The moon rises and a broken man wanders through the fog, his heart heavy. For he is not alone, something inhuman lurks in the shadows, a devilish creature that plagues the dark corners of both the town and the man’s memories. Music will lure the beast, but only the decisions of a heartbroken man will determine who survives the encounter.
Last Notes is a short film created by 8 animation master’s students at Bournemouth University.
My role in this project was that of an animator, rigger, technical director & render wrangler. As a technical director, I worked out and set up our animation constraints, debugged problems in various areas such as in rigging, rendering hair/fur, distributed rendering, alembic exporting and also worked on our pipeline efficiency (eg. transferring animation, referencing, proxies, etc.). As a render wrangler -apart from render wrangling per se- I developed a script that would set up/startup render jobs automatically on local target computers. This allowed us to copy our project onto various computers and instantaneously fire up the appropriate render job without opening any software or facing the danger of using incorrect settings. The script also performed error handling (auto-restart and continue rendering where it left off) in case of system failure (eg. program crashing due to high memory usage for hair simulations).
The awesome team I had the opportunity to work with in this project consists of (in alphabetical order):