The Design Process of “A Polish Winter”.
Character Design Influences:
The ‘Boy’:
The boy character is based on a number of influences including a short animated French film I saw called “Clik Clak”. I liked the idea that film used of giving the lead character small, charcoal-like eyes rather than the typical Disney-esque style of oversized eyes. It seemed to make the character more sympathetic for some reason.
The proportions of the boy are far from realistic what with his large, oversized head but it does contribute to making him look like a young boy and isn’t a huge exaggeration on child proportions either.
Setting the film in a snowy landscape really helped the character design process.
For one thing, it meant that I didn’t have to model fingers, as the boy would be wearing mittens. An earlier design of the boy had him wearing gloves but his fingers looked kind of strange for some reason, so that idea was scratched.
The large hat the boy wears also meant that I didn’t have to make hair. In fact, I actually didn’t need to make the top of his head at all.
The same goes for the boy’s torso, arms and legs – he doesn’t have any! His coat covers his midsection and arms while his trousers cover his legs.
The design of the boys clothing required study of the types of clothing worn by children in the 1940’s.Grey colours seemed very popular at the time. The coat and hat were very important. In earlier versions the boy’s coat was slightly shorter yet this slight deviation seemed to make the boy look older than he was supposed to be. Simply by altering the length of the coat so that it was below the knee made the boy look younger and less like he was wearing a specially tailored coat.
Clothing design references included “Shindler’s List”, “The Pianist” and “Enemy at the Gates”. The clothing of the young boy in Enemy at the Gates in particular provided plenty of inspiration.
Textures for both the boy and his clothes were kept simple.
A simple texture map for his face was painted directly onto the model using Blender’s internal paint system. Subtle tones of pink, red, blue and cream were blended and softened to produce his skin texture. Freckles were applied by a few dabs of brown paint across the boy’s cheeks and nose.
His lips and the inside of his mouth were painted a stronger shade of red and then blended and softened at the edges.
A number of simple textures were applied to the clothing including two types of cloth texture and various dirt and frost textures to simulate the appearance of ice and grime.
The ‘Doll’:
The doll’s design was based on an image I’d seen of one of the characters from the video game Little Big Planet.
We didn’t want the doll to be gender specific and to also come across as something that is tattered and torn and has been through hell. The rough stitching that holds the character together is an idea I intended to use on another discarded short film we were making.
There are also some design influences in there from Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. The dolls hollow eyes are based on Jack Skelengtons eye socket design.
A cloth sack texture was applied to the doll along with numerous other textures for dirt and grime.
The “Train Carriage”:
The train carriage provides the central location of the film.
I studied the design of real life German cattle wagons from the time period and sourced lots of images on the Internet from various angles of this infamous transport system.
I was surprised by the variety of different carriage designs I found. Some had wheels that were like those on a stagecoach but I found that they looked odd.
Some had diagonal crossbeams.
The eventual design we went for was based on a cattle car that is on display in Israel (I think) as a monument to the Holocaust.
One carriage was modelled completely in 3D. For shots involving up to 40 carriages, baked projection map snapshots taken from various angles were assembled to form simple textured UV planes – much like the assembly of a cardboard box. From a distance, these ‘cardboard cut-outs’ integrated seamlessly with the real 3D train.
The interior of the carriage was a separate model. The floor and walls were very large baked texture maps of about 8000x3000 pixels in size.
The light rays shining through the carriage windows were non-shadow casting lamps with emitting halo’s.
The General Location:
The location for the majority of the film is a snowy landscape, which meant that, as far as modelling was concerned, I had very little to do other than create a large, subdivided plane and sculpt a natural, hilly shape.
A very large baked UV map was applied to the modelled hills and ground. This baked map had shadows baked into it to assist the rendering process.
The barbed wire fencing surrounding the scene was based on images I’d found of various extermination and concentration camps but mostly Auschwitz.
I actually modelled a strand of barbed wire in 3D then rendered a single frame using orthographic projection. This image formed the basis for all the barbed wire in the film as it was edited using The Gimp photo editing program to add a light dusting of snow sitting on the wire and altered in other ways to enhance it’s bumpy texture.
This pre-baked image was then applied to flat planes with an alpha channel to create rows and rows of barbed wire fencing. Subtle changes to each plane meant that the wire didn’t appear too ‘samey’ as the camera moved throughout the scene.
