The latest short we worked on here in Brown Bag was Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty. Here’s a few bits and bobs about the short, and that grim Granny of the title.

We’re all delighted with how well Granny is doing for herself ( ‘It’s far from the Iftas that crowd was raised,’ is probably how she’d put it.) I thought people might like to hear a bit about how the short came to be, and to see a bit of the work in progress stuff from when we made it.
Granny is a character Kathleen O’Rourke developed and used to perform as part of the Fallen Angels, a group whose show was a great mix of comedy, cabaret and what ever you’re having yourself. Below is an image of Kathleen (left) on stage as Granny, with Anne Lillis, the founding member of the Fallen Angels,  playing the befuddled grandchild.

In a case of six degrees of seperation, Anne’s act as Rose Lawless has supported the Bottom Floor Band (and vice versa I believe..). Ray O’Dwyer is one third of the Bottom Floor Band, and also worked as a 3D animator on Granny. Tis a small world after all!
I’m friends with Kathleen since college, when I met her through her sister Ruth who was in my class in Ballyfermot. A few years ago I saw her do the Granny sketch. I asked her if she’d be up for making a cartoon out of it, and thankfully she was. I talked to Doc in here about it, and thankfully he was up for it too.  So a Frameworks application, oodles of drawing, , animating, tracing, colouring, modelling, lighting, music composing (by the very talented Gregory Magee)  and sound recording (by the also very talented Sound Butlers) later, we had a finished short !
And here’s a few images from preproduction -

This old guy was going to be at the Christening, until we remembered the Elderly Fairy was giving out about how YOUNG all the guests are. So unfortunately, he didn’t make the cut!

Here’s an early work in progress render of the Granny model. We were experimenting with how Granny’s hair would work; as we didn’t have the resources for ‘real’ simulated hair, we had to come up with an alternative. Shane worked it out using Partical Flow for the hair placement; this Partical Flow was then collapsed to a mesh, and later modified to get the look of the hair strands right. Here’s an early Partical Flow render. She looks a little electrocuted, but it’s still a good look for her methinks….

Here’s a render of Annie, Granny’s not-so-delighted audience. This render was output while we working on Annie’s textures, and in this pass we tried out eyelashes to see how they’d work. They wouldn’t, it turned out.

...And here’s a still from the film to give an idea of what they ended up looking like, minus electrocutions and eyelashes.