The Robin Danger Action School of Culinary Excellence

The Robin Danger Action School of Culinary Excellence is a 2011 American comedy short film about an absurdly dangerous culinary school. The film was created as part of a graduate research project for the graduate program at the Center for Advanced Digital Applications at New York University. The purpose of the project was to demonstrate effective animation production techniques using game engine technology, which in this case was centered around the Source game engine by Valve Software.
Plot
The short film appears to parody the style of a 50's infomercial. It begins by introducing the audience to an unnamed office employee, who is suddenly confronted with a bodiless booming voice. The voice describes a fictitious, highly dangerous culinary institute and then proceeds to bully the employee into enrolling.
Cast
* William Olsen-Hoek as the Announcer (booming voice)
* Igor Bass as the office employee (Thrall)
* Helen Gasser as the Overseer
* Patrick Galligan as the Timid Chef
* Varun Gupte as the Boss Chef
Crew
* Christine Phelan - Animator
* Nick Dubois - Animator
* Greg Mourino - Animator
* Gale Williams - Storyboard Artist
* Sonja Harpstead - Audio Engineer
Production
The research project which led to the creation of this short film was based on a comparative analysis of two rendering techniques, scanline rasterisation using nVidia graphics hardware, and ray tracing through the Mental Ray software package. The Robin Danger Action School of Culinary Excellence was produced twice, once using each technique. The render costs for each technique were quantified, and the project's paper claims that game engine rendering is a cost-effective technique for image generation, provided the limitations of the medium do not hamper the story and a majority of the shots in the film are less than two seconds in length.
Distribution
The film was displayed at MetroCaf, the New York film festival run by ACM Siggraph, on September 15, 2011 . As of April 30th, 2012, the DVD of the short film is available through Amazon.com.

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