Deli Team Animation

Hi Tessa,

I'm Gareth and I'm working in a team of six on a short animation. I shall be working alongside Tony lighting our scenes.

The premise of the animation is as follows:

It's set in a 1920's Little Italy, New York Delicatessen. The short is based around the Deli owner, Alfonso and his prize-winning ham (something he is very proud and precious of). Alfonso has a son, Jr, who is pretty fat, and clearly quite greedy with an unhealthy obsession with the prized ham (he wants to eat it). The story unfolds as a street urchin tries to steal the ham and a chase ensues eventually ending in Alfonso being caught in a particularly compromising situation - with the shop destroyed and tomato sauce amongst other things splattered across the shop.

The style of the animation and modelling is particularly stylised so we are looking to have some pretty clean lighting - nothing too dramatic.

To the left are a couple of screengrabs of the shop layout so far and top down view too.

The palette we intend to use is something like this:

I've done some lighting in the past (but nothing too fancy) and have a reasonable understanding of mentalray and Final Gathering - something we wish to use.

We have the characters modelled and rigged and partly textured, the shop is still being textured - any advice or thoughts on the shop texturing and lighting of the environment would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

- gareth