What is the film about?

When it comes to office politics, there’s one element that takes precedence above all else: the hot drinks round. Coffee Run is the story of a hard-pressed protagonist attempting to make an elaborate coffee round for his colleagues.

Depending on who in the studio you ask, it’s either a fully fictional piece or the closest you can get to a documentary while still having a character with squiggly spaghetti arms. Either way, the film is based on experience.

What influenced it?

When writing the concept for Coffee Run, the Bomper team took influences from the physical and wide-reaching slapstick comedy of Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan; with the animators pushing for a fun, cartoon-style within a realistically lit scene. Influences for the animation include Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania, Inner Workings and Looney Tunes.

A little background information...

Produced by CGI studio Bomper Studio, Coffee Run was an exercise in creating the studio’s first stand-alone short. Bomper has been known for creating hyper-real CG visuals for advertising and branding, but they have always had an underlying passion for storytelling through character animation. Thus, Coffee Run was born; an internal, self-motivated and self-funded project to challenge their ambitions and help them test their abilities outside of a client project.

For simplicity’s sake, Bomper chose an idea that was intentionally based on one character in a single environment, save for a short office scene.

For us, the best way to test anything new is to invest our own time and money and do it in-house. We get total creative freedom, and our artists can explore the areas of production where they don’t often get to ply their skills.

-Emlyn Davies, Founder at Bomper Studio

Coffee Run was our first chance to really work on a short film as a studio. It’s rare that we have every member of the studio working on the same project, so getting to put everyone’s talents to use in order to realise and elevate the film has been amazing. There’s also something good about putting hours and hours of work and creative energy into a shot of a man banging his head on a mop.

-Josh Hicks, Art Director at Bomper

How was the film made?

Made in varying – and often unpredictable – gaps in-between client projects, Coffee Run served as an testbed for a new production pipeline. Though Bomper uses Cinema 4D as a main tool, this was the first time they’d used it so extensively for a project of this type. Cinema 4D and ZBrush, or a combination of both, were used for modeling and sculpting. And all of the character animation was handled in Cinema 4D, while hair and liquids simulations were done in Houdini. Background for the office scene was painted in Photoshop, and lighting, compositing and other finishing touches were done with a combination of Cinema 4D and After Effects.

To achieve the 2D cartoon-style smears, Bomper learnt so much within the dark art of rigging; developing a robust rig in-house, that enabled them to deform the character in novel ways to achieve 2D cartoon-style smears.

The film also gave artists the opportunity to take on several roles within an animated film: from assisting with the creation of the script, rigging and animating to even having input on the creative design and style of characters and animation.