“The Adventures of Baxter & McGuire: The Soccer Game” by Mirari Films

  • ©Michael S. Blum Mirari Films

Conference:


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

Animation / Video Overview:


Type: