Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique Playing at Belafast Film Festival 2009

Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique is in the Jameson Short Film Competition at this years Belfast International Film Festival in Belfast, Northern Ireland.


Visit Belfast Film Festival Website


The festival takes place in March.

Mr. Humpfninkel was written and directed by Shane Sheils and Paula Sheils of Dwarfed Films. The part of Mr. Humpfninkel was played by American Sherman Alpert.

Mr. Humpfninkel - Another Update

Here’s another update on the film “Mr. Humpfninkel’s Sales Technique”.

Attached are some new frames from the short animated movie.

The movie is being rendered in 1920 X 1080 Hi Definition – which is the first production we’ve used the format on so far.

It makes a massive difference to the output quality, as I’m sure you can guess.

“To Shoot A Rurf” was rendered at a DVD PAL standard scale of 720 X 576 and although the overall image quality was good, I feel that it would have really benefited from being rendered the way “Mr. Humpfninkel…” is being made.

The image quality is so clear and sharp and there is no loss of picture details – which is so important when there has been so much effort put into little details throughout the film.

Even if something is only going to be on screen for less than a second it should be clearly seen - otherwise what the hell was the point in putting it there in the first place??!!!

On the audio front, lots of time has been going into producing a quality soundtrack.

“Mr. Humpfninkel…” is a completely different feel to “To Shoot A Rurf” or even “Opera Baby” and the music need to both reflect this and really contribute to the overall mood of the movie.

“To Shoot A Rurf” was very sparse aurally except maybe for the big singing number in the night Club sequence towards the end. Overall it was a very sombre movie in the audio department.

“Mr. Humpfninkel…” is a jolly little movie and writing ‘jolly music’ or a ‘comedy score’ is much harder to achieve successfully than a horror or a drama.

Until the next update,

Shane

Mr. humpfninkel - More Images

Some new images from the Short films "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sale's Technique".

Humpfninkel New Image

New image.
Look at the little guy waving. Nice!

More images form Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique

Some more images from the short film.

Mr. Humpfninkel - Old Folks Home model Location

The Old Folks Home location from the Mr. Humpfninkel short film.
Creepy looking, aint it?!

Rendering out composited frames for the film takes time and isn't helped by the fact that each shot has to be checked a number of times for colour correction on different monitors to ensure everything looks exactly as it should.
You can't trust computer monitors - especially laptop screens. The colour difference can vary greatly from massively oversaturated to dull and lifeless!


More images to follow.

We've also been very busy composing and recording the soundtrack for the film. Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique is gonna have an orchestral score as opposed to the dark and eerie music in To Shoot A Rurf.

By the Way, you cancathc To SHoot A Rurf at the Animation Bloc Party in New Tork this month (July). Visit Animation Bloc Party's website for more details.

Shane

Mr. Humpfninkel - Images

Been difficult to connect to Blogger.com lately. Why is it so damn slow????

Anyway, Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique is coming along nicely.

Here's some more images from the film.



NB: Compare the above image with the similar un-graded image from the previous post.
Colour grading makes a huge difference to the final output file. The colours are richer and you may notice the enhanced sense of depth of field in the image above compared to the previous versions.

Mr. Humpfninkel - new image

Here's another image from the film.

Mr. Humpfninkel: New Bus Model

Here are some images from Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique of the bus model.
The previous bus model I created was crap, to be honest!
This one is much better.
Modelled in Blender 3d.
The lighting in these mages is a bit rubbish and you can see the crappy approximate ambient occlusion artifacts. But these are just quick renders to check how the model was shaping up.

And it looks much better than the old version!

Shane

Mr Humpfninkel: Wearing a gaz mask while vacuuming vomit!

The heading pretty much describes what's going on here, I suppose.
It's the lead character form our latest animated offering, "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique", displaying his vacuum cleaner product in all it's 'glory'.
Why is he wearing a gas mask, you ask?
Well, why not!!!

Bcakgrounds are being rendered seperately in multiple layers so this is just an animation still with an alpha channel.


More images to follow.

Mr Humpfninkel Short Film Update: Blender Fluid Sim

In our latest animated short Mr. Humpfninkel’s Sales Technique, the title character (an inept door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman) is required to get sick. Yep, that’s right – vomit!

We initially intended to achieve this using Metaballs but then changed our minds and went with Blender’s fluid simulation instead.

He reason for this was the quality and realism of the FX. Our initial scepticism was based on the sometimes fiddly and random nature of the fluid simulator when we’ve used it before (We used it for the liquid pouring from the Rurf bottle in To Shoot A Rurf, but used metaballs for blood, the ‘mirror snake’ and a plane multi-subdivided and with a wave modifier for the river in the ear canal sequence)

Here are some early tests.

The first shows some gloopy vomit (the render is ultra-lo resolution) lit using approximate ambient occlusion and a single lamp.

The second shows a quick and dirty test (using open GI renderer - taht's why it looks crappy) of Mr. Humpfninkel getting sick. I know the image is small and very lo-res, but you should be able to make out that the vomit follows the movement of his head and his body deflects the flow of the vomit also.

All this talk of vomit is making me queasy!

More images and updates to follow soon.

By the way, Blogger doesn't seem to like Animated gif's so instead I use http://tinypic.com
to host them and link them to Blogger so that they display correctly on the site.

Mr Humpfninkel's Sales Technique images

Some images of Mr Humpfninkel from our latest animated short.
Blocking in all the actiona at the moment after sysnching up a fair amout of the dialogue.
More details and images to follow.

Salesman Short film: new image and details

New image form our latest short.
Named "Mr Humpfninkel's Sales Technique", the film follows the disastrous adventures of salesman Mr. Humpfninkel (pictured) as he goes door to door trying to sell vacuum cleaners.

The movie is quite obviuosly a demented comedy!

More images and details to follow shortly.