Pivot from Pivot on Vimeo.

A while back we caught a glimpse of this great animated short and now you can see the entire animation online.  Lets not forget about the work that went into it.

We managed to get in touch with Floris Vos Art director for Pivot, to find out about the challenges they faced producing an animated short with a small team.

For this project we were looking for a new personal look and feel. We didn’t feel like doing semi-photorealistic animation with the newest techniques, but focusing on a more graphical film noir-ish style.

Of course we used to play the first wave of 3d games when we were kids, which until this day made a big impact on us. Origami, Vectrex game console, Tron, but also great film noir movies like “The Third Man.” Comics were an inspiration as well. The way things get simplified in distance to create focus, the use of simple forms and silhouettes like in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics. We hoped to find a new charm in 3d animation, like clay-animation has with its ‘clumsiness’ and imperfections.

As a team we spent a lot of time gathering images, films, and ideas. What do we like, which chase scenes do we like, and why. After two weeks we made up some image collages which would be our reference point to start from.

With all these images and concepts, I started designing the characters and the look and feel of the film. The others worked on technical research and a first draft storyboard. This ended up in a basic storyboard and a series of vector illustrations which would be our main reference throughout the entire production. We tried to get as close as possible to these illustrations in 3d.

To our advantage, this look took just little rendering time. That way we could focus on the animation, lighting, and compositions of the shots more, instead of the awful tweaking of rendering and lighting settings

If you want to know more about the process of making your own 3d short we highly recommend that you start with their development blog.