La Noria

Today I started getting myself set up to work on "La Noria", an animated short film written/directed by Carlos Baena and produced by Sasha Korellis.

It's a collaboration of artists from all over the world volunteering to help bring this story to life. I'll be coming on board as a lighter, and am really excited about the overall look and approach this piece will have. It's going to be very different from the typical animation studio-style approach to lighting, and definitely much different than the work I'm used to doing at Blue Sky. This will be a great opportunity to really explore some new styles and techniques.

The short will be rendered in Arnold. This will be my first time using this renderer, and I'm really excited to get some experience with it and see what it can do. Arnold was actually inspired by Studio++, the proprietary renderer I use now at Blue Sky:

The roots of Solid Angle date back to 1997 when founder Marcos Fajardo had the realization that a brute-force path tracing solution to the rendering equation could be optimized to produce previously unattainable imagery. His early ray tracing code was integrated into WYSIWYG, a stage lighting design tool, helping Toronto-based CAST Software secure an Engineering Emmy Award. The inspiration and itch to work in film production was sparked by a 1998 visit to Blue Sky Studios in New York, where co-founder Carl Ludwig showed Marcos beautiful and intriguing images rendered with their pioneering Monte Carlo ray tracer. Arnold was born shortly after.​

I'll post updates as I can, but probably won't be able to show too much. But, you can watch the teaser:

Teaser for the Animated Horror Short film "La Noria"Written/Directed by Carlos BaenaProduced by Sasha Korellis

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