“Descendents” is a beautiful 14-minute animated short film telling the story of two flowers, an old and jaded flower voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and a young and hopeful flower voiced by Christy Scott-Cashman.  Begun in 2005 as a diploma project by Heiko van der Scherm and Holger Schoenberger at the Institute of Animation, the project resulted in not only the great animated short, but several side-projects like special facial animation rigs and an interesting project management tool called  ‘ShotManager’:

As a result of these requirements, the “ShotManager” was born – first planed to be open for any kind of project, but then customized for this project only. Since the whole film takes place at the edge of a clearing of a dark forest, the set had a fixed size. Splitting the set into about 6 multiple reference models has made it possible to set the scene layering inside of the scene manger (enable/disable what’s required)

The Shot manager had also other nice features. If we had to make a change for all scenes (which happened a lot of times), we have just done it on one scene, copied the script log and put it into the Shot Manager. It then generated a script which opened every scene and made our changes. We let it run overnight and all scenes had been updated.

See the video below, then read the MakingOf at CGSociety.

via CGSociety – The Making of ‘Descendants’.

Descendants from Goro Fujita on Vimeo.