Inspected By - Draft

Inspected By (Working Title)

Digitally Animated Short Film

Cameron Kerr & Justin Cerilli

Concept

Setting

             Present day, in a toy factory.  This particular factory specializes in the production of simplistic dolls that come pre-packaged with an abundance of manufactured joy.

Characters

Lou: A post middle-aged man who takes great pride in his position on the inspection line.  A 30 year veteran, he has unquestionably earned the plethora of “Employee of the Month” badges that he wears with such honor.  He credits his success to his uncanny ability to detect the most minute defects in a seemingly perfect doll- a skill that many of his coworkers seem to lack.  His area of expertise happens to be with irregularly proportioned, yet still socially accepted, miniature female dolls.  He regularly goes months without having a single defect slip through his fingers.  Of course, having fingers as thick as smoked Kielbasa sausages makes such an occurrence all the more rare.

Story

            Another regular work day for Lou.  As he approaches his workstation, he cycles through his routine preparatory tasks before officially beginning his work day.  He eyeballs his desk to make sure it is aligned perfectly parallel to the conveyor belt, and that it rests precisely 1 inch from his control panel.  He dusts off the top of his desk, then the control panel, then of course his shoes.  Lastly, he takes a moment to ensure that his coveted and much envied “Employee of the Month” badge glistens just right under the not-so-flattering fluorescent lights overhead.  After placing his feet in the same spot they rest every day, he quickly makes two-dozen simple adjustments on the control panel without looking and the motors of the conveyor belt start chugging.

            Dolls pass by for Lou to inspect, each one pausing for 2.5 seconds to verify perfection.  They used to pause for 5 seconds, but when you’re as good as Lou is, you only need 2.5.  Lou pays no attention to the reference poster on the wall in front of him, and instead focuses on each doll, with an occasional glance at his clipboard to make sure he is checking the right box.  Everything is going by the books today.

            As the dolls pass by, Lou seems to be slipping in to a mechanical state of perfection affirmation. So much so, that he almost lets a tragically defective doll sneak past him.  He suddenly notices and his arms fly up and a look of horror consumes his face.  One of his heavy hands slams down firmly on the emergency stop button of his console.  Alarms go off and his entire work area is illuminated by red and blue flashing lights.  A rookie may suspect a squad of police cars to somehow be inside the factory, but most employees know by now that this is just what happens when Lou does his job.

            The conveyor belt quickly reverses to bring the potentially defective doll before Lou’s qualified inspector eyes.  Using his handy “Inspecto-Arm” he searches for the problem he is certain he saw.  Unsurprisingly, resting just behind the ear on the doll’s head, is a single strand of hair that is drastically out of place by almost 3 entire millimeters. Lou fumbles with his clumsy hands, but due to his unfortunately chubby fingers, he is unable to grasp the strand of hair.  Using a few other tools and a bit of fumbling about, he is finally able to correct the defect and restart the inspection line.

            His routine resumes, and so does the steady onslaught of perfectly crafted, over enthusiastic looking dolls.  As he once again slips in to his robotic routine of drawing a check mark every 2.5 seconds, a rather peculiar defect passes before him.  This is not one that he could possibly miss, either.  The doll seems to be doing a jig with an eye patch and large handlebar moustache drawn on its face. 

            “Something seems wrong” Lou thinks, and is paralyzed by his disbelief as he watches the doll pass by him.  Slowly and cautiously, he reaches out to his console and reverses the line.  With the doll before him, he takes a moment to compare the doll to the reference poster for the first time in many years.  He notices many significant differences. 

            He struggles to fix everything, but can’t.

He starts getting a little worried.

            He looks at the clipboard, and realizes he can’t check it off as perfect, so he hesitantly sends it to the defect line.

            As it travels down the line, it passes in front of the giant scoreboard that reads “No defects for 298 days!”  Feeling his pride is on the line, he rushes over and frantically takes the doll off the defect line.  His eyes dart about as he struggles to find a hiding spot for it.  Eventually he hides it in his desk, and feels relieved.

            However, even more obviously vandalized dolls start appearing on the line in front of him, taunting him more and more.  Unwilling to give up his spot as “Employee of the Month” he continues to hide them in his desk.  Eventually the drawer is full and he needs to start hiding them elsewhere. 

            He begins getting creative.  He tapes them in obscure places, dangles them here and there, and does anything he can to make the defective dolls that he cannot fix disappear. 

            He eventually becomes so overwhelmed that he calls it quits for the day, and shuts down the line.  As he leaves, he takes all the dolls from his desk drawer in his arms.  After nervously looking around to be sure nobody is watching, he lifts up a part of the floor revealing a chamber stuffed with defective dolls.  Lou adds all the day’s defects to his stash and carefully closes the chamber.

            With a sigh of relief, Lou takes a moment to admire his “Employee of the Month” badge.

Method

We began with sketching our character and set design on paper.  These sketches will be the basis for our model and set creation in our 3D software package, Maya 2008.  All of the modeling, rigging, lighting and animation will be done in Maya 2008 and rendered using Mental Ray.  The files rendered out of Maya are TIF image sequences for diffuse, ambient occlusion, shadow and specular highlights.  These image sequences will be brought into a compositing package.

We will be doing our compositing in a nodal based compositor, Shake.  This allows us to edit each image sequence individually as we use it to make our final composite of each scene.  Shake also has native integration with Maya 2008 and our editing platform Final Cut Pro.  Once we have shots completed in Shake, we will then transfer those shots into Final Cut Pro and put together an edit on a timeline.

From Final Cut Pro, we can lay down our audio as well as send shots to Color for primary and secondary colour correction.  These colour corrected shots can be brought back into Final Cut Pro for the final render of the short using Compressor.

Why is it Important?

Both of us want careers in the post production or visual effects industry upon graduation.  However, this type of work is extremely time consuming.  The industry judges your ability based on a demo reel of your work and it is very hard for students to put together a good demo reel due to the lack of time they can dedicate  to it during their studies.  We feel the creative freedom of the final project gives us a perfect opportunity to create a professional level animation, and ultimately a worthy submission in to our demo reels.