LightscameramodelsrigskeysposesetsanimationrenderingACTION

At last! At last, animation.

I am animating, and its fun and amazing, its like getting to play with dolls all over again. Slowly moving dolls with strange joint and twist controls that have a billion little colored lines coming out of them that make them look like they're covered in ugly neon string.



But still! Animation! Rigging and modelling of all characters has been completed, and a tweaked script awaits storyboarding. While I wait for my lazy pencil to kick its own ass into gear, I move forward with animation.

I could post the entirety of the six seconds here, but that would take forever.

So here:


You get a screenshot. Not much is happening, obviously. Some construction. Its a frame from the very first shot of the short. Lots of "s" words and "f" words in that last sentence.

But yes. Lots of things still very rough around the edges in there. Textures, lighting. You can't see it, but the animation needs work too. Basically as it stands now, what I've got is a bit of a redheaded stepchild.

Hopefully within the next few days I can beat it into something prettier.

Observant readers (all two of you) will notice the presence of a new chap in town, and by town I mean in the animation, one that I haven't shown before. Well I'm glad you asked, Billy, because here he is:






Presenting a proud member of the Los Cielos manual labor workforce.

More to come soon, friends.

Bigass Baby Steps

That's what I'm taking with my most recent thesisical undertaking.

Bigass baby steps. They're baby steps, but they're big ones. Bigass ones, even.

First of all, let's see some setwork.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, SETS, RAAAA-

Ahem.

Firstly there's outside the big old dome city of Los Cielos, that barren, rocky wasteland where the workers will first begin.


I know what you're going to say. The rocks look ok, but the cliff-face and the dirt ground look like shit.
And if that's not what you were going to say....well then, fuck you, that's what -I- say. Because it does.
The textures here look like they were made with a cheese grater, which would be so cool if it were actually true.
Nothing a day or so of being shoved around won't fix though.

Next is inside the city, and not only inside the city but inside one of the buildings inside the city, and not only inside one of the buildings inside the city but inside one of the rooms inside one of the buildings inside the city.
Specifically speaking, the bedroom of our protagonist Kryssi. Is that saucy? That might be saucy.



The room doesn't really look saucy, however. There isn't even a bed. Well ok, that's not true, there is a bed, you just can't see it from this angle.
What the room -really- needs (other than a desk that isn't made solely out of WHITE) is a woman's touch. With the exception of the flowers on top of the desk thing, you'd never know it was a lady's room.
I'm at somewhat of a loss. But only for the time being. I will be speaking to some advisors about this presently. And I don't mean Myles. I don't think he has any first hand experience on how a girl decorates her room.

Speaking of girls, there is progress on characters. Progress. Outside of the Manifest Destiny context that word sounds so....-neutral-. Its like saying "things are going." No mention of where they're going, or how they're going. They're just going.
So I take that back. There is no progress. Instead there's a bigass babystep. Yeah.



They've been gussied up a little bit. Kryssi has eyebrows now, and our friendly neighborhood terrified polizei has been given something to breath through (his mouth grate texture). Its stunning what a difference a few little things can make.

Speaking of a few little things.

Its funny to me how many third party tools go into making Maya....functional. Yes, functional. I've come to a conclusion over the past months, and that's that Maya, as a 3d imaging program is horribly unintuitive. Anyone who knows it or has used it would probably agree with me. Its certainly less intuitive than my flagship program, 3D Studio MAX. Hell, I even think that its worse than Lightwave.

And Lightwave is pretty damn unintuitive.

For this project I've been forced to use, nay, LEAN on a few 3rd party tools in order to be able to crank my project at a reasonable speed. In particular, I'm using Roadkill UVUnwrapper and The Setup Machine.




You'd think a 3d imaging program worth its salt wouldn't need these things for work to progress at a rate that doesn't induce hairloss via one's own fingers, but these tools, which assist in texturing and rigging, respectively, now that they are being used, seem invaluable and utterly critical to the process. And Maya has no provisions that come even close to what these plugins do. Gravy.

