Behind the Scenes: Two Little Boys
INTRODUCTION
Hello! I am Mishel “Misho” Abramidi, a 3D generalist and animator living in Tbilisi, Georgia.
My journey in 3D started as a graphic designer, who wanted to present his design work on costume mockups and use it as a secondary tool. Later, I became interested in motion graphics and familiarized myself with animation. Still, at some moments, I got dissatisfied with purely commercially-driven work, and the need to tell narrative stories slowly grew in me.
To say it shortly, instead of being solely a designer, I wanted to be an artist as well.
This led me to Animschool where I began learning character animation and on the side, I also started studying and getting familiar with other disciplines (cinematography, lighting, LookDev, acting, VFX, etc) necessary for creating compelling visuals and bringing them to life.
INSPIRATION
During my studies at Animschool, we had an assignment to find an audio clip and build an idea around that clip to which we would animate characters. I stumbled upon a clip from a film called “Trainspotting” in which one of the characters was singing a song you hear in my shot. I got curious about the song and wanted to hear it as a whole and what it was about. So I started searching for it and discovered this version:
The song resonated with me, how little boys through play are taught to glorify war, later to realize the horrors of it. Things, of course, have not changed since then and lately, eagerness to fight in wars seems to be on the uptrend, which is worrisome to me, to say the least.
I wanted to show in this short scene that at the very least, war is tragic, and at worst, unimaginably brutal, horrifying, and there is not much worthy of glorification in it.
PROCESS
Maya was used for all the character animation you see in the shot.
References
After finalizing the Idea, I started production with shooting references. Admittedly not being a good actor, reference is still quite important in my workflow but usually after initial blocking, I tend to change things around and the final product deviates quite a bit from the reference. Animation as a whole took me 10 weeks after which I started working on LookDev.
Texturing
After that, most of the LookDev and rendering was done in Blender, excluding hand-painted textures which I did in Substance Painter.
My initial intent was to make it all PBR “Pixar style,” something I’m quite familiar and comfortable with, but I quickly changed my mind in favor of something more stylized. I did not exactly have a clear vision of what I was going end up with, but I knew I wanted to use hand-painted textures.
The background sky was painted directly in Blender with Grease Pencil, which was helpful in figuring out how to place it into the composition without much of hopping in and out of different software.
Smoke & Explosion
The smoke and explosion sim was done in Embergen—highly recommend the software. It is very intuitive and easy to learn compared to alternatives. It took only 1 week of studying to be able to use it in my own project and make custom fx.
To complement the hand-painted textures on the characters in the background, I decided to use physical brushstrokes applied to objects which created a natural separation of background and foreground elements. For this technique, I used the addon, Spline Brush – Turn Splines into Brush Strokes.
Below is the full BTS video of the project:
And that’s it! Below is the final animated render and some render shots.
RENDER: Two Little Boys
Thank you for reading!
About the Artist
Mishel Abramidi is a 3D artist and an animator with a passion for telling narrative stories through animation.
Absolutely freaking morbid and depressing, but job well done…great animation, great stylisation. I’m happy you didn’t go down the Pixar route, cause it’s cutesy look wouldn’t have helped with the overall theme you were going for. Also, didnt realise animating a shot takes so freaking long (10 weeks??)
Hello Weasel, appreciate the compliment, glad you liked the choices made. In this case, the first 3 weeks were spent developing the idea, set dressing, composition, etc., and 7 weeks actively animating. But animation does take a long time. On average in feature films, an animator animates 3 seconds in a week (about 40 hours per 3 seconds of animation) and I’ve heard from industry animators that on “Spiderverse” production, animators were animating about 1,5 seconds of animation per week. On lower budget TV shows it goes up to about 5 seconds maybe even 7 but quality does drop with increased output.