Saving Thyme with Layout & Animation

Walk through the quaint city of Mount Dora and you can’t help but notice the Steamroller Animation logo fixed to the tallest building in the downtown core. Founded in 2014, Steamroller is a rapidly growing company that provides animation services for some of the biggest films and games of the past decade. In addition to its robust animation services division, Steamroller aggressively funds its own projects which is a high priority for its owners who are artists themselves. Behind the doors of this young, progressive company located just 40 minutes north of Orlando is a team of artists, technicians, and support people working hard on the craft of animation and storytelling.

When entering the pet-friendly studio, you’ll quickly be greeted by an entourage of affectionate pups. At Steamroller, you can’t help but feel there’s a buzz among the staff. The “Steammates” as they call themselves, are hard at work on a new animated TV series called Spice Frontier. Created by one of the studio’s co-founders and Chief Creative Officer, Jalil Sadool, Spice Frontier is a beautifully crafted science fiction adventure that takes place in a universe where Earth has already been destroyed for nearly three centuries. It is the story of a chef named Kent Williams, who dreams of finding the lost spices of his Human ancestors so he can share the joy of Earth's forgotten recipes with the universe.

In 2020, Steamroller released its self-funded short film, Spice Frontier. Having won numerous awards and helping to establish Steamroller’s creative voice for storytelling, the team decided to go all in and begin working on the pilot episode of this currently undistributed series. Thanks to the incredible work being done on Spice Frontier, in 2022, Steamroller became the recipient of an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games, which was used to help the young studio push the boundaries of its animation pipeline.

For this young independent studio, making an original TV series isn’t the only exciting thing happening at Steamroller today. A film crew from Steamroller’s marketing team is also hard at work shooting their first of many production diaries for the making of Spice Frontier.

The focus of this first Production Diary, appropriately titled “Saving Thyme”, features the animation and layout departments and looks closely at the artistic style of the project, how the animations are constructed, as well as the animation pipeline and its unique commitment to a real-time workflow.

The first to kick off the interviews is Josiah Massingill, one of Steamroller’s long-time animators who now works closely with Spice Frontier’s director, Jalil Sadool, as the project’s Animation Supervisor.

Josiah describes the importance of realizing and pursuing Spice Frontier as an animated TV series instead of a more traditional feature film. Unlike the previously released short film, the series features a larger cast of unique characters, all with their own fully developed backstories and complex relationships.

“I think the benefits of doing Spice Frontier as a series instead of a film or a short film format is we just get to spend a lot more time with the characters. And we love these characters and we love their stories. And it would be really difficult to tell that in a short film format where you’re kind of structured and you're limited in how much you can really get into the details of it.”

Josiah, who has worked on episode 1 of Spice Frontier for over a year, is responsible for ensuring the animation team has clear direction at all times. Over the past 5 months, Steamroller has slowly onboarded new animators to join the team in order to ensure the project delivers by the end of 2023. With 12 animators currently working full time, Josiah is able to confirm that 1 sequence has been completed with a second not far behind. There are currently 45 people from all departments across the production process working on the project. Episode 1’s running time is 32 minutes, making it the largest self-funded venture in Steamroller’s young history.

Over the course of the day-long production diary shoot, Josiah discusses the unique look and visual feel of Spice Frontier. Drawing inspiration from the classic 2D films of Dreamworks in the 90’s and animated television shows of the 80’s, Josiah explains how this particular handcrafted visual style has a direct impact on the creative choices animators have to make when designing the performances of Spice Frontier’s many diverse characters:

“One of the challenges of this visual style has to do with the flat shading of the characters. We don't get a lot of dimension and sometimes even elements can kind of blend into each other if we don't pose them in certain ways. So there's a lot more intentional focus on silhouette and making sure that everything is reading clearly within the confines or, you know, the limitations of that style choice.

And then the other side of it is the twos side of it. There's some risk of things feeling like they're strobing for the audience or like they're dropping frames. And we just have to be really intentional with our spacing when we make that transition into that style and put a lot of care into making sure that doesn't distract from, you know, the performance in the story.”

As new animators join the production, they engage in a series of exploratory exercises designed to assess their performance sensibilities and help the leadership team evaluate their casting on the show. From facial expressions to a myriad of different walk and run cycles, the animators must complete a gauntlet of different onboarding exercises to help them understand the nuances of each character and demonstrate where their performance intuitions lie.

Josiah explains the critical importance of the art department and the foundational materials they provide that set the tone and feel of each character. Through illustrated expression and pose tests, the art department is able to establish many of the critical building blocks that help the animation team establish the movement style of each character.

Every character in the pilot episode has a comprehensive animation bible that is designed to familiarize the team with the “rules” of how that character must be animated to convey the essence of their personality. With so many characters in play, and this being the first episode, these animation bibles are still in flux, even after production has started. Josiah explains that the animation team needs time to explore the characters through shot work and evolve the character bibles over time, with the goal of locking critical aspects of their movement style and mannerisms over the course of production.

With the interview now running into its second hour, Josiah delves further into the challenges of Steamroller’s pipeline development for both Spice Frontier and the many other properties the studio is hoping to develop.

“One of the main components of this new pipeline for us is the implementation of the Unreal engine. A lot of people are using Unreal, and it has many benefits to offer across the pipeline. But something that we're trying to do that's new ground for us is actual animation in Unreal.”

Josiah explains that Steamroller’s long-term vision is to create animation at the highest level of the craft while continuing to leverage the power of real-time solutions such as the Unreal Engine. The hybrid approach of animating in Maya and then porting the data into Unreal for downstream departments has been adopted for many years now. However, the advantages of having all post-production departments working in the engine at the same time would offer enormous creative and logistic flexibility for the studio’s storytelling ambitions. Josiah goes on to explain that having animators work exclusively within the engine is no easy task as many of the tools they have come to rely on in Maya still need to be created and refined within Unreal. At the time of this writing, the animation team has begun animating its first sequence entirely in Unreal and hopes to complete more with this workflow by the end of production.

As the interview continues, Josiah looks closer at the day-to-day workflow of artists learning to animate in Unreal. He explains that one of the primary motivators for animating directly in the engine is due to the non-linear workflow between departments. When an animator begins working on their shot, the characters are already lit. This means that the animator can make informed decisions about posing and silhouette because they already know how the character will be lit.

“Shadows can really influence the read on a face or even just highlight certain regions that you may have not given as much love as you would have otherwise. So it's almost critical for the integrity of the performance and the honesty that we want to come through on these characters to really see that context and adjust as needed.”

Josiah closes out his interview by focusing on the future of real-time technology and its impact on the industry. While a lot of the tools animators are accustomed to are currently either missing or underdeveloped in the engine, by embracing this software as the core of its pipeline, Steamroller is able to work closely with Epic Games to craft future tool sets for artists in all departments. When asked why people should be so excited about a studio like Steamroller and its strategy for developing a real-time pipeline coupled with a unique visual style, Josiah explains,

“The reason I think the industry should be excited about Spice Frontier being done in Unreal specifically is the look of it. It's so unique and shows the industry at large that, you know, Unreal isn't just for realism, which it’s really good at, but you can also make art-driven style choices and execute that in the program as well. It's just showing a huge level of flexibility there.

Another thing I think is just the scope of Spice Frontier and being able to do that in Unreal we're looking to save a significant amount of time and money and hopefully not just focus on other stories. But the animator in me wants to sort of channel that and hopefully push the quality that we can achieve as well.”

Steamroller Animation’s Layout Supervisor, Digger Jensen, is also on the interview roster for today's production diary filming. Jensen boasts extensive experience as a Layout Supervisor from many years working in the VFX industry before joining Steamroller nearly two years ago. Digger starts by describing what he sees as a fundamental paradigm shift in the layout workflow with the introduction of real-time technology.

Traditionally, Layout will often work in a vacuum at the individual shot level. A negative consequence of this is that layout artists lose sight of the bigger storytelling picture of the sequence. However, with a real-time approach, the Unreal Engine allows the artist to work on an entire run of sequential shots at the same time.

“So instead of just one shot per artist and they have a stack of shots that have no relation to each other, they're actually able to work on a sequential set of shots. And we're presenting a lot more work, a lot faster to the director.”

Digger speaks at length about the speed of workflow within the engine, as well as the flexibility to make changes on the fly with the director or client. In traditional pipelines, the layout team receives a note in dailies and then has to go back to the scene after the fact, make the change and resubmit for the following review. With the real-time workflow the engine offers, the layout artist can make changes on the fly, show the director different lenses, change the camera angle, and adjust the composition seamlessly.

Digger also explains the look of the images in the engine. The appeal of the images even at the early stages of layout, allows the artist to see textures, lighting, and shadow occlusions, and as a result, have a much better understanding of the complete look of the shot.

Wrapping up the day of filming, Digger and Josiah both comment repeatedly on the long-term value of a non-linear workflow in the production process of animated linear narrative content. The traditional methodology of a linear data model means that each department’s success is contingent on the chronology of work from the previous department in the process. Working this way has always resulted in critical bottlenecks where if content stalls in a particular department due to any number of reasons, the downstream departments will also stall. This inevitably creates a significant financial and logistic burden on the entire process. Through working in a real-time engine, the workflow becomes non-linear because all departments can effectively contribute to the process at the same time. This means that downstream departments that traditionally had no influence on the early developments of a production can start working much earlier in the process. The long-term value of this will mean incredible opportunities for creating story-driven narrative content, hopefully resulting in cost savings as the process is streamlined as well as greater collaboration across the entire pipeline.

As the production diary filming winds down for the day, you can’t help but feel an electricity in the air at Steamroller Animation. From developing a fresh perspective on a classic visual style to embracing new animation workflows within a real-time technology context, the future of storytelling at Steamroller Animation will be something to keep a close eye on.

Stay tuned for the next production diary, “Refining the Palate”!

To learn more about Steamroller Animation please visit their site at: www.steamrollerstudios.com