The Star Keeper

'The Star Keeper' is a story about a boy named Cassio whose job is to create constellations in the sky. But one day, he accidentally dropped a star onto Earth...

CONCEPT (CASSIO CHARACTER DESIGN)

Cassio is an entertainer in the sky. The reason he poured his stars onto earth the second time was to make Estella happy. So we wanted his design to reflect that.

Bringing happiness:

-Inspired by the constellation Grus the Crane

-Crane (tsuru) is considered a bird of Happiness in Japan and represents Hope.

Therefore

-His overall color scheme is Black, white, and blue.

-Black high-knee boots like crane legs

The entertainer aspect:

-Circus-themed pants

Sky theme elements to show his role as a Star Keeper:

-Clouds for hair

-Constellation as freckles

CHARACTER MODELLING

The model was sculpted in Zbrush and retopologised in Maya. 

This was a look dev test of the boy character. We wanted to give the hair a soft, cloudy feeling whilst maintaining the stylised look. 

CLOTH SIMULATION

We used Marvellous Designer to simulate the clothing. We then took the simulated clothing into Substance Designer where we created textures for it.

ASSET MODELLING 

ANIMATION 

TEXTURING

Textures were made in substance painter. We wanted them to look weathered and lived in. We worked closely with the concept art and mood boards to make sure that the style was consistent with the rest of the project.

For Estella’s window, teal mermaid-scale-like tile textures were chosen to create a fairytale/whimsical feeling. Not only did the handpainted color variation (shades of pink and purple using a watercolor-like brush) broke up the yellow marble into something more colorful; the addition of dirt and droplets throughout also added visual interest. Keeping with the circus theme, we did a fun star-pattern tiling for the sky bridge with the addition of dirt and faded paint on it to make it look a bit more realistic. The star is a golden metallic star with glitter all over it so it shimmers when the light hits. They look especially well after animation.

RIGGING

CLOUDS FX

We experimented a lot with the clouds. We created our own system to generate the shape so as to have more control over the shape as we replaced and changed them many times. Here is an example of how it works on one of the final clouds :

Experimentation on the look of the clouds :

STARS SIMULATION (IN CART)

There were 2 simulations. The first one was to fill in the cart with stars. For this we replicated the model of the star and did an rbd simulation with a cart being a collision object. The second one was to make the stars fall out of the cart. There was not enough motion from the animation of the cart, therefore taking into account the camera angle of the shot , we added an “invisible box” to push the stars out of the cart.

LIGHTING

To create a distinction between Cassio’s and Estella’s world, yet still preserve a consistent color palette, Cassio (with a blue costume) is in a sunset atmosphere with pink clouds. While Estella’s world is lit with blue moonlight with pink and orange ambient light from inside her room (echoing the sunset light in Cassio’s scene).

BACKGROUND PAINTING AND 2D ANIMATION

COMPOSITING

Compositing was done in Nuke and video editing in Premiere Pro.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME. WE HOPE YOU LIKE OUR LITTLE ANIMATION! :)