Case 03 / 07 · Film & Animation · Real-Time & Virtual Production · 2019

Roborovski

Role: Art Director / Technical Director
Year: 2019
Type: Real-time animated short · 9 min
Directed by: Dev Patel and Tilda Cobham-Hervey
Studio: Spectre Studios
Recognition: Yoram Gross Award for Best Australian Animation, Flickerfest 2021
Film: ▶ Watch the film

A thimble-sized hamster lives in Marvin's Pet Shop and waits to be adopted. Dev Patel and Tilda Cobham-Hervey directed the nine-minute short.

The production set out to show that a real-time pipeline can deliver authored, stylised animation with a visual identity of its own.

My contribution

Art Director and Technical Director. I set the film's visual language and designed the real-time pipeline that produced it.

01Set the look: palette, materials and lighting for a stylised, semi-toon world.
02Built a custom semi-toon shader library so characters and sets read as one designed world.
03Built the world at ten times real scale so camera and lighting behaved physically at a hamster's size.
04Designed an Alembic pipeline that brought animation into Unreal within GPU memory limits.
05Set up a low-cost capture pipeline: Rokoko suits for body performance and iPhone AR face tracking for faces.

Approach

Warm, shaped light and a handmade surface language, with camera work grounded in real lens behaviour. The aim was a film that feels handmade even though every frame comes out of a game engine.