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Ask Richard Anything #AMA





Today we've got BIRD FOOD Director Richard Keane at the AMA helm to answer your questions!

BIRD FOOD - Brown Bag Films short film produced in 2012 is being screened this Saturday at the Galway Film Fleadh as part of the Brown Bag Retrospective.

The short tells the tale of a business man who tries to eat his lunch in the park, where the local pigeons have other ideas!

Richard is happy to field your questions, be they on the making of BIRD FOOD, his work in Brown Bag Films or what his favourite sandwich is - drop your question in the comments below - and we'll hop to it. (We're fielding Q's on Facebook, Twitter and G+ too, if that's easier!)

If you haven't caught it already, watch the trailer for BIRD FOOD here:

First up:

Hi Jonathan and thanks for the question!

Yes Bird Food was completely animated and rendered in 3D. I wanted it to look like an old Looney Tunes style cartoon so we had to keep in mind how they would have done it in 2D – they used acrylic paint on acetate for the animated characters which were then placed over a painted background.

We used the same technique just imaging the layers in 3D space so the background could have nice details painted on it in the texture but the characters had to be textured with only block colours so there was no shading (as they could not afforded to do this on these old cartoons).

Also to make these colours flat we didn’t have any lights in the scene so all of the textures were self-illuminating. This in turn saved huge amounts of rendering time and once we worked out the system the entire short was rendered and composited in around a week.

The same went with any props the characters interacted with, like the sandwich, as again if it was hand painted they wouldn’t have been able to put any fine detail in every frame so we just used block colours and made sure the design had a graphic style.

I hope this answers your question! Thanks again and we look forward to showing you the full short online soon!


Anahita Tabarsi

Anahita is Brown Bag Films' Marketing Director, Digital & Social and drinks more than five coffees a day...

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