Galactic Mail is a short film I made in collaboration with my fellow friend Jonathan Vuillemin aka Motraboy. It was produced by The Mill which basically gave us some time to create it. We spent around four months working on it together from storyboards to compositing. Because of the time we had to complete the piece, we went for a different approach than Sigg Jones. On one hand, we had to make things simple and turn it at our advantage. On the other hand, I was keen to experiment a lot of things I had thought about using the 3D media. To me Sigg Jones was a proper global illumination shaded film, something we wanted to do at the time. I like to call it the “classic” way of making full 3D animation, involving proper lighting, shading with texture channels for bump, reflection, etc… With Galactic Mail, It wasn’t about generating impressive 3D renders, but more about the pictures themself, composition, colors and overall coherence of the style. I had this idea of making a movie with self-illuminated textures where all the shadows would be painted in already, and then combined with a “sliced” shadow system where you could really isolate how stuff are going to look when it’s in the shadow or not, nothing physically correct, but pretty controllable.

• Fedex champion fighting to keep the package.

On the animation side I was willing to generalize an effect I have been working on at some point animating Sigg Jones when they fight in the streets. And I developed a way to get the characters playing at 12 fps while the camera was filming at 24 fps. Even though I think it brings a certain charm to it, I was a bit disappointed by the fact that I had to crack on so much to get the animation done that, in the end, I could not really get the best out of it. But sacrifices always happen when you create something.

• Failure is always hard to swallow.

In the film, you will see to firm of courier service fighting to deliver a package. I always had a lot of sympathy for delivery companies, not only because I love to receive package from eBay, but also cause I usually like their graphic charts and the gears that comes with it from vehicules to outfitt, going through boxes and signing devices. Some model of UPS trucks are looking amazing. I thought it would be funny to keep the teams gears idea and make it more impressive. Transpose it in the future was a way to gain a bit of epicness and give a sense of humour to the film because people don’t expect that mail is still delivered by a postman in the next thouthand years. How futuristic is that?

As a conclusion I would say, like every piece I create, I am pretty unsatisfied with the result, nevertheless, It’s a good feeling to have it done. I hope you enjoy it…

For more informations on how it was made, please check the Flickr WIP Gallery.