Cookie Dough

Cookie Dough by Luke Clough, Charlie Banks, Stuart Wells and Stefan Tsvetkov. A Major Project from the NCCA, Bournemouth University 2012. Technical Director Charlie Banks spoke to us about the making of the film

Who?
We are a group of students from Bournemouth University who joined together to create the major project for our final year. The group consists of Luke Clough (Art Director), Charlie Banks (Technical Director), Stuart Wells (Lead Animator) and Stefan Tsvetkov (Lead Modeller).

What?
“Love that heady mix of knock about violence, humour and pratfalls that filled your screen in toons from long ago? Want to see the 2012 version? Watch as a little girl, the picture of blue-eyed innocence, runs circles around a wiley old bank robber and makes herself a million in the process! Who knew the power of the chocolate chip cookie!?”

Why?
We wanted to create a project which took advantage of each members specific skill sets and attempted to mimic the studio environment by making sure the work flowed well between each person. I think it’s easy to spot from our animation that we are inspired by studios like Pixar, Dreamworks, Blue-Zoo and no-dialogue animations like Looney Toons. We are more influenced by more traditional animation artists such as Chris Sanders and Ken Duncan.

How?
During the pre-production stage, the story of our animation went through many different iterations until it got to what it is now (I’m pretty sure there was a robot involved at one point!), most of the designs were drawn out with pencil and then refined later on in Adobe Photoshop.

All production work was done using Autodesk Maya, ZBrush, The Foundry’s Nuke, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere.

Next Project?

It’s difficult for me to answer this on behalf of my group members as half of them are in different countries. For me however I am further developing my technical skills. I am currently developing both my creative and technical skills. Other than animation, I like to film and at the moment I am preparing for another short video which should hopefully be finished in December. I am also developing some tools for Maya which should help when my next animation project comes along!

Which animated film would you like to have made?
This is a very interesting question and requires a lot of thought! I think I would personally like to have worked on a more traditional Disney film, like Lion King or Aladdin… or even the more recent ones like The Princess and the Frog or the new Winnie the Pooh movie. Traditional animation fascinates me because even though I have produced this animation, I think I would find it literally impossible to create an animation frame by frame with a pencil or on cells. It would definitely be an interesting experience especially as I would be working with some of the well known Disney animators.