providing 3D animation services to Australia’s largest games developer, Krome Studios, for a number of current and generation console video game titles.

    PRA made the Lancer TVC as part of an initiative organized by Sony Tropfest and PBL media in conjunction with Mitsubishi. Sony Tropfest alumni were offered the chance to pitch for six “Supershorts” for the new Lancer. These six supershorts would tell a story about the Lancer’s six attributes – Safer, Smoother, Greener, Stronger, Smarter & Roomier.
        
       

    The Pitch
    To pitch, each creative team had to come up with ideas for all of the attributes. So there were five other ideas PRA pitched with the “Safer” concept. To translate the process of pitching thru to production, CGSociety asked PRA to spell out their line of attack in a small feature. 

    “With the skew towards women and young families, we wanted to tell a story that would engage with families on an emotional level,” says Producer Hugh Nguyen. “It’s about the imagination of young children and a parent’s longing to protect their children without understanding exactly what it is they fear. We’re big fans of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and wanted to tell this story through a homage to his work.” The story was meant to remind people of what it was like being a child with an active imagination, and how differently we saw simple things in our lives like the cars our parents drove, and what they represented. As children we felt helpless in a big world, and the family car represented the impenetrable ark that would take us home to a safe and familiar place.

        

    Concept design
    There are some very obvious cues to “Where the Wild Things Are” in the design of some of the characters. The young boy, “Mikey” wears an anthropomorphic tiger costume, a bit like Max’s wolf costume. The Monsters have textures and colour palettes similar to Sendak’s work. Much like Sendak’s monsters, they’re cute with big round eyes, but act in a menacing way.  “We gave Mikey and his Mother a Eurasian look to add in an anime twist we felt would work well with the young, cosmopolitan audience,” adds Eddie White, the co-director. “Curiously, comments on the forums have indicated some ambiguity in Mikey’s gender with some people referring to him as ‘the girl’.”

    The story still works. Mikey’s mum is deliberately young and attractive to appeal to the younger family market described in the brief. It was interesting have characters in three types of animation styles: Mikey & Mother (anime); the monsters (Monty Python-esque cut-out animation); and the Lancer (cell shaded 3D). Getting all of these things to fit together was a challenge. But it worked great, with a very noticeable change in the environment when Mikey entered his fantasy – from 2D/3D to cut-out animation!
     
        
     
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  • Character animation
    The PRA crew used pretty simple tools to make the characters and to animate. Mikey and his mother were animated in Photoshop CS3, which now has a timeline feature similar to the one in Flash. “It’s a tool our animators prefer over Flash that allows people to create high quality 2D animation,” explains Hugh. “I think it will help bring a lot of traditional animators back to the fold. Our mentor, a traditional 2D animator who worked at Hanna Barbera, was amazed and started playing with the features himself.”

    The Monsters were scanned in, then colored in Photoshop, then animated in Maya, a bit like how they make South Park. There weren't even bones in the creatures, just mapped planes grouped together.

    The backgrounds were mainly mattes, some came from photographic reference, and some straight from the layouts/storyboards.

    The car was a real challenge – we had to get the “product” right, but still render it in such a way that it was cohesive with the rest of the film. With such a new car, we weren’t able to find an exiting CG model, so we ended up getting a model of a previous make, and modifying it. The car was animated in Maya too.

    Once all the elements were done, the PRA crew used After Effects to composite it all together. The final look was one of a 2D family in a lush 3D environment, driving through the night where anything can happen. The lighting, modeling and coloring of the car, creatures, road and forest, in the 3D space made this Lancer spot one that PRA can be proud.

        
      
      

    Talented artists, simple tools, great results!
    “We had pretty much the same people who work on all our projects,” Hugh continues. “A couple of 3D animators worked on the Monsters and the car, a couple of 2D animators for Mikey and the Mother, an art director and a technical director. Just using Photoshop, Maya and After Effects on PCs. Nothing special at all! It’s the people and process that make it innovative! We have a small team that has worked together on a lot of projects that continues to do great work under all sorts of conditions!”

    There was an obvious technical challenge in getting so many stylistically different elements to fit together. The group admits their 2D Photoshop pipeline was still pretty new. "As an initiative," says Hugh, "the budget was relatively small for the volume of animation required. We also only had a month to do it. Thankfully, our clients were really supportive and really backed us."

    Related links:
    People’s Republic of Animation
    PRA blog
    Sony Tropfest
    PBL Media
    Adobe Photoshop
    Adobe After Effects
    Autodesk Maya

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