Coffee Brake is a film that tells of the office rivalry for the last doughnut during coffee break that not only gets out of hand, but also out of this world. In this article, UTS Animal Logic Students, Hollie Secomb, Matt and Judisak Meng, share their experience producing the animated short film.
The Master of Animation and Visualisation students at the UTS Animal Logic Academy in Sydney have been shaking up the 3D animation production pipeline with their latest collaborative project ‘Coffee Brake’.
Developed as part of the emerging visualisation technologies subject, the students have put together a racy 3D animated film in just 8 weeks of production using the open source animation software Blender, featuring effects from the plug-in Grease Pencil. Read on for some inspiration!
Coffee Brake is a film that tells of the office rivalry for the last doughnut during coffee break that not only gets out of hand, but also out of this world. In this article, UTS Animal Logic Students, Hollie Secomb, Matt and Judisak Meng, share their experience producing the animated short film.
Judisak: Definitely challenging, especially since we were working on a tight schedule. Most of the team were learning Blender from scratch, so the main challenge was helping other departments.
Hollie: It was chaotic because no one really knew anything at the beginning. But it was also fun for the same reason since we didn’t have any expectations and wanted to make something cool and wacky.
Matt: It was pretty hectic with a lot of moving parts, and trying to wrangle a pipeline in Blender was tricky, but altogether it turned out to be a fun challenge.
I’ve really enjoyed learning from other departments and helping each other develop in our skills. - Matt
Judisak: I was tasked with assembly and rigging, which involves bringing in modelling assets to create the scene and character structures, so that animation can build on top of that. I also spent a lot of time animating micro-details, which are subtle but add to the final look. Because of my experience with the software, I was appointed the Blender Technical Director to troubleshoot any issues.
Hollie: I’m in Animation, so we were really focused on speed to produce something within the short timeline. We experimented a little with style and settled on hand animation, which I think fit the whole theme of the project. I helped with making blend shapes for the facial expressions and worked with Judisak who rigged the characters.
Matt: I was part of building the render management pipeline – basically our render outputs and figuring out how to make sure when we render, we’re also getting data from Cycles and putting them all in the same workflow. There’s a lot of sculpting in the image that Compositing is responsible for, as well as being our own colour-graders. It is really creative but does involve some technical strategies.
Hollie: Most of the challenges were due to the software, but we did have Carol, one of our characters, keep disappearing, which was really funny. We got it fixed in the end, but at times it would just be ‘Oh, Carol’s gone again!’. We also had to set up previs and figure out where the cameras would be placed.
Everyone was definitely invested in the little dimensions shown in the film. We all really enjoyed that because it was really fun and wacky, like a whole world only we know about.
Judisak: Getting to use Blender at a high level was definitely a highlight, since I came into the Academy having experience with the software. Communicating and working with others was also a big part of having everything come together.
Matt: One really positive thing about Blender is that you have a lot more access to resources than you might otherwise. In general as well, I’ve really enjoyed learning from other departments and helping each other develop in our skills.
You can check out more great work via the students' Rookies profiles here below!
Hollie Secomb | Matt | Judisak