The Smith is a shortfilm I did in a rush about a Norse Blacksmith who recently lost his Shieldmaiden wife and was left all by myself.
I stumbled upon a ton of problems, and most of them I was able to overtake, yet the finished product is far from what I wanted or originally imagined. This shortfilm was going to be traditionally-animated, but due to time and a lacking expertise I decided to go for 3D which was definitely the better solution.
My influences for the character proportions and such were older Dreamworks 2D movies and Wind Waker, fortunately my story involved only a couple of characters so it was a much faster process.
I did this in Maya and rendered in Hardware Mode, which was originally the look I wanted but I had to do some extra tweaks. I rigged the character with AdvancedSkeleton and everything else by easier means.
The textures were a mix of Photoshop and 3D Coat which worked wonders, it made the process so much easier and better because Mudbox was bugged as hell and I really wanted to directly paint over the 3D models.
After Effects did the compositing, which as usual worked as intended.
I had the sound effects done by a school mate who was studying the Audio Engineer Major, and for the music I wanted a classic guitar song; something that felt nostalgic and far. I asked a friend to compose a song for it and it was good but not what I wanted so I began looking for the composers of this song and asked for the rights/permission to use it.
That song is from a game I played when much younger, a game I have extremely fond memories of and had just the perfect song for me. The problem was that I wasn’t able to contact any of the people involved with it but found another musician who had used the song for a very nice cover; I asked him for it and turns out he already had permissions to distribute his version and allowed me to use it for my shortfilm.