TECHNICAL DIRECTION

As Technical Director it was my job to problem solve the post pipeline to get every shot finalized. We were using multiple avenues of software with assets hitting us from every angle including repurposed archival show animations / kits. Production used Basecamp and Filemaker and through this we kept track and managed the demand of the workflow. Our pipeline typically started with beautiful 6k or 8k PSD/PSB backgrounds, layeered/structured intelligently for compositing purposes, from BG/art dept headed by Art Director Arthur Tang. Then, we would get Adobe Flash files from animation & layout dept led by Assistant Director Travis Simon and Animation Director Mike Roush which were then ran through a Titmouse Flash plugin that the comp team used to I separate out lines and fills. From there we could further take another Titmouse plugin for After Effects that was deconstructed to suit our film—and give our lines ‘the line treatment’ (see below), a process where we would scale up and alter Flash vector lines into something more resembling an organic raster penstrokes, giving the lines a more hand-drawn feel than the television show and a subtle visual update across a large majority of shots. Altogether software I used After Effects, Cinema 4D/Redshift with Arnold Engine, Trapcode & all Red Giant Suite, Sapphire Suite, Embergen, and Element 3D. Our 3D renders would often be broken up into multipass/cryptomatte AOVs that I would show our comp team how to extract mattes and incorporate etc.