Making of From the hoop

Making of: From the hoop – short film. We are glad to show you our graduation movie made last year in Supinfocom Arles.

Story of From the hoop is inspired by Earl Manigault‘s life. Earl Manigault was one of the greatest basketball player of his generation. Mentored by Holcombe Rucker through his youth he became the star of his high school team. As an universitary champion, he seemed destined to shine in NBA. But before the transition, he fell into drugs and lead his life far away from the basket. After dark years made of jail, drugs and friend’s death, he gave up this world to return in the right way to Harlem. He started the “Walk Away From Drugs” tournament for kids in Harlem. He died in 1998 from a heart failure.

From the hoop first take place in Harlem streets then go to the Rucker Park, a famous Harlem’s playground renamed in memory of Holcombe Rucker.

The Rucker park is considered as an important place of street ball history and had welcomed some of the greatest players of all times during yearly competitions.

Learn more about Earl Manigault in Wikipedia
Learn more about the Rucker Park in Wikipedia
See the Rucker Park in google map

Harlem / Rucker

We made a significant database of pictures about Harlem’s streets & equipements in one hand and about the Rucker Park in the other in order to recreate the feelings and the mood of this area.

We want to thank Kevin Couliau, photographer from the french magazine Reverse to help us obtaining precise views from the Rucker.

The main character is obviously named Earl. We wanted to have a light character design to contrast with the detailed environment.

Named Truck for the heaviest one and Cran for the tallest one. Concerning our bad guys, we wanted to border the ambiguity of non living person to embody Earl’s fears and malaise.

Comparative views of characters.

From the hoop is a full HD movie.
To minimize render time, we choose to render everything in default scanline (with an additional occlusion pass). In those videos you can see first some examples of several rendered layers then turned into the final result after some compositing work.