Ranting aside, what this means is texturing and rigging is progressing much, much faster than would likely to be initially anticipated, and all that crap ought be done within a few days at -most-, and I'll be on to animating like a happy child being let out to play after finally finishing his chores.

YAY.

Bigass baby steps, aye.

Breathing Fog

You know, I was telling a story the other day about a man lost in a city that was drowning in a bank of sickly, yellow fog. The man would breathe in the fog with every step, and each time I described it as feeling like it was breathing in fine dust. It would coat his mouth and the inside of his lungs with a sickly sandy feeling, sandy like the sand you'd find at the bottom of a dumpster.

He died later on.

In other, mildly related news, there's been a little bit of progress on that thing called Rain.

Yes, that thing.

Animating is fun, I've realized, but the steps that it takes to get you to a point where you can freely animate can be a rather tremendous pain in the proverbial (or none proverbial, I'm spending hours and hours on end sitting after all) arse.
Luckily I find texturing fun. Though I probably oughta rein it in a little.

In other news, I'm not ready to start animating yet. This is mostly in line with my traditional schedule of work, which typically goes like this: character models, set models, spattered with intermittent work on textures for said models, completion of textures after the models are done and rigged, then with the characters are thrown in, like so many action figures in a massive digital Malibu Barbie playpenhousemansionfortress, and animation, camerawork and lighting all begin simultaneously.

Editing typically comes later, and all at once. Well no, that's not true, editing happens in the beginning, with the animatic and in some senses, the storyboard and the sound design, etc etc. Whatever. Koo koo, potato potato.

Its a(n) order of work that's evolved naturally and makes a lot of sense to me. Imagine the colossal task of building a house. Now imagine that you have to build that house yourself. And then imagine the house has to be able to get up and walk around and conduct itself in an orderly manner, likely involving handling kittens without crushing them.

Heavy.

So I start from the ground up. Make sure I have all the individual pieces before I start applying the duct tape and staples of animation and editing.

Its not exactly easy to monitor, but its safe and its been consistently reliable. Aside from some deviations, in terms of showing things off during critiques, that's how I'm gonna be working.
Its all on my Gantt Chart, I swear. Wherever that is. I might have jettisoned it into space.

The man can't hold me down.

What was I talking about.

Oh yeah: progress.

Here's some snaps of models, almost fully finished, in terms of actual modelling (some tweaks here and there, the fussy things) and partially textured. They're partially rigged too, but there's no good way to show that off until partially rigged = fully rigged.

Here's Kryssi, our pwotagawnist. I mean protagonist.







The background is peach for unrelated reasons.

And here is your friend and mine, the Gas Mask doffing officer figure:







What time do we have, little Timmy?

Oh yes, that's right, that reminds me.

Did I mention that I'm fully two weeks behind in production? So here I am. I'm a month into thesis and playing it like its the first week. Working every day, getting things into place, and I'm still only where I should have been weeks ago.

But I prefer not to worry. Worrying and stressing makes me churn out shit for work. -Utter-. -Shit-. With a capital "S" "H". Just look at the swill that I was making last semester. Yeah, ankle deep mucking around in that is a lot of fun. So no, I'm not going to worry. I'm not going to stress.

I'm done stressing. I've breathed the suffocating yellow fog-sands and found them wanting.

This is my project. You people told me it was my project, and I took that to heart. Now I'm going to make something that I can bear to watch, no matter how long its going to take.
At least then, in the end, no matter what manner of project I end up producing, I know that I am going to have at least -one- dedicated viewer.

Beyond The Veil of Madness

Its a new semester. New professor. New classmates. New classes. New attitude. New haircut. New things to look forward to.

Good.

This is good.

Let's see where this takes us, shall we?

Here's the animatic, held over from last semester: LINK

And the synopsis and statement as it was at the end of last semester: LINKY

Iteration-ing

Moving forward is fun. Its so much better than moving backwards, unless you're being Michael Jackson in Billy Jean, but then you have to deal with the children.

What was I talking about.

Oh yes. Moving forward is fun. Most (in fact, all) of the moving forward that I"ve been doing this week has concerned my dear old thesis project, entitled Rain.

