Eels (Aal im Schadel)

 

 

Eels is a 17 minute 3d animated short film; created, in the Animation Institute of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, as Martin Rahmlows Diploma Movie.

The short film tells the story of The Traveller, who suffers from a mysterious illness and is searching for salvation.

Directed by Martin Rahmlow

Written by Dominik Steffan

Produced by Anne Hoever

Country: Germany

The Traveller: Michael Tregor
War:: Udo Schenk
The Fis: Andreas Fröhlich
The Ferryman: Helmut Rühl

 

Development consumed almost four years till the initial ideas became the finished short film. The short film's script phase lasted for
nine months, another nine months was needed to complete the
character design, animation consumed an additional eight months, rendering and
compositing used up a further six months, additionally, over the four year
period, everyone avidly made and textured models, programmed, and wrote
Mel-scripts.

The short film was almost completely visualised with Maya, except for
some models and UV's which where created with 3ds Max. Mainly Maya 6.0
was used during production, but also 5.0 (in the beginning stages) and
6.5 (Some problems did not occur here) where employed. A few shots where
rendered with Mental Ray, but the main load was carried by Mayas own
software renderer. All shots where divided into an average of about 8
renderlayers, these where then composed with Digitalfusion 4.