Papa Bouteille is a 3D animated film. It came out in June 2023 and it took 6 person and 10 month to make. It takle the subject of alcoholism, but from a young Kid's point of view
My Contributions
I designed at first the story and the first visuals. Then I took the lead of the art direction ( color palette, background and character design, visual development ), storyboard, texture, lighting and compositing. I was also head of the project witch included some people management ( but to be fair, my team was really cool ! )
Art direction
It started at firt with a lot of drawing thrown away on a page. It was a good start ! From there, we understood that we wanted to use the white of the page, we had the color key and a first design for the kid. We also had a bright personnality for them witch helped set the tone of the story. I had then to structure my drawing a big more, to create background and character design Then I work on more detailed illustrations to find what a shot would look like
Fun fact ! Turned out this version of the design was waaay to short and their non existent neck didn't feat with the range of motion we wanted to have. So, in modeling, The design changed proportion wise.
Storyboard
Obviously, a good storyboard is the key to strucure visually a film. I had the chance to draw it almost entirely. Our film was based on a poetic narrative structure, so the big challenge was to find a way to express visually figures of speech, like methaphores.
Texturing
The thing in 3D, is that we always look for more and more details. But the real challenge here was to make more of less. Our style was very minimalist, we needed to keep that in mind while doing the modelisations or the texturing. We wanted everyting to be seen as if it was hand drawn on a piece of paper. On this project I had the pleasure to texture entirely and in all their different version the protagonist. We also created dynamic textures on the kid's face ! With Papa Bouteille's lead animator, Clement Bretou, we managed to create attributes that linked the Rig to the shading. The real issue was that a lot of them needed to be superposed. But we did it ! And we're really proud of it. I also worked on props and background like the facade or the living room
Compositing
Sometimes, I can be a real geek when it comes to compositing. Put me in front of a Nuke scene and I can stay hours just doing my things. So, it was a surprise to no one when Papa Bouteille appeared to rest a lot on compositing. We needed to stylise the images. We needed to draw lines around shape, characters, background... And not only around, also inside ! How to shape the nose, the eyes ? How to find the brushed aspect of the pen on the paper ? All of that was so fun to find out ! Sometime, we need to dissect the 3D to better shape it !
In this one, I also made the 2D animation for tears of the child ! I was not that hard cause I use a tracker to link the tears to the eyes, just like the second specular in the video just above this one !
Want to work together?
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