Note that I say "moving forward" and not "moved forward and done and now we're doing some actual work on the project."

I'd have a finalized version of the project by now if I didn't continually get it into my head to run it by a few trusted friends of mine and getting suggestions that blow my mind in how perfect they are.

So the script and screenplay you all saw last week, or whenever the hell I last posted here has been demoted to a v0.5 and v1.0 is still to come.

I've lashed together a storyboard out of the rotted wood and metal that is the now-v0.5 and there's an animatic ready as well, but one thing at time, hey?

Here, have a storyboard:
Linky

More to come, soon.

Pontificating

So some people have asked me "Patrick, you lovely ultra-desirable piece of beautiful man-meat, where do you get all of your ideas?" Well I'm glad you asked that, Timmy. Now shut up and sit down.

The big example I'm going to to be blathering about in particular this time around is my thesis project. My big final opus of one minute and eight (was it eight? or was it nine?) seconds that will become the culmination of all of my efforts as a New York University SCPS student.

So, Rain, basically, the project I've been going on about for a little bit by now.

My primary inspiration for Rain doesn't exist. I cannot and could not say that there is one thing that inspired me to make this project the way it is, with the exception of my previous project, which takes place in a similar futuristic-sci-fi-dystopian-city-with-a-dome-over-it setting, Euphoria Inc.

But like so many fliers for shows that I'm never going to go to, picked up off of the ground outside of a club in midtown Manhattan, my inspirations came from all types of things.
For example, the story itself, or rather the style and attitude of the story itself. For all two (Timmy doesn't count) of you who remember, most of my previous projects have revolved around two attitudes: surreal horror and film noir. Adagio, Hellhounds, Royal and Manchester, Anathema, The Laboratory of Doctor Aken, they all generally fit into those two categories.

As much as I love these two categories like a fat man loves his chocolate, I felt it was about time I did something different. Just to tell myself, yes, I can do something different...after all, nothing's worse than realizing you're a one-trick pony. But what to write?
Now for the past five or six months I've been regularly (and by regularly I mean irregularly) dropping into the Barnes and Noble Booksellers in Union Square to read through Neil Gaiman's magnum opus anthology, The Sandman.
Four months and five books later, I was officially a fan of the way Neil Gaiman tells stories. Not necessarily the actual stories, which range from phenomenal to "meh", but the way he tells them.
WIth that on my mind and thesis season encroaching, it was only a matter of letting the right two brain cells rub against each other for me to attempt to do something similar.

Now how about the characters? Kryssi in particular comes from a bunch of different places, and has probably mutated the most over the course of the development process.
One thing that has not changed in the least is her underlying attitude, which is directly inspired by the female leads of a few webcomics that I read and still read regularly, Dresden Codak and Gunnerkrigg Court. In particular, they are quiet, observant and incredibly resourceful gals (each in their own way), with strong tendencies towards not only thinking outside of the box, solving their own problems, and not being afraid to go after what they want, when they get it into their head to do so.
Her appearance, however, has shifted all over the place. She started off as a spunky ten year old girl named Anna, then turned into an not-entirely-emo mid-twenties woman with the weight of the world on her shoulders, also named Anna, then back into a spunky ten year old girl, except this time with a smaller head, still named Anna.
It didn't really click with me though. It'd do in a pinch and a half, sure, buuut it stilll really wasn't something I felt was -there- yet.
It wasn't until I took a page from my previous Euphoria Inc. project that I settled on something I could really go with. You see, almost all of the characters from Euphoria Inc. are inspired by people I know in life. A friend, a lover, an acquaintance, some shmuck that I happened to live down the street from, its their stories that I try to tell, in my own way, and their personalities that drive their counterparts in the graphic novel.
It turns out that trying to come up with an entirely new character for such an unfamiliar means of storytelling was exactly what my problem was.
And so she went from being Anna to Kryssi. She's based on an old friend and romantic interest of mine from a long time ago and who I've long since parted ways with and who's insistence on deviating from the norm, no matter what it may have been, was responsible for drawing me to her in the first place.

