Jul 11, 2016

Exclusive Premiere of "After the End" directed by Sam Southward

And now, one of our newest alumni, director Sam Southward, is about to shock the animation world with his graduation film, After The End. We are pleased to present the online premiere of this film today at Cartoon Brew. Watch it below:

Southward recently signed with Nexus Productions, an independent production company and animation studio in London. Nexus Productions has a long track record of commercials, VR, music videos, and shorts, and has a roster of the best-known independent animation directors today. He wrote "After The End" with Samantha Collins and decided that the story of the second last man on earth, featuring mind-altering drugs and full frontal male nudity, was a good fit for a combination of CG and live action. Southward told Cartoon Brew, "We borrowed the charm of stop-motion miniature sets and the beauty and texture that comes from using real light."

Still, it took more than 20 rewrites of a draft of the script to get "After The End" into shape; when he began writing it in early 2014, the director said, few films humorously depicted life after some sort of apocalyptic event. That was the starting point, he explained, and the film took some interesting turns, with the story "ironically becoming a microcosm of the destruction of humanity all over again, with no lessons learned."

Inspired by the animated, evocative visuals of a post-apocalyptic world, Southward created several storyboards from the script. He started with thumbnails of notes and moved on to cleaner paths using Photoshop and Wacom. From there, animatics were cut

that would eventually inform the design and production of the miniature sets.

In all, four sets were designed by production designer Olivia Dixon and built for the shoot using cardboard, polystyrene, wood, and myriad other materials. Some of the props were "stolen" from the dollhouse, Southward says, while other parts were found at the bottom of the aquarium. The sand was a mixture of real sand and cat litter. Cinematographer Diana Olifilova shot the live-action set with a Canon 5D.

The next step was to create the characters in CG. Using the latest tools ZBrush, Maya, V-Ray, and NUKE to build, animate, render, and composite the CG, Southward designed After The End's characters with a "handmade, lo-fi" feel. The director states, "I think I was able to add charm and personality to a world surrounded by so much sophisticated CG."

Interestingly, much of the character animation (over 200 shots) was done primarily remotely by animators in several countries. Southward had to quickly adjust to the almost 24-hour production cycle. He said, "I would get up at 6 a.m. in the UK, send feedback from the previous day, and work the whole day until 10 or 11 p.m.

I would then go to the studio and work on the film until I was done.

As the film unfolded and we learned more about the characters in the post-apocalyptic world, Southward incorporated deliberate but subtle changes in the way the film was shot. For example, the film climaxes at night, in a more dramatic setting. Here, the emotions of Rene Fustercluck (voiced by Peter Caulfield), who believes he is the last person left alive, and Gordon (Tom Davis), who suddenly appears in a dress with a blow-up doll, are designed to feel more primal and unstable. Southward suggests that this is further exaggerated by the illumination of the flickering bonfire.

Further inspiration came from sound design and music, directed by sound designer Ben Henzer and composer Antonio Nardi, respectively. One of the sound challenges was to convey the atmosphere of a dead and empty world. Initially, Southward thought this could best be achieved with minimal sound design, but instead found that a design that was "actually incredibly layered and complex, requiring all the right nuances to be hammered out at the right time" would work.

So what now - according to Southward, the plan is to develop an "After The End" series in the near future. The original script is three times the size of the final film, and Southard and co-writer Collins are already working on outlining the next few episodes and an overall story arc.

Now, Southward is looking forward to seeing what kind of response the short will receive, having already been nominated for a 2016 D&AD "Next Director" award and won a gold award at this year's Cannes Young Director Awards. 'We hope the film will finally come online and make people laugh. That's why we wrote the film and in the increasingly bleak times we live in, it's good to laugh."

Credits Directed by Sam Southard Produced by Michelangelo Fano Screenplay by Samantha Collins and Sam Southard Director of Photography Diana Olifilova Production Designer Olivia Dixon CG Supervisor Matt Norris Editor Neil Rennhall Composer Antonio Nardi Sound Designer Ben Hensor Online Editor & Colorist Alex Peters