cup of joe
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a short animated film
production team
introduction
‘Cup of Joe’ is a short animated film produced by a team of animation students called the ‘Déjà Brew’. This team production is completed for the module ‘Final Major Signature Project’ within a span of 8 months. Though the overall animation is made with a 3D software (Autodesk Maya), it is set to achieve a 2D looking animation.
synopsis
The story starts off with Joseph, the protagonist, who works as a barista at the local café. Sofia the waitress works alongside him to serve the customers. Every once a week, Joseph finds an anonymous appreciation note complimenting/ thanking for the drink. By the end of each note, a brightly coloured sticker is adhered onto it. He begins collecting the appreciation notes on the mini fridge and looks forward to find out who the unknown customer is. Three weeks have passed, and Joseph has not receive any usual appreciation notes since. One afternoon, Sofia receives a call and has to leave urgently. Joseph is left to take care of the cafe himself. As Joseph is attending to a customer, he finds out the identity of the anonymous notes sender. Joseph serves the unknown customer her order and hands her a note saying “Coffee’s on me”.
pre-production
concept development
Character design
character design - Joseph
Joseph is the main character in the short animation CUP OF JOE. He works as a barista in the CUPPA HEAVEN cafe. He is a very optimistic person, as shown by his hopeful expression in trying to find the mysterious customer who keeps leaving him all these kind messages, because if he wasn’t optimistic he would revert back to his old emo ways. Looking at all the latte arts in the animation, we can conclude he is very skilled in latte arts as he keeps drinking too much coffee accidentally from all those latte art attempts.
character design - sofia
Sofia is the waitress that works alongside Joseph in the CUPPA HEAVEN cafe. Sofia is the kind of character who is very blunt about her actions and loves nothing more than teasing Joseph during work hours. She loves interacting with the customers that come to the cafe and asking them about their day. She also has a boyfriend who keeps crashing their car and she has to keep getting him out on bail.
character design - faye
Faye is the mysterious customer that frequents the CUPPA HEAVEN cafe. She enjoys Joseph’s coffees and latte a little too much that she has now developed a crush on his coffees and now leaves anonymous messages for him, so that he would continue making the coffees because she is addicted to them and she needs them to deal with the children in her classrooms.
set/ environment design
Exterior Set Design
The exterior set design of the CUP OF JOE takes inspiration from the heritage buildings that can be found in the heart of the cities in Malaysia like Chinatown in Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown, Penang. We decided to create a sense of familiarity using the local culture and architecture that is found abundantly around us.
interior Set Design
The interior set was designed to have a rather vintage yet minimalistic theme in contrast to the bustling exterior which has a strong cultural architecture. The cafe itself radiates a very warm atmosphere, which comes from the different shades of brown tones in the cafe.
interior Set Layout Design
The layout of the cafe had to be based on the actual layout of the heritage buildings which the cafe was taken inspiration from. So unlike any typical cafe’s square layout, the CUPPA HEAVEN layout had to be made rectangular. We didn’t want the interior to be filled with the same kind of seating areas, so we decided to let the cafe have three different seating areas to give variations to the interior furnishings.
story & art direction
Since my story pitch was chosen, I was responsible for fixing the storyline & storyboard throughout the whole project and lead the team as we worked closely to finish everything up in time.
Storyboard
colour palette/ scheme
production
3d modelling + texturing + rigging
(character)
The softwares used during the modelling, texturing, and rigging process of the characters include Autodesk Maya and Adobe Photoshop. The modelling and rigging procedures were done with the help of my teammates (Ming Hui, Panashe, Mee Hee, and Zubair), whereas I worked on the texturing. Since we were trying to achieve a 2D render look, I assigned SurfaceShader to all of them. After the UV maps (face, body, eyes, name tag, apron) are opened, I proceeded to paint textures on them in Adobe Photoshop. For the parts that do not require additional details such as the shirt, apron straps, and shoes, I only assigned basic colours to them in Autodesk Maya.
▲ The images above show the 3D model of the character Joseph.
▲ The images above show the wireframe render of the character Faye.
▲ The images above show the rigging process of the character Joseph.
The rigging of the characters is done by my teammate Zubair. He used a plug-in called the Advanced Skeleton during the whole rigging process. The types of binding during the Bind Skin procedure include Selected Joints and Joints Hierarchy.
▲ The images above show the facial rig and Blendshapes of the character Joseph.
The facial rig is done with the help of our lecturer. In order to create different facial expressions and poses, Mee Hee aided in creating the Blendshapes.
▲ The images above show the making of sub-characters (customers) using the Deformer method.
Due to time and man-power limitation, we decided to use the Shape Editor to deform the existing characters into multiple sub-characters for the customers.
▲ The images above show the rendered look of the customers.
▲ The images above show the UV maps and textures of the character Joseph.
▲ The images above show the UV maps and textures of the character Sofia.
3d modelling + Texturing
(set/ environment)
▲ The images above show the overall 3D model (wireframe render) of the set/ environment.
After my teammates and I were done with the whole set modelling, I assigned colours to the shaders, except the few parts that required texturing. For the interior set of the cafe, I applied a brick texture to the wall and a wooden panel texture to the floor. Some of the exterior parts that required texturing include the road, road signs, sign boards, and trees. Instead of modelling each individual tree, I created two planes that intersect each other in the middle and assigned a tree texture to them.
