Inspected By Production Blog

Justin animating a scene

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Justin animating a scene

Rendering animation passes in the RCC VCL lab

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Rendering animation passes in the RCC VCL lab

Animation

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Animation has begun on our main scene. Here is a frame grab.

Texturing Lou

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

We have textured our Lou character and I’ll show you how we did it. First I went to ShareCG and grabbed a 1K square texturing grid.

Next we applied this texture to Lou to see how the square lie. You can use this information to determine many things including which form of UV mapping you want to use to flatten out your UVs. This is what Lou looked like.

Using this information we determined to just leave the UVs the way they are and not to force any other kinds of UV mapping (cylindrical, automatic, planar, camera projected, etc). Then we go to the UV Texture editor in Maya and get our UV Snapshot. This is a grid version of Lou’s flattened out body.

Using all this information, we can bring everything into Photoshop and create our Lou Texture. This is what it looks like.

Then, we apply it to Lou

And that’s it. Pretty sneaky sis.

camkerr & Justin

A render test to check the textures of the elements in the...

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:28:11 -0500

A render test to check the textures of the elements in the Warehouse. Next the lighting stage.

Holiday Work Session 2

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:26:48 -0500

Justin and I got together for another Holiday Work session where we focused on texturing and our Character rig. The rig has been giving us a lot of trouble. The hair keeps coming off Lou’s head, he doesn’t scale correctly, his body bends over in weird ways. Texturing on the other hand has been quite successful. We were originally planning for the texturing stage to come after animation, however this hiccup with our rig has opened up some free time. As of today, 99% of the environment is textured and awaiting the lighting stage.

Holiday Work Session 1

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:19:28 -0500

Justin and I spent two days together at my place working on Inspected By. We accomplished a lot including finishing modelling the set, props, and character. The character is also fully rigged and we are ready to animate.

Here is a test of the animation controls using our character...

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 17:33:20 -0500

Here is a test of the animation controls using our character Lou.

Update

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0400

We haven’t had much rendered since our Pitch on October 20th so I thought I would update our blog. We are currently working with our character Lou, getting him modeled, rigged and prepped for animation. We are on schedule and are looking forward to the month of December or “Animation Month” as we call it. Check back for more updates.

-camkerr

A photo from our pitch slideshow. Lou’s Control Panel in...

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A photo from our pitch slideshow. Lou’s Control Panel in Maya 2008.

A photo from our pitch slideshow.

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A photo from our pitch slideshow.

A photo from our pitch slideshow. Our current WIP of Lou.

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A photo from our pitch slideshow. Our current WIP of Lou.

A photo from our pitch slideshow. Storyboard.

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A photo from our pitch slideshow. Storyboard.

Inspected By - Proposal

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Inspected By

Summary of Proposed Project

Inspected By (working title) is an entertaining digitally animated short film. Running only a few minutes in length, the film is written and presented in a way that creates a fun atmosphere for the viewing audience.

The goal of this project is to show that a professional level short can be created with off the shelf software on a very limited budget. Animated feature films have large teams and are often produced by studios with near unlimited resources. We are creating a film that has the same production value as a studio film, for little to no money.

One of the ways that we are achieving this is that we are doing all the work ourselves. We will write the story, draw the storyboards, animate and render the final product entirely on our own. This drastically eliminates many expenses and allows us to experience an entire production pipeline.

Inspected By challenges the misconceptions of animation being a simplistic art. This piece is an example of a New Media work that exploits digital imaging software and generates a final piece that has a very high production value.

Detailed Description

Inspected By in an animated short film that frames itself within the standards of the entertainment industry, largely derivative of traditional storytelling and acting methodologies. It draws inspiration from the many pioneers of animated storytelling such as Walt Disney, Milt Kahl, John Lasseter, and Pixar Animation Studios. Inspected By emulates the recognizable appeal of these artists while simultaneously developing its own unique aesthetic. Its originality emerges through unique character development and clever story progression, ensuring that it will do more than simply mimic what has made previous short films of similar nature successful.

As a short film, it is important to have a succinct yet interesting plot that not only engages the viewers but also evokes a particular emotion within a small time frame. Essential to this success is the ability to create believable characters that the audience is able to quickly relate to through refined and well-executed acting as well as creative character design. In addition to this, a fluid and well conceived environment must be constructed for the characters to exist in and interact with. The flawless combination of each of these elements contributes to the overall aesthetic of the animated short film. Creative crafting and manipulation of each element is what forms the unique qualities of the film. With Inspected By, a lot of effort has gone in to the development each of these aspects.

The main character, Lou, exists within a flawless factory environment, designated with the job of evaluating flawless machine-made children’s toys. This mechanical perfection is directly contrasted by his organic imperfections. The story focuses mainly on his struggle to cope with these imperfections as they begin to interrupt his ability to execute his necessary tasks. Though watching him struggle amuses the audience, they will ultimately feel pity for his unfortunate shortcomings. As the plot progresses, the complexity of the character will be fluidly unveiled to the audience, with each scene adding more depth to the character through his actions. Ultimately, he will undergo an entire character transformation by the end of the film, shifting the audience’s emotion along with his own.

The complexity of the character is mirrored by the complexity of the environment he exists in. A massive and fully operational toy-manufacturing factory surrounds him. Though the stage itself barely exceeds the boundaries of the character’s wingspan, it is important that the set appears to be just as alive as the Lou himself. In this instance, a bland environment would lead to a bland character. Extreme care is taken in crafting the most minute details to bