Production A Mouse Called Julian

A Mouse Called Julian

A Mouse Called Julian, the tale of a mouse who is perfectly happy being by himself. That is until one day, Julian has an unexpected dinner guest…when a fox tries to sneak into Julian’s burrow, it finds itself stuck headfirst in Julian’s front door! At first alarmed and wary, they soon find themselves having a lovely dinner together, and it’s not long before each realizes that they have found a lifelong friend.

Client: Mercury Filmworks

S T I M:

CG Supervisor: Jordan Soler
Pipeline Supervisor: Benoit Gielly
Production manager: Roxanne Forestier
CG artist: Melissa Armangau, Alicia Sabot, Elina Roux, Fabien Taxil, Elliot Renet, Alvin Arevalo Zamora, Martin Behem, Niels Dervieux, Juliana Berckmans, Armen Pamokdjian, Severin Valran, Paul Kupelian, Michael Larue, Mathieu Peters Houg, Elliott Lequertier
Software: Maya, Arnold

FORMAT

Short film

LENGTH

26 mins

TARGET

Family

GENRES

Adventure, Comedy, Animation

A story that conveys messages about the importance of friendship and taking the time to look at people a little deeper. It’s a powerful celebration of finding friendship in unexpected places.

Play the film

Characters Breakdown

CONCEPT

Stim Studio worked with Mercury Filmworks for this project, which handled the concept based on the book A Mouse Called Julian.

Mercury provided us with drawings of front, profile and 3/4 views for our 3D production, which had to remain faithful to the style of the book.

MODELING

Adapting this 2D graphics project into 3D proved to be a complex process.

The decisions taken during modeling had an influence on the other departments, especially because of the extreme deformations required to preserve the book's graphic style,

as desired by director Christian Larocque (Mercury).

Many questions had to be addressed, such as: how to treat animal fur in geometry so that it always appears in profile (as it does in 2D).

Or how to create a topology adapted to different facial expressions, to work with both closed-mouth and extreme open-mouth shapes, etc...

LOOKDEV

Despite the investigations during modeling, a number of questions were resolved during the lookdev stage:

How to deal with the flatness while controlling the light on the characters and backgrounds?

How far to push the paint style or keep things closer to 3D?

How to stay within the production budget without editing the shot too significantly?

Using Arnold and its toon shader enabled us to manage the balance between 2D and 3D. The idea was not to make a 2D film in 3D but to retain the value of 3D in a 2D graphic style.

FINAL

When it came to lighting and compositing, we tried to automate as many tasks as possible to keep to a low production budget for the series, film or medium-length feature.

So most of the elements had to come straight out of Maya, without requiring a lot of editing.

Mercury was responsible for adding a few minimal effects in 2D compositing and harmonizing the lights and colors on the shots.