“The Adventures of Baxter & McGuire: The Soccer Game” by Mirari Films
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Conference:
- SIGGRAPH 2007 More animation videos from SIGGRAPH 2007:
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Title:
- The Adventures of Baxter & McGuire: The Soccer Game
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- Mirari Films
Description:
This Emmy-nominated, animated buddy comedy chronicles the adventures of Baxter and McGuire, the closest of pals who never leave each other’s side. They also just happen to be testicles. In this episode, the guys have decidedly different reactions to being stuck in a soccer game.
The production goal was to bring the characters to life using high-end production techniques on a webisode budget. Pre-production and post were done in Los Angeles, and production was com-pleted in Romania at Mirari Films.
We focused our efforts on the two main characters and left the backgrounds simple and impres-sionistic. Mirari spent extenstive time rigging the characters to allow for broad (for example, blend shapes) and fine-grain (for example, clusters and wire deformers) control over facial expressions. Because our designs required two faces in a single character model, modeling and rigging proved a significant challenge; we could not trivially model around the origin to take advantage of symmetry. Baxter’s mustache hairs were simulated using dynamics, but animation could modify results via traditional key framing. We used subsurface scattering for skin, created soft shadows by ray trac-ing, and rendered many passes to tweak everything in the final composite.
Hardware:
PCs
Software:
Maya, Shake, mental ray
Additional Contributors:
Creators/Writers: Michael J. Weithorn, Nick Bakay
Director/Producer: Mike Blum
Executive Producer: Eric Kaplan
Storyboards: Johnny Ryan
Composer: Kurt Farquhar
Character Designer/Opening Sketches: Laurent Dareau
Editor: Joe Gressis
Project Leader/Layout Lead: Oana Bejan
Production Managers: Janos Boda, Raduca Kaplan
Art Director/Compositor: Adrian Chifor
Modeling & Rigging Lead: Cristian Bronescu
Texturing: Carmen Alexandrescu, Dan Nanu
Animators: Eduard Ersek, Eduard Baak
Effects: Claudiu Paduroiu
Lighting & Rendering: Florin Besleaga, Rudolf Benning