The Painter

422 South has completed work on a short animated film entitled The Painter, commissioned by Hewlett-Packard (HP) to test its new experimental rendering service.

422 South has completed work on a short animated film entitled The Painter, commissioned by Hewlett-Packard (HP) to test its new experimental rendering service.

HP asked 422 South to develop the concept and story and to produce and direct the animation from start to finish. The objective of the production was to demonstrate Frame Factory, an experimental rendering service created by HP Laboratories. The aim, to test the power of Frame Factory to its ultimate ability.

422 Animation Director Andy Power directed the film. Andy developed the central 3D character – a long-abandoned robot that lives in a dusty basement. The robot spends his time drawing scenes of exotic locations on the walls, using inadequate materials – he is lost in his daydreams and longs to be in the outside world where he would be free. One day, in a fit of rage and frustration, he kicks what appears to be an old oil can. At this point his life changes for ever as a genie appears from the can and grants him three wishes. Needless to say, through the magic of the genie he ultimately finds a way of making his dreams come true!

The animation team, lead by Andy Power, included Tom Downes, Duncan MacDonald, Jaime Pardo, Libby Redden and Tia Perkins. The four minute film was animated and rendered in Maya, deliberately setting out to exploit the software’s ability to create rich textures and lighting effects. Composer Kim Humphrey wrote the all-important music for the dialogue-free film and the BBC’s Steve Williams was dubbing mixer for the project. The film was produced by Anne Farrell.

Andy Power says “Thanks to the speed of Frame Factory we were able to see test-render results a lot faster and could therefore afford to spend much longer “fine-tuning” the animations before kicking off the final renders. It was a great opportunity for us to have full creative input on this project and to have this kind of technology at our disposal”.

HP Labs designed the Frame Factory experiment to further it’s research into utility computing, in which very large numbers of processors, memory and other resources are available rapidly across a network, with users only paying for the computer power they actually use.

Steve Hinde, manager of the Frame Factory project at HP Labs says “We wanted to show how a computer-intensive service such as rendering could run on our own utility computing system, the HP UDC. A happy side effect of our research is that, thanks to the skills of 422 and our Frame Factory project, we have created a piece of art in The Painter.

author: CH
2003-01-01