In The Rough

Blur Studio | 2004
Short Film

Occasionally at Blur, if we have a little bit of time in our hands, we have an internal competition for short film ideas. In 2004 we had two winners, In the Rough, by Paul Taylor, and Gopher Broke, by Jeff Fowler. You can watch both in iTunes here:

In The Rough @ iTunes
Gopher Broke @ iTunes

People usually ask why we do shorts, and the short answer is that we get the opportunity to actually create something from start to finish, which we don't normally do when we do client work, and that gives us some publicity and helps to establish our name in the Business. It is also a good way to use the team if there are gaps of time between paid jobs. That said, we often end up having to pay for the shorts from our own pockets as they eat up time that could be a paid job, to the point that in some cases we have to turn down paid jobs if we want to complete the shorts. That's the reason why we don't do them every year.

I did a bit of everything for in the Rough, but mostly spent my time as the Animation Supervisor. In hindsight, I spent most of my time trying to figure out the whole Supervisor thing. Supervisors at Blur are given quite a lot of freedom to do things like they want, but I hadn't realized that yet, and even if I had I wouldn't really know what to do anyway, thanks to my lack of experience actually guiding a team (as opposed to just sitting down and doing my own shots).

Here's a simple walk cycle I did to study Brog's attitude (he's supposed to be holding a boulder on his right arm...)

And here are some development stills, showing a couple test poses and the rig controls.

You can read a lot about In the Rough in this interview here. Enjoy!