▲ The images above show the exterior and interior of the set/ environment after texturing.
3d modelling + texturing + rigging
(props)
▲ The overall 3D model of the props is done by using Autodesk Maya.
The modelling task of the props were distributed among all of our teammates. Rubini and I then redefine some of them into the final look before I proceeded with the texturing process.
▲ Screenshots of the prop texturing process.
▲ Rendered look of the props after texturing.
▲ The images above show the rigging process of the props (door sign & doorbell).
There was some issue with the initial doorbell model as it was not modelled well for rigging. Thus, I decided to separate them into several parts and add controllers to them, so that it will be easier to animate in one of the animation scene.
I consulted with the lecturer about the problem we had regarding the door sign. The initial model for the door sign poses issue for 2 of the animation shots in which the string needs to be twisted when the sign is flipped. Thus, he suggested us to use the cloth simulation for the string. We smoothen the string model by increasing its edges and chose the preset of heavy denim attribute and adjusted it till we acquired the desired effect.
animation production
▲ The images and gifs above show the animation breakdown (storyboard/ 2D animatic, 3D layout, blocking, and final animation) of one of the shot.
The process behind the animation production includes a few stages - 2D animatic, 3D animatic, blocking, in-between, and final animation.
2D animatic was first created after the completion of storyboard. To further figure out how each shot will look like in a Autodesk Maya, we did a 3D animatic to set up the layout and camera angle. The characters and props were then adjusted to their position.
The blocking of the animation was done concurrently with the progressive updates of the asset models and textures. During this stage, each animation was assigned with key poses which gave the shot an initial idea of how they would be animated.
Then, it was further polished by adding more keyframes to give the animation/ movement more definition. Some principles of animation were applied, such as exaggeration, anticipation, and arcs, in order to give the final animation more appeal.
post-production
lighting
The lighting applied to the overall animation is Directional Light Since Shadow Layer is needed for every shot during the rendering process, we decided to use the light as mentioned and adjusted the angle differently for each shot depending on how we wanted them to look or where the sunlight would usually hit on.
rendering
In order to achieve a 2D looking animation, we rendered each shot with 3 main layers - Beauty layer, Ambient Occlusion layer, and Shadow layer.
The Beauty layer consists of a collection of mesh with their assigned textures and shaders. The Ambient Occlusion layer consists of a collection of mesh which was assigned a shader override of aiAmbientOcclusion. As for the Shadow layer, the collection of mesh was assigned a shader override of aiShadowMatte.
We also rendered some extra layers such as Matte layer and a Ramp shader layer for the glassy effect on the tipping jar model.
rendering & compositing
(character turnaround)
▲ The image and gif above show a completed (turnaround) composition of the character Joseph.
▲ The images above show a sequence of Beauty layer, Ambient Occlusion layer, and Shadow layer as rendered in Autodesk Maya for the character Joseph.
To achieve a 2D render look, there were 4 main layers that were placed on top of each other in the composition - Beauty layer (Blending Mode: normal, Opacity: 100%), Ambient Occlusion layer #1 (Blending Mode: Multiply, Opacity: 10%), Ambient Occlusion layer #2 (Blending Mode: Overlay, Opacity: 20%), and Shadow layer (Blending Mode: Overlay, Effect: Invert, Opacity: 20%). The composition process took place in Adobe After Effects.
rendering & compositing
(animation clip)
▲ The gif above shows a composited animation clip.
▲ The images above show a sequence of Beauty layer, Ambient Occlusion layer, Shadow layer, Matte layer, and Ramp layer as rendered in Autodesk Maya for one of the animation clips.
The same composition method is applied to the compositing of the animation clips. I then added on the matte layers to create some depth for the foreground and background using Alpha and Inverted Alpha masking option. I added on a Gradient Ramp effect to achieve the lighting for each shot. Then, I created an Adjustment Layer in which I used the Lumetri effect to do some colour correction to each shot. The Ramp render layer (Blending Mode: Screen, Opacity: 30%) was used where the tipping jar and glass surfaces were visible in the shots. There is plenty of masking throughout the compositing process. To achieve the effect and simulation, I used Particle System II and Wave Warp to create the liquid pouring and steam rising.
▲ The images above shows the compositing process of the animation clips in Adobe After Effects.
▲ The gifs above demonstrate the compositing breakdown of some animation clips.
score & sound fx production
▲ The image above shows Logic Pro X software used to create the music for the animation.
▲ The image above shows the list of sound effects used in the animated short.
Concurrently, Charles worked on the sound and score of the animation. Logic Pro X was used for the production of the music because it was the most appropriate software to use and the most reliable as the various range of interactive instruments available was easy to use and tweak around to match the music to the theme of the animation.
The sound effects were sourced from royalty free websites as they offered more variation to the sound effect that we needed for the animation production.
editing
▲ The image above shows the editing process in Adobe Premiere Pro.
When all the shots had been composited, Rubini moved on to the editing process. The software used at this stage is Adobe Premiere Pro. All the shots are compiled and adjusted with some changes to timing and transition. The sound effects and music are then imported in to finish up the whole animation video.
