Moon Rockz "Best Sci-Fi" at Flicks Film Fest

We are proud to announce that our short film "Moon Rockz", written and directed by Molly Babington, has won an award for "Best Sci-Fi" at the Flicks Film Festival.

"Moon Rockz", which tells the story of the moon landings from the point of view of the moon, has also been a finalist at five other international film festivals.

"Moon Rockz" is a unique film project at Escape Studios in that this was a collaboration between students on our master's degree in Storyboarding & Previsualisation, MA students studying animation, and also undergraduate students studying the Art of Computer Animation.

Moon Rockz Storyboard
Moon Rockz was based on an original idea by Molly Babington, who also did the storyboard animatic.  The animatic was pitched to the second year animation students as one of a number of projects at Escape Studios which could be taken forward into production.




Moon Rockz - Final Film
Below you can see the final film, and how it developed from the storyboards above.

Colour Script

"Moon Rockz" Colour Scripts
Colour scripts were also created by Molly for "Moon Rockz". The colour scripts were an essential first step in deciding the look and feel of the film, and what the textures and final lighting would look like.

Without colour scripts, the lighters would have lacked a coherent road map of where they needed to get to. To see more about the importance of colour scripts in animation, read this blog post.

Industry Feedback

Santiago Colomo

"Moon Rockz" also benefitted from studio feedback from DNEG animation supervisor Santi Colomo and Dara McGarry, Artist Manager at Double Negative.  Santiago and Dara joined us online via Google Meet and Syncsketch to offer feedback.

Santi helped the animation team push the standard of their work, helping them to make their shots more expressive, and better communicate what the characters are thinking and feeling.

Santi gave the Moon Rockz team the time to go through all the shots on the film, drawing expressive poses in Syncsketch and making sure that every shot was as good as it could possibly be.  All our animators got notes, and all of them were able to push their shots a little bit further before the final May 29th deadline.

Industry feedback

Still image from "Moon Rockz"

Industry feedback forms one of the five pillars of "The Escape Method"; important because it helps to keep us grounded in the real world of the animation industry.

Software
"Moon Rockz" was animated in Autodesk Maya, edited in Adobe Premiere, and rendered in Arnold.

Credits

• Molly Babington - Writer, Director, Art Director, 3D Layout, Modeling and Rigging
• Stevie Stedman - Producer 
• Victoria Pleschko - Editor, Co-Producer, Compositing Supervisor
• Austin Hill - Sound Design
• Leroy Dias - CG Supervisor
• Charalampos Avraam - 2D Supervisor, modeling
• Brandon Pascal - Lighting Supervisor
• Erica Melino - Compositing Lead
• Anastasia Gurova - Art Dept
• Timothy Jones - Art Dept, Animation, Credits
• Musharaf Hussein Rasel - Modeling
• Andrew Watson - Modeling
• Paolo Amadini - Animation, Modeling, Rigging
• Michaela Butler - Rigging
• Heidi Prescott - Lead Texturer
• Jonathan Humphries - Animation
• Giada Carnevaletti - Animation
• Natasha Di Maggio - Animation
• Matt Neputin - Animation
• Marco Ramos - Animation
• Robert Hagan - Compositing
• Christian Heim - Compositing
• Jing Ding - Compositing
• Guy Buckley- Compositing 

IMDB Listing
You can find "Moon Rockz" at the IMDB here. You can find the list of Winners at the Official Flicks Website here.

The Escape Studios Animation Blog offers a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To find out more about our new BA/MArt, now recruiting for September 2021, follow this link.   To apply, visit the official page here.