The other characters, at least the ones with legs and sentience, consist entirely of the three hazmat suit workers who chase Kryssi through the city, and who are the first to discover, after Kryssi, the harmlessness of the falling rain outside.
Since they are almost entirely defined by the appearance of the hazmat suits, I made the decision to design the suits in a fashion that would outwardly express the terror that is contained inwardly, towards the rain and the environment in general that exists outside of the safety bubble of Los Cielos' dome, and where better to look for expressions of terror than Edvard Munch's Scream:




So to sum up, my inspirations have been pulled from a highly successful and lucrative author, a person who exists in my life, and an impressionist painter.

How's that?

Previsualizationerarium Update (aka about fcuking time)

Ok so.

The project is called "Rain."

No wait, we've already been over that.

Here's the update, I've finally got a script and screenplay that I really like, and that I'm almost 100% confident about whether or not I'm going to be able to actually pull it off.

Its just a matter of tweaking and dusting and punching it in the face until the kinks, which I'm positive are there, are worked out, like those annoying gas bubbles that always end up in your hummus and make you pick up less hummus every time you scoop. You know what I mean.

So yes...SCRIPT and SCREENPLAY...a moving Oscar-award winning film about a script and screenplay who move to Africa and embark on a journey to find themselves in the midst of...a lot of Africans. Also the meaning of twoo wuv.

More to come, summarily. SUMMARILY, so says I. This is shaping up to be cool. But first, I gotta get something to eat.

Blogstorm

Yes, this is exactly what I shouldn't be doing. I'm running my process under the big heavy tuesdaytuesdaytuesday wheels of dragged time.

But its how it'll happen.

Gimme a second.

Breakthrough

RE: Thesis

I finally have an idea I can truly be excited about. More on this soon.

PS: eu-fucking-reka

Boids

Did I ever mention that I don't have enough to do?

Have I ever in the past...two...three years of doing a shit job at maintaining this blog with any sort of regularity ever give the impression that I didn't have enough projects on my plate to wrap my teeth around, like some goddamned animal trying in vain for some ungodly reason to devour a beach ball?

But I'll be fucked if I don't think otherwise. I've got yet another new project that's slithering out of the works, and its gonna be a doozy, and by a doozy I mean not so much so.

Its about birds. Its for a "contest", the stakes aren't very high as its for the Digital Arts Network, a club formed entirely out of NYU and in spite of all its charms could better be termed "NYU CADA Fan Club". But that's why I love them.

Anyways, the contest is about birds and digital art and that's it. Make some digital art thing that expresses the idea of birds. Simple.
Deadline for the contest is somewhere around the end of October, or the middle, I'll be arsed if I can remember anything I didn't take the time to scrawl on the screen in big black marker.
That's anywhere from half a month to a month to pull some amazing out of our collective asses.

I'm pumped. So pumped.



I think its coming along nicely.

Handlebars

Some color references for what I'm thinking about.

This is more of a "kinda like this" than an "it is this" because its not exactly what I want.

For example, the reference I'm using takes place in the withered, poisoned ruins of a dead city, and my actual story takes place in a fully furnished condo with running water, clean not-utterly-destroyed walls and a shuddering similarity to a furniture catalog targeted towards young urban professionals.



This is from "Post Nuke," a webcomic about...well you can guess what.


The sun. The fucking sun.


Speaking of young urban professionals, here's a piss poor shot of the furniture from Fight Club. I'll have a better one once a wrangle a copy of the movie.

Put Something on the Something or Other

Oh, what the hell am I trying to do here.

Oh yeah.

YEAH.

So.

I revised the story a little bit. But like any good suicidal, after looking down the edge of the precipice, I'm having second thoughts.

So the original story for those one and half of you (Billy the Torso only counts as half a person) was about a girl who was trying to find rain outside of her domed, air conditioned shithole of a city. It was a big, fat, complicated idea that involved getting her favorite umbrella and trying to leave by car and then by train and then plane and then space cannon and nothing works, until she decided to say "fuck it" (not really, she's ten) and walk, which turns out to be what takes her out of the city and into the rain.

