When we asked Stuart Bury of Other Brother Studios about their recent short, HOWL, he told us, “Our main goal was to create a piece of character animation that packed as much story into a small amount of time as possible.” We’d say that goal was more than accomplished! In under a minute this piece follows a main character suffering from the modern condition of computer-driven weariness right out of the cubicle and into the jungle, where the he finally has a chance to reconnect with his inner primal nature. The result is quite the journey for such a short film.

“We had a bunch of paper left over from paper craft based stop-motion projects from the previous year and wanted to experiment with the medium outside of the commercial setting,” Bury went on. “Conceptually, forced perspective was important to us. We liked the idea that the office world only appeared to have dimension, but was all a trick of layered paper. While the full jungle scene, still being paper, was actually a dimensional set shot with a slider.”

When asked about the production, Bury explained, “Since this project had to fit in the cracks between other commercial projects we needed something that we could turn around relatively quickly. Our process was a balancing act between what we saw as visually interesting with how quickly it could be executed. Knowing this in preproduction allowed us to storyboard the project so that (with a few intentional exceptions) there was one pose of the character for each shot. Even though there’re only about 10 poses of our main character, he felt surprisingly dimensional.”

Creating such a complete piece in such a short amount of time seemed like a real challenge. Bury agreed, saying, “As many of the readers know it’s very hard to hold your own nose to the grindstone and get something done on a personal project. So we did what every artist should do, we got a producer on board to help us stay on schedule. He (Thomas Culton) was a huge help to us.”

We’re happy to hear that another big help, according to Bury, was the Dragonframe software. “We love Dragonframe. We were lucky enough to start using this program almost a decade ago on a student film, Dried Up, and have never looked back. Every scene in HOWL was shot flat except for the jungle scene so our setups were not overly complex. The ongoing integration with Ditogear and motion control has been fantastic. The Jungle scene was shot with the Omnihead and Stepper slider on 4 different passes.

“The first pass was a stand-in of our main character to pull tracking information of the camera move. He was later animated flat on a green screen and comped in. We then shot a clean pass of the jungle set and then 2 more passes with the room fogged to try and pick up light rays and a nice soft environmental feel we could fully tweak and balance in post. Fog and stop motion admittedly do not mix well but we had a little time to experiment and are quite happy with the subtle ambiances we were able to create in that scene practically.”

For more on the Other Brother process, check out these behind-the-scenes videos and pics:

Isaiah Powers – Director, Animator, Props Fabricator
Stuart Bury – Director, Animator, Pupet Fabricator
Thomas Culton – Producer
Haley Chaffin Haleychaffin.com – Prop Fabrication Assistant
Primary Color Music primarycolormusic.com/ – Music and Sound Edit