About six years ago Grzegorz Jonkajtys came up with the concept of a CG-animated short film. In March he completed the film, The Ark, employing motion control for many of the background environments and managing to create and render virtually the entire 1920×1080 short on just his laptop, along with managing files being sent and received remotely from designers, animators and technicians in the U.S. and Poland. The film was selected as the Best in Show for this years’ SIGGRAPH. Jonkajtys will give a presentation at SIGGRAPH about the film and also be around the Softimage|XSI booth so read about it here and be sure to check out the film if you get a chance. It is not to be missed. Click below to view the trailer

One never knows from where inspiration will come.
In 2001, Grzegorz Jonkajtys was attending a premiere in Rome for the Polish film Quo Vadis? (Imdb) he worked on. (He has been employed at CafeFX since 2003 creating vfx for such films as Gothika, Sin City and Pan's Labryinth, among others). While in Rome, he was visiting the famed catacombs. Upon seeing the immense underground tunnels he almost immediately came up with the concept for an animated short film about an unknown virus that threatens to destroy the human race.

“Visually that inspired me to create the boat full of these sections that resembled the catacomb. Kind of like a floating tomb,” says Jonkajtys.

The film begins with what is left of the human race departing on enormous boats in search of land that has not been infected. The hero is a scientist who is trying to find a cure for the disease when he finds that he is infected and has to do what is necessary to protect the rest of the ships inhabitants: commit suicide.

With the story in mind, Jonkajtys had to figure out the style and spent much of the next year sketching out ideas. He worked out some animatics of the scene progressions but then had to work out the look of the characters.

“I thought of making the characters have animal features, the way the eyes are set and the way the nose is disproportional,” recalls Jonkajtys. “The initial thought came from the look of an animal and then I just went off and created the characters. They are pretty unique I think. Some people don’t like it but at least it stands out and it is not common.”

The main character was designed in Lightwave by Radek Nowakowski, based on pencil sketches by director Grzegorz Jonkajtys. Other characters were modeled in 3DS Max of Luxology modo and then rigged in XSI, which was the software workhorse for The Ark

For what Jonkajtys had envisioned, the creating the characters of the film was the easy part. The challenge was to create the enormous, cavernous, extremely detailed sets he wanted for the sequences inside the ship. Creating them from scratch in CG would be too time-consuming and also would not provide the aesthetic he was seeking to achieve so he decided on building miniatures and shooting them with a still camera.

“I started doing this after watching a DVD of Brother Quay short films,’ says Jonkajtys. “That’s where that idea came from. I thought it looks better when it’s real. Plus, it is more fun to do than sitting in front of the computer all the time. I started doing initial models and photographed them and proved that it would work and then I had my producer (Marcin Kobylecki) help me with a lot of the miniatures. He did the first room and the corridor where we see the main character. My other friend made this big miniature of the catacombs of the interior.”

But still there was no way to create a miniature that would be large enough to resemble the massive interior. So he decided to shoot the sets using motion control with a still digital camera (Nikon D70). The motion control was shot at Platige Image in Poland where they developed software specifically to handle this technique of using a still camera with motion control.

“In the big interior of the ship I would use the same miniature four times so I could photograph one pass, move the miniature further away from camera and then redo the motion again and then composite it so it made he set of the interior of the ship much, much bigger. It’s a similar technique used by Tim Burton in Corpse Bride, except he used it for stop motion.

“I didn’t want to pay for shooting film; it was more cost effective to shoot with digital still images. I could shoot the whole sequence, move the miniatures in the foreground or background and then repeat the sequence. It was the same miniature but in a different depth. Also I flipped it to the other side so we’d have right and left of the interior.”

These plates were then enhanced with matte paintings and CG elements were added for the objects the character would interacted with.

Once Jonkajtys had these background plates and was receiving character models based off his designs from designers in Poland, he had to figure out a way to put the entire film together with only his laptop.

“I used Softimage for animation then moved everything to Lightwave to use FPrime for rendering. Why? because FPrime is probably the fastest retracer. It may not be the quality of Mental Ray, but given that I didn’t have a renderfarm for this project and basically rendered this whole thing on my laptop, not the whole but 90 percent of it. That was the only renderer that could handle almost 2K footage (1920×1080) with motion blur and radiosity and things like that. So I got the models from different packages, sometime Luxology modo, sometimes 3DS Max, sometimes Lightwave and then move it all to XSI, rig it and export the animation to Lightwave were it was lit and rendered using FPrime. Then those renders were comped on top of the backgrounds. I think it worked pretty well for a small project like that where I was controlling all of the renders."

Writer and Director: Grzegorz Jonkajtys
Producers: Grzegorz Jonkajtys, Marcin Kobylecki
Co-Producers: Jarek Sawko, Piotr Sikora
Executive Producer: Marcin Kobylecki
Production Assistant: Marta Staniszewska
3D Artists: Steve Arguello, Alex Federici, Joe Hoback, Kevin Hoppe, Szymon Kaszuba, Grzegorz Krzysik, Slawomir Latos, Votch Levi, Olek Lyzwanski, Radoslaw Nowakowski, Bartosz Opatowiecki, Akira Orikasa, Marcin Pazera, Piotr Rusnarczyk, Aaron Singer, Bartosz Tomaszewski, Piotr Tomczyk, Gabriel Vargas
Character Animation: Grzegorz Jonkajtys, Grzegorz Kukus, Lukasz Muszynski, Tracy Irwin
Paint Artists: Damian Bajowski, Lei Jin, Krzysiek Kamrowski, Pawel, Lewandowski, Marcin Pazera, Maria Strzelecka
R&D: Adam Wierzchowski
Model Builders: Marcin Kobylecki, Tomas Mayer
Music: Pawel Blaszczak, Adam Skorupa
SFX: Adam Skorupa
Theater Mix: Tomasz Sikora, Piotr Knop
Tech. Support: Tomasz Kruszona, Piotr Getka. Danny Torres, Michael Torres