Possibly a bit much for six months for one man. But only because I want it to look pretty.

So I threw that into the "I don't want to throw you away because you're still an adorable halfway decent sploo of an idea but you're just too big and heavy and i'm not really ready for a committment right now baby but maybe a graphic novel in the future or something" box.

Its not a very big box.

The new idea keeps the girl and the city and the rain, except now the girl is in the room, is about eight to ten years older and never leaves the room, because in the room THERE ARE NO DOORS OR WINDOWS no, its a room in a condo-like flat in a skyrise building in the condo-district of the city.
The dome and the air conditioning over the city (aka a lot of production work) are gone, and have been super-shrunk into snowglobe size in the form of a...well, a snowglobe, on a table that the girl is now sitting at. Its not quite a snowglobe however, as instead of snow that falls every time you shake it, its rain. Impossible? Yes. But this is the future.
So the girl (let's call her Anna) is sitting at the table (one of those round breakfast tables), chin in her hands and is staring at the rain falling in the little globe and sighing wistfully. As is expected, the sun is bright, yellow and blaring outside through the glass-pane double doors behind her. For added effect, all the furniture in the room has that plasticine yuppie bought-off-that-catalog-that-was-in-Fight-Club look to it, there's a pot of eye-stabbingly red plastic flowers near the door, there's a calendar with a picture of a girl standing on a balcony smiling into rain falling on her face, with a checkmark for each day its been sunny (every day since the 1st, as far as we know) and there's a little figurine of a girl dancing in the snowglobe.
Everything I just mentioned will be strictly peripheral, as they'll be in scene, but the camera isn't going to give us any sort of up-front eyeful of them, because it'll be too busy focusing on Anna and the room at large, EXCEPT for a shot of the girl in the dome. A confrontational sequence of shots, as it were.
Anna is busily being wistful and casting longing gazes out the glass pane door behind her and generally looking like she wishes it were raining when....lo and behold...it starts raining outside.
Anna jumps up from her seat and runs over to the door, presses up against it, looks out and smiles.

Then she reaches over and presses the button (remember, future(is that stupid? that might be stupid)) to open door, and the door stubbornly refuses to do just that. She buzzes it again and again until she notices the words "EMERGENCY DANGER LOCK ENGAGED" glowing above the button and then looks outside again.

Outside is a potted plant (not so sure...its something she left or put out there at some point, like a book or a puppy, or a firstborn child) and the camera focuses to see little holes being burned wherever the droplets of rain falls on it.
Anna sees this and backs away from the window, then sits back down at the table and, with rain pouring outside, goes back to looking at the rain globe. Hopefully this time it'll feel more like she was wishing more that she was the girl dancing in the rain rather than just wishing for the rain.

Cause she sure got that.

So that's my new idea. As you can see I kind of took a machete to it. The only thing that's remained consistent so far are the overall attitude towards civilized society (aka its dirty, fake, depressing and pointless and weeee) and the color scheme, which is mostly yellows, browns, and some more yellows, with blues and greens thrown in during the rain.

It might be too much? Maybe I just need to man up and go wrangle the first idea onto its knees so that its a little more manageable.
I could be utterly fucking myself if I try to take that leap of faith, or it could be good.

Its hard to know what the right decision is, sometimes.

After all, its quite a drop.

Singing the Statment Blues

I have a new project idea...as if I don't have enough thousands of fuckin' projects on my plate and in my planning books already.

Its called "Rain."

Its a 3D animated short about a girl who wants to find rain.

More to come, fellows.

New Kids On The Borough

I'm surrounded by Hasids. And I couldn't be happier.

Let me clarify.

I'm living in a neighborhood full of Hasids, and I couldn't be happier.

For those of you who don't know what Hasids are, they are orthodox jews. Their collective group moniker translates roughly into "righteous", and they follow a strict doctrine of behavior so that they may place themselves in favor of the big glowy man in the sky.

Let me zoom out a little further.