The watchtowers were loosely based on those used at the extermination camps in Poland and elsewhere. They all had pre-baked textures applied to them – including the snow gathered on their roofs.
The sky was a large semi-dome with a sky image texture applied.
Snow and Smoke FX:
Snow plays an important role in A Polish Winter as it really creates the atmosphere of the film visually.
Even though Blender version 2.47 was used for modelling, animation and texturing, it was the much earlier Blender 2.42a that was used for all the particle effects in the film such as snow and smoke.
Why?
Well, whilst the enhanced particle system used in the more recent Blender releases is great for things like hair strands, I found that it was impractical to use for things like snow. The reason is mostly down to a number of factors:
A: The updated versions of Blender do not allow particles be emitted from a negative number. In practice, this means that, say, if I wanted snow to begin falling before the start of my animation the updated Blender versions wouldn’t be able to do this.
B: The updated blender ‘bakes’ the particle data much like the way fluid simulations are baked. This can often create huge files of gigabytes in size when dealing with large amounts of particles such as snow.
C: Because of the newer method of baking the particles beforehand, you must allow the computer to run through a particle simulation first before you can see how it will look. With large animations, this can take some time. In the old method, adjustments are viewable in the 3D window immediately.
As outlined in the above reasons, that is why I chose to use an earlier build of Blender to create the snow.
The snow itself was basically a number of subdivided meshes with particle systems applied to them. A number of meshes were used in each scene to create a dense cloud of snow (most scenes used 4 different particle systems emitting in total approximately 120,000 particles).
The particles had either a large snow material or a small snow material applied to them to vary the size and scale of the snowflakes falling.
The Blender Node compositor was sued to output the particles with blur filters applied to create less blocky looking shapes.
The particle system in the earlier Blender 2.42a was also used to create the smoke plume coming from the chimneystack at the close of the film.
This was mainly because of the success of the snow effects and also because it rendered quickly compared to a Blender 2.47 simulation, emitting UV mapped billboards.
Because the smoke is seen in the distance, I felt that we could ‘get away’ with the quicker solution.
Music and Sound FX:
The main theme of A Polish Winter was composed relatively quickly and was created during the original design period of the film before any animation was created.
Having the music at such an early stage helped guide the direction of the films mood and keep us on track with the general style and feel of A Polish Winter.
We wanted the music to sound as if it could have come from Poland at that time. The music was composed using a midi editor and then recorded - after much experimentation with other soundfonts and VST instruments - using the freely available Cadenza soundfont. The richness of the strings suited the tone of the film perfectly.
We wanted the music to be intimate and not overly layered with multiple instruments so we carefully selected just the violin, a viola and a plucked cello as our virtual ‘orchestra’.
An exciter was added to the mix to enhance the middle tones of the arrangement before a subtle medium-sized hall effect was applied to add depth and richness.
We reused some sound effects from previous films we’ve made yet altered them slightly. These included footsteps, body movements and wooden creaking sounds from To Shoot A Rurf.
A number of different wind effects were used throughout the film.
All the weaponry and gun shot effects came from royalty free sound FX libraries.
Final Points:
A Polish Winter is probably the film that we’ve made which mostly matches the original design and feel we set out to make at the start.
Whereas in other films certain scenes or details are changed or left out altogether, in a Polish Winter the original animatic pretty much matches the final product shot for shot.
Why this is, I don’t know but I presume it could have something to do with the respect we both had for the film from the beginning. Having he backdrop of the Holocaust running through the film placed a responsibility on both of us to deliver a film that could not veer away from its central theme. There was no room for mistakes; otherwise the whole idea of the film would collapse.
It needed to be simple and direct with no frills.
Having watched Shindler’s List many times, we were both struck by the way in which that particular film awkwardly mixed humour with suffering to the detriment of the film as a whole.
Things like that are forgivable in a fictional setting but not when dealing with reality.
Although A Polish Winter is an animated cartoon, we sought to tell the story without any unneeded extras. The memory of those children murdered in the Holocaust is projected in A Polish Winter without the need for slideshows or gimmicks but is instead delivered in an implied fashion.
We hope that when you see A Polish Winter you will enjoy it as we are both extremely proud of this film.
COPYRIGHT © Shane Sheils 2008-2009
“A Polish Winter” COPYRIGHT © Shane Sheils & Paula Sheils 2008.
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www.apolishwinter.blogspot.com
