When you’re starting out in the rather hit-and-miss world of animated shorts, one way to ensure that your work grabs attention is to build your film up to a really great gag. Then, of course, you can show off your outstanding character animation skills. But it takes chutzpah to make a student film that visually references CG blockbusters. You have to make something that both evokes Pixar and DreamWorks and stands up to comparison with them, before topping it all off with an unexpected twist worthy of South Park.

“I was trying to get as much into two minutes as possible,” says Joshua Beveridge, who made the impressive short film Things That Go Bump in the Night for his senior year thesis at Ringling School of Art and Design in Florida. “I was definitely pulling ideas from Monsters Inc – I’m a huge fan of Pixar – and The Polar Express, and at the beginning I wanted to set up a kind of nostalgic feel. This film could be happening on Christmas night – it’s a night of magic, there’s something in the air and you don’t quite know what it is.”

It turns out to be something very nasty for the film’s baby hero, who flees a night-time terror only to encounter something far worse. “There’s this awkward, uncomfortable humour at the end,” Beveridge concedes, “and I don’t think most people laugh until they see the dedication in the credits.”

MAKING BABIES
As with all great cartoon characters, it’s the reaction of the baby to his situation that brings the film to life. “I just doodled and doodled. I wanted it to be adorable – a Disney/Pixar cute child,” Beveridge says of his main character. Finessing the baby’s expressions was always going to be vital. “I spent a good two months setting up the character to make all those expressions, trying to get them to tell the whole story,” he explains. “I used a combination of both joint-rigged facial expressions and purely sculpted shapes to make a broad range of blend shapes, with lots of in-betweens to get natural arcs in facial movement and maintain the speed I wanted. The joint-rigged system gave me a big expressive range and strong arcs, but you can’t beat blend shapes for fine-tuning the details.”

Beveridge had already done some smaller tests in his course, building and rigging characters. “It was a matter of taking everything I’d learned from them and putting it all into this kid,” he says. When it comes to facial animation, Beveridge’s ampit- up philosophy is close to Nigel Tufnel’s in This Is Spinal Tap.

“What I discovered about facial expressions is you have to go for much bigger expressions than you would ever actually need to use. Even if you only need expressions on a scale of one to 10, it’s great to work with a scale of one to 100 for digital character set-up. Never think you’ve gone too far!”

Not that Beveridge wasn’t limited in his college-level resources – he lost a month trying to give his baby hair. “He had a gorgeous head of hair for one shot, but I realised that lighting his hair would be another college thesis altogether, because it would need to be separately lit for every single shot.”

THE JOURNEY TO NARNIA
The monster that pops up in the film also changed from the original concept. “The monster was a big debate for me,” Beveridge remembers. “I started out intending to make him a 2D character, so he would stand out more and clearly not ‘belong’ in that world. I did these studies and tests of him being traditionally animated within a 3D environment, but realised that I’d be spending my time less on animation and more on painting alpha channels, which would limit the performance in the long run. So I changed it early.”

In the event, Beveridge had much less time to work on the 3D monster than he would have liked. “I just had to slap him together and make him work as fast as possible,” he admits. “It was a big crunch to get it done, so simplicity was essential. I was definitely amused with how phallic he ended up! It was intentional, but it was only a last-minute idea in the character design. Originally, I designed the monster to be an amorphous blob of imagination, but when he had to become tangible for the purposes of 3D modelling, he changed. He now treads an awkward line between being very perverse and very cute.”

Which is a pretty good description of Beveridge’s film as a whole. Things That Go Bump in the Night feels astoundingly breezy and effortless when you watch it, but for Beveridge it was “nine months of working 12 to 15 hours every day, including my birthday and Christmas.” Happily, the toil paid off, with Beveridge recruited by Sony Pictures Imageworks to work on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Amazing how a naughty cartoon can get you a gig on a wholesome family fantasy!