MAKING THE PILOT

"The Riverbank Scene"

The aim of the Feedback project is to create
South Africa's first computer-generated full-length film.
The Riverbank scene, featured in this website, is a pilot for the full 80 minute film. It was created through an experimental collaboration between Philip Boltt of Sickpixie Animation and the students of the Wits University Digital Arts Postgraduate Animation course of 2003 under Professor Christo Doherty.

We created one scene from the award-winning stage play, Feedback, by Andrew Buckland and Lionel Newton. The scene happens about a third of the way into the play, and is an extract rather than a well-rounded story in intself. Our focus was on creating engaging characters, using live performers to animate the characters through motion-capture and testing our production pipeline to see if it would hold up against the rigours of a film.

Many thanks to our primary sponsors, the National Film and Video Foundation, Hewlett Packard, The Shuttleworth Foundation, Direct Distribution Services and ScreenAfrica for making this project possible.

This “making of” website has been designed to give you an insight into the making of a computer-generated short film. The information varies in complexity , from beginner to advanced, and focusses more on the flow of production than computer specific tasks. We hope that some of the insights we've gained in the process are useful to you too.

Additional information in the form of reports, articles and tutorials are available on the Feedback Production Website. This is a database-oriented website containing documentation that was generated during the year.

On the next page is a flowchart that depicts a rough outline of the workflow that we followed. Use it to navigate around this website and see for yourself some of the magic involved in creating something out of nothing.

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