For the length of last year I was living in a neighborhood of Brooklyn stammeringly named Bedford-Stuyvesant. I'd call the name a little odd, but its an hour or so's train ride away from another neighborhood tastefully named Flushing.
The Bed-Stuy is a shitty fucking neighborhood.
Its dirty, its noisy, its serviced by one of the most infamously terrible trains in the five boroughs, and its full of crime. The only reason I even lived there was because its bloody cheap.
I could say I was too busy being all doe-eyed at living in New York City for the first time to notice, but as it turns out, I continued not noticed for nine months straight.

That all came to a gloriously reality-checking halt when I walked out of my room one late night/early morning to find a guy I've never seen before standing in my hallway.

The little shitstain had already taken almost 600 dollars worth of stuff and passed it out the window that he came in to his friends.

The police arrived in the nick of time, fifteen minutes after the man had lost all of his nerve seeing me and taken off down the street.

The next month and a half after that before I moved out was a whirl of paranoia, wild parties, late nights and missed plane tickets, half fueled by my recent escapades into the business end of petty crime and half fueled by the imminent end of summer.

At that point, we installed bars on the windows and kept everything under lock and key. It wouldn't have been quite so bad if the same nuts hadn't attempted to break in two or three more times after that. How did I know? They left their greasy handprints on the window from trying to shove them up from the outside.

So Bed Stuy was a little late to the welcoming party. Nine months late, in fact. But the Hello Crew came in and did their job, and as a result, I moved. Sometime in the swirl that was the last month I pulled a place out of the ground in South Brooklyn, helped my roommate clean up the old place the best we could, then got the hell out of dodge.

My new neighborhood is fantastic, in every safe sense of that word. And not safe as in conservative, but safe as in safe. Its a family neighborhood. There's a jewish school across the street, and Bramsonort College a handful of blocks down 20th.
As a result, the place is also kind of boring, in terms of social scene. As in, there is none, unless you count going to a 24 Hour Grocery being social.
But its safe. After a few months of tearing my hair out, and going to sleep uncertain of whether I'd find the window broken when I woke up, I can rest easy.

Its Shabbas, and a few Hasids just walked down the street.
I'm freaking surrounded by them in this neighborhood.
And I couldn't be happier.

"Theses"

Look at all that time that's gone by. I can't even begin to imagine how long its been since I've set foot here. Its all just a matter of time isn't it?

As it is, I'm going to start spilling about my final project ideas here on occasion, or as its called in the annals of NYU CADA, "thesis".

A whole year, spent on one project, that's what thesis is. One semester for previsualization and another semester for setting in motion the plan laid out in the previous semester.

That's a lot of time to matter through.

Its to be expected. Its the final huzzah-house, the grand finale, the last big show of "holy fucking wow" that's supposed to make every money-stuffed executive and recruiter say "oh my god I want to hire you right goddamned now yes right goddamned now and I hope you take massive sacks of cash".

So we'll spend some time on it.

I really do wonder about what I'm actually capable of pulling free from the soil that all of my ideas crawl around in. Each of the Royal and Manchester micro-episodes, or "micro-sodes" as I've been calling them for the last four and a half seconds, were done in one semester, from pitch to print.

Maybe I'll pull off something amazing, a 3d animated opus that will brand itself in the leathery side of NYU's cowhide to be remembered for all eternity. Or I'll huck out a ten second shit of an excuse for a project and be told to never work in this town ever again.

Maybe I'll come out with a project that I'll love working on so much I'll just dive eyes first into it and swim around in work like a diver swimming around in a pool made of pure happiness. Or I'll hate it.

Who knows. Either way I'll have something at the end of all this. Something big, something fancy, and something that, hopefully will look good.

I don't quite know what it is yet.

But I will.

Its only a matter of time.

A Literal Font of Technicalated Mambojambonation

New York City is alright. Its a town of hustle and bustle, and a place where you get off the subway and get yourself lost in no seconds flat.

Its full of annoying things like raucous taxis, yuppies, crowded sandwich shops, stores full of clothing that's more expensive than god, posers, those little dogs that like to bark at you for no reason, advertisers, and people.

Its also full of awesome things like stage shows, famous people, non-crowded sandwich shops, stores that have anything and everythin in existence, artists, ice skating rinks, reliable public transportation, and people.

The technical expertise here is very nearly palpable, -tastable-, you could practically squeeze it between your forefinger and your thumb, some places you go. Or at least, all the hundreds of godforsaken powerwalkers who flock and swarm along Fifth Avenue and Forty Second want you to think that.

New York is everything and anything, in the end, and that includes a self contradiction. The city is quite possibly one of the most confrontational cities around and it gets in your face like its got something to show you often. But more often then not when you stop and look and show your face back, you find in the end that nothing too much was looking you down in the first place.

So what have I been doing while I've been sitting pretty here in the Big Apple? Well let's see...

Anathema is complete. At long, long, long last.

How about I take you on a journey through its creation?
Yeah that sounds like a good idea.

IN THE BEGINNING, God created the animals.

No wait, that's too far back.

SO FIRST, I came up with the idea.

No wait, that's still too far back.

According to this blog the last thing I showed you guys was the animatic. So let's start from there, shall we?


The Story Reel, a sideways glance at a first look at a beginning:
So in any video project worth its salt, there ought to be video....footage plates shot onto which the effects and everything else are added and edited against.

Bit of a no-brainer, this one, I shot my footage somewhere around October when my most gifted talent, Joanna "Akemi" Micco was in town. She did a bangup job of the role I asked her to do, adn there's nothing like looking at a bit of raw video plate and saying "yeah this is gonna be awesome."

STORY REEL WAS HERE

I would know. That's what I did.


The Rough Cut + Color Correction, chipping, chipping away:
A rough cut, as any video editor/producer worth his salt would know, is first pass at editing a piece, after the footage has all been slotted into their placeholders, marked out in the animatic.

A little while ago, a friend of mine, working on the same project, asked me what the difference between a Story Reel and a Rough Cut was. And so I told him. His response was that meant that they were the same thing, since a good portion of the editing was supposed to have already been done in the animatic.

I didn't have a response to that.

ROUGH CUT BEHIND HERE

I did all my color correction in the same pass. Why? It was a button. Well, a button and a slider, and a few more buttons and some adjustments and a couple more sliders....what I'm trying to say is that I did it, and I did it because there wasn't that much tweaking needed for the editing.


The Effects Pass, like a backstage pass into WHOA (not really):
Here's where the brunt of the work happened.

X - HERE BE EFFECTSPASSES

The aim was to terrify. And every single effect, filter, slider, and button that I inserted into this was made towards that goal. If anything seemed like it didn't more rightly align the piece towards something unnerving, something discomfiting, something that would give the viewer that sense of -unease-, it got chucked.

At the same time my knowledge with Aftereffects, as I'm doing this is about as stable as a palsy victim tapdancing on a seesaw.

Continually change, continually morphing, and acquiring new parts like some hideous metallo-bionic collective, I found myself having to throw out half of the effects that I started with whenever I found something better.
Radial blurs got replaced with horizontal-restricted gaussian blurs. Manual camera shakes got replaced with time squeezes and remaps.

Text was added and adjusted in ways that I hadn't anticipated before and as is evident, even the ephemeral title sequence got a complete workover.

But I like it.


The Sound Pass, a valley of audio connecting the Sound Valley to the Sound Plains:
Sound effects are horror. They are what makes the scary terrifying, what makes the disquieting unnerving, and the disturbing horrifying. It adds that extra thick filmy layer of immersion that is so essential to pulling your audience in when you're trying to disturb them.

In other words, I had fun with this.

HEREIN LIES SOUND PASS, GOOD IN LIFE, BETTER IN COMPLETION

Putting together the sound effects for this monster was a bit of a doozy. I wanted to keep the backing "music" track, I'd refrained from inserting that particular track into any other project specifically for the purposes of this very project.

So what else? It didn't really feel cohesive unless the individual cuts had some other sound things going on top of it.

