Six Questions with the 'Dox' crew

1 November 2007

by Magnus Reid

Reviews

How would you describe your new film ‘Dox”?

I would describe ‘Dox’ simply as a fun-filled, slap stick, fantasy cartoon for kids.

Who else was involved in making the film?

Dox comprised of five other crew members: Nadir Raza Khan who was responsible for modelling and rigging the ‘Weed’ character, background painting and shared some of the animation with Dave Ronnert who was our Lead 3D animator/2D animator. To be honest, I’m not quite sure where we would have been without Dave. He is an exceptional 3D animator and was really our 3D technical adviser and certainly has the knack for animating well timed cartoon characters such as Weed. Dave showed us some wonderful tips and tricks and was able to instruct us on the 3d animation and took charge of animating mainly Weed and Dox’s ship as well as the 3D visual effects.

Gareth Kees who had just finished production on the last OOMPF project stepped in to lend a hand with the 2D animation focussing mainly on animating Dox and utilised a number of the techniques. Richard Reitzenstein was our sound designer who provided the sound effects and was in charge of voice recording.

And finally we had Ben Collins who created a remarkable music score, which I couldn’t be happier with. From the start, Ben had a very good sense of what sort of music I was after. Using Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’ as the main influence, Ben and I both agreed that this was the music that was going to inspire the score for Dox. In the end the music was beautifully composed and synced, and carried appropriate mood and change of pace to the scenes and characters.

What was the production process like?

The production process was intense and quite complex due to the number of techniques and applications we used. At the beginning I emphasised that most of the time will be spent on the main part of production as most of the pre-production had been done with exception to finalising the ‘Weed’ character. We did stick to a strict deadline, but what I didn’t consider was allowing enough time for situations that involved technical problems and we certainly ran into quite a few during production.

We did go through phases where we had to change things and back track a bit as I expected, because everyone was coming up with great ideas for certain scenes, characters had to be modified and making sure that the animation and backgrounds were consistent. Getting feedback from everyone was also important to the production.

As we were approaching the deadline I had to keep the pressure on but I think in the end, everyone learned a lot from this production and worked very well together. It was challenging for all of us.

Your film combines 2D and 3D styles of animation, did that approach create any challenges?

I knew from the start that combining a 2d and 3d character was going to be a difficult challenge in itself, taking into account that this was the first time that the crew had attempted something like this. Why? Primarily because my initial thought to do Weed as a 3D character would be less fiddly and time consuming, whereas with Dox being physically different 2D character would allow both flexibility and exploration into the diverse range of animation techniques.

We even went to the extent of recording some live action footage to be used as reference in some scenes for the Dox character so there was a mixture of Roto – animation, Traditional 2D animation and Flash animation, which proved very useful.

The design of Weed even went through a considerable number of changes. The first and second designs were rather ‘flower’ like but we found they were impractical and too complex in 3D. So the third design was simplified and the flower element removed and we ended up with something far more likeable, unique and 3D – friendly.

We encountered technical problems with Weed like making him stretch and compositing him correctly with Dox. We had to make sure that both characters looked right in terms of the style and that they would not be too lost in the backgrounds.

This was certainly the most challenging but rewarding production that any of us had experienced so far.

What’s next on the cards for your team?

At present we’re looking at applying for a LINK next year, but also hope to carry through with Dox in some form or another further down the track.

What advice would you give to someone about to embark on making their next film?

PLAN AHEAD! Know what you want to create and have some idea of how you’re going to do it. Write down a battle plan for your production and research as much material as possible. Experiment with ideas and techniques and find which ones are likely to work best.

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