Media Design School chooses Yeti for Short Film

At Peregrine Labs we believe it is important to foster creativity and innovation in educational institutes around the globe. That’s why we are pleased to offer a significant discount on permanent Yeti and Bokeh licenses to qualifying schools. One such institution who recently used Yeti for a short film is Media Design School, New Zealand’s most awarded tertiary institution for creative and digital technology qualifications.

We spoke with James Cunningham who wrote, produced and directed the short film titled, “Accidents, Blunders and Calamities” that looks at all the perilous ways humans inadvertently bring death to animals. Thirty-one creatures were developed, 11 of which had fur or feathers and were created using Yeti.  Inspired by the Edward Gorey classic, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies”, James created an alphabet storybook that a concerned father possum reads to his kids.

In total, 44 students were involved in this project and all visual effects were completed by those in their final (third) year of their degree. The team included 3-D generalists for model, texture and light, animators and compositors. Some students were set up to be fur specialists and groomers but in some cases, strong students would complete a creature in its entirety, including adding the fur.

We asked why Media Design School chose Yeti and James told us, “We had been wanting to play with Yeti for a while and finally had a project that screamed out for the control and complexity that Yeti could achieve for us. One of our more precocious students was also mad keen on Yeti. He ended up being the lead fur designer on the possums. Yeti also fed well into our Maya and Vray pipeline. Peregrine were very supportive of the project and donated the licenses we needed for this educational production.”

He went on to explain that, “With the quails, we attempted to not use Yeti as we didn’t have that many artists trained up and interactive licenses. However the texture-only approach was just not selling it. We got an extra seat and very quickly another student got up to speed on Yeti and it turned out much better doing the feathers properly. The rendering of the close ups of the possum shots were very heavy in memory usage but once we nailed the culprit we were able to keep even these hero close shots in reasonable render times.”

Watch the trailer here.