Darragh O’Connell has been blogging all through the production of his new short film, ‘23 Degrees 5 Minutes’, and now we can finally show you the teaser trailer!
‘23 Degrees 5 Minutes’ is Brown Bag’s first short film since Nicky Phelan’s ‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’, which earned Nicky and Darragh an Oscar nomination.
In the short film, an old explorer close to freezing in the Arctic re-lives the events that brought him there in the first place. He recalls his student days at Trinity College in Dublin when he studied under the enigmatic Professor Orit, the professor who was driven to madness by his obsessive pursuit of the unified theory.
Convinced that the answer somehow lay in the relationship between the numbers two, three and five, Professor Orit’s obsession started the journey which has led his former student to the top of the world.
Featuring the voice talents of John Hurt and Stuart Townsend, and produced by Colm Tyrrell, the film was scripted by Darragh O’Connell based on a short story by Austin Kenny. The film is being made with the support of the Frameworks short film scheme and will premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh this summer
Lighting & rendering has become by far the trickiest part of the process so far! The fact we are using Renderman means we are working at a technical level way beyond anything we used in the past.
Hopefully the results will be worth it & here’s a look at some of the renders that we have produced so far:
I thought it would be good to bring you up to date with how the looks of the ‘23 Degrees..’ characters are going.
We had signed off on the Professor Orit model, which is the grey scale model below:
signed off Professor Orit model
So the lads started doing some initial hair tests. Hair is a really tricky thing to get right & as you can see from some of these early tests (on a previous, unfinished model), Professor Orit started to look more like Jack Black.
Just realised I hadn’t posted any production blogs on ‘23 Degrees…’ in a while, but it’s coming along and we are aiming for an April finish.
Here are a few presentation pieces that we had to prepare recently. I thought they looked so nice, sure I’d fire them up here for anyone to have a look at!
We have been animating away on ‘23 Degrees 5 Minutes’, so I thought it would be nice to share some of the work as it is coming together.
All of the work below is still work in progress, but if I had to wait for shots to finish before showing anything you would be waiting a long time…
Here’s a movie showing how we progress from storyboard to rough animation to final animation. The music is composed by Darren Hendley as scratch tracks which we were using to time out the animatic. I’ve left it on here to give you an idea of what some of the final music might sound like. Storyboard panels were done by Tim Spillane with animation by Geraint Wright.
Stephen Robinson, Art Director on 23 Degrees 5 Minutes, worked on the colour script for the film. This basically gives a breakdown of how colour will work in the film and helps us to plan how to tell the story emotionally. It’s a huge help to the lighters & texture artists.
I can’t show it all here as it will give away too much of the story, but I think Stephen has done a great job. Hope you like it!
When you’re setting a film in a specific time & place it’s important to do as much research as you can. While the internet proves a valuable source of reference, nothing quite takes the place of going out into the field!
So with kind permission from the good people of Renaissance Antiques on Capel Street in Dublin, Stephen O’Connor set off armed with a camera to snap away at anything interesting that caught his eye. Here are just some of the snaps which he came back with:
Sorry there have been no ‘23 Degrees…’ posts for a while. Work commitments are crunching precious time once again, but work on the short film has been ongoing in spurts.
Here are some colour studies done by Stephen O’Connor. It’s amazing how colour can change the mood of a shot even though it’s the same object and angle.