Originally I recorded a bunch of audio using my lovely little headphone mic...gasps, wails, groans, and strange mumblings.

Exactly ten seconds after I put them into the track, I threw them out. Homemade audio is not conducive to scaring people, unless you're going less for "scary" and more for "really freaking sketchy".

So I went back to the library of ambient tracks that I had originally pulled the backing "music" from and began slicing and julienning things as I saw fit and sliding them onto the tracks.

And I liked it.

The finished product that made it onto the DVD deviates exactly none from the finished Sound Pass. Everything up until that point had been polished out nicely before I moved on to the next step so I felt no real need to go back and whip a dead horse that's already primed for the races. ... ...

...

More on my other projects later.

Stay tuned.

Lock, Stock and Some Other Things That Might Be Smoking

A few more highlights in the project, to show how things are coming along, more on all of this later.

This is the shot list, the name of which sounds kind of like a drunkard's to-do list. Aka fantastic.

Linky

MORE LATER

What's He Storyboarding In There?

So in the motion visual arts industry we have this thing called a "storyboard". What is a storyboard? Well for the three of you out in the world older than 21 who don't know what it is, a storyboard is a board that tells the story.

Quite literally, when the storyboard was first invented deep in the bowels of the media infant that was dubbed "Disney", which would later grow monstrously and terribly into the media giant that was dubbed "Disney", it was a series of boards, likely cardboard or foamcore or whatever they used in those days, upon which an entire Mickey Mouse cartoon would be laid out in text and drawn frames. Each drawn frames represented a key moment in the animation that would help all the animators know what was going on.

Cut to the present day, two thousand seven, the cusp of a brilliant era that gave birth to high definition television, touch screen displays, motion capture, holograms, computer chipped coffee machines and weird subliminal Sprite commercials involving guys in huge green suits that really don't make you want to drink more Sprite. Really.

And a storyboard is still a series of boards, likely cardboard or foamcore or whatever. The difference now though is that they are not only limited to cartoons, and they are not only limited to Disney's inner sanctum.

After all. If they were, how in the world would I be using for my in-development Anathema project right now?

The answer is: pure willpower.

Zoom In On That Thing Right There

It's called "Anathema".
Or rather it will be called Anathema, once it gets made.

The assignment is I will have thirty seconds to scare the everloving fuck out of you and yours.

Now, like any good obsessive artist/filmmaker/motiongraphicisisist/closet psychotic I want to avoid cliches when making something like this. It helps that the cliches of the modern day horror extravaganza don't really consist of terrifying people anymore.
Certain horror flicks go with gore. All over the place. Intestines and stomaches and hearts and brains and chainsaws and knives and more intestines and more knives and hey how about some more intestines guys I think this scene needs more intestines what do you think more intestines, yeah more intestines. And that works sometimes, it gets a reaction out of the crowd.

Others go with LOUD NOISES.

....
....
....
LOUD NOISES

And that's always guaranteed to get the audience to jump, right?

But is it really scaring them?

Showing a few dozen liters of red liquid in a scene and throwing in some screams, murder weapons and maybe a lampshade made from human skin isn't really terrifying someone, as it is more of a elaborate and puppeted disgust dressed in the trappings of fright. Also unsanitary.

Flinging loud noises and sudden scary imagery onto the scene is the movie equivalent of jumping out of a corner and going "BLAGHLABLGKHAL". This too isn't scaring someone as it is just surprising the crap out of them.

Its cliches like these that I will seek to avoid. The gore, the gotcha moments, the sudden loud noises and things rushing towards the camera going "AAAHHH!"

Instead I will rely on things more substantial...chilling imagery, the unseen, the implications of the unknown and a vague conceptual story about a curse, or a possession, to grab you by your ribs and leave a mark.

Or, at least.

That is the hope.

The script has been revised, and a style sheet is available for your viewing pleasure. Check it ouuuuuttttttttttt. T.

Footslogging

There's new recent developments all over the damned place.

But for now:
Link (not Zelda)
Linkimus Rex

More on these later.