Ripieno Animation Studio

Established as part of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, Ripieno is a team of six Master's students seeking to explore the potential of emerging technologies in animated storytelling. Some of the techniques we used are 360 cameras (both digital and physical), motion capture, physical-based rendering, and spatialized sound.

In 15 weeks, we produced two deliverables:

Below you will find more information on our team's process and my contribution to the effort. First are the presentations; mid-semester covers how we adapted to emerging technology, and final addresses our iterative process. Past the videos are detailed descriptions of my producing, writing, storyboarding, and branding work.

My Work

Producer

The center of my responsibilities was to keep everyone on task. When we were in concept phases for Melody of Life, we adopted the Scrum method, with weekly sprints. Once we had locked in on story, I realized Scrum was no longer working for our team, so we moved to Kanban. After mid-term presentations, we became phase-focused, so we moved into deadline-oriented to-do lists.

I also managed anything that was not specifically related to animating. This meant I arranged team meetings, dancer recruitment, and motion capture appointments. In total, we worked with 16 outside individuals. Sometimes I sat in on motion capture appointments to provide timing and placement, or negotiating honorarium amounts with the administration in order to pay our dancers.

Finally, I organized anything related to branding. I manage our team's website, coordinate presentation preparation - from slide decks to rehearsals, and created our advertising materials.

Writing and Story Art for Two Productions: Melody of Life and Agloe

I was responsible for taking a pre-production package we had been given for Melody of Life, and rewriting it to suit the limitations of our team in facing certain technological challenges. For instance, we are a team of artists with not a single programmer among us, so using Unity was unrealistic. This completely changed the script we were given, which was heavily dependent on gaze and collider activated animation. I decided we needed something to guide us through the environment, and ultimately developed Manny.

Next we had to figure out how to board the story in 360. We could have drawn in a stretched frame and wrapped it into 360-viewing, but this was too much effort between opportunities for feedback. Instead, I resorted to showing the frame as "ideal audience view" and then created guides for our artists and dancers to understand where the action would be in the space.

Finally we put in emotional marker. This was mainly for the dancers. We knew that Manny was going to go through a distinct emotional arc, and he would need to do so through gross physical movement, rather than minute facial expression. Manny has no face and, even if he did, there is no such thing as close shot when the camera is a stationary 360 one. So we asked the dancers to do samples for each scene so we could playtest with audiences for emotional comprehension.

To see the final product, click below.

Once the story for Melody of Life was locked in, I began putting together the script, storyboard, and pre-production documentation for Agloe. Agloe was selected as the working title because the story was initially inspired by Agloe, NY, a town that was marked on a particular brand of map to prevent copyright violations. 

We wanted to examine how this might occur in art, where a painting is damaged after its completion and then appreciated for the damage rather than its original content. Over time this evolved into an abstract, non-linear piece about a woman who finds out the artist she admired was not responsible for the artistic movement his work inspired.

I completed a full storyboard and presented this story to faculty members. Based on their feedback, I iterated further, looping in outside experts in narrative to help me clean up what I could. By the end of these iterations and with the approval of all faculty and teammates involved, I decided to pursue quality of story over adherence to the initial pitch.

Agloe has now evolved into the story of two artists who realize that collaboration can create something more beautiful than either of them could have made on their own. To see the story, click the link below.

Branding

Ripieno - as our sound designer explained - is the orchestral body in baroque music. An ensemble, kind of like us, where no one person tries to stand above the team. When I approached our logo, I wanted to do so from the angle music. At the time, we knew what our film would be, but not what we were going to write for the pre-production package, so our focus was predominantly on music and dance. With that in mind, I drafted different logos to run by the team, and then adapted what they liked from each into our final product.

When it came to designing the poster and half sheet, we wanted to keep things simple. We're a studio, not the film, so after talking with the team, we decided to let the logo speak for itself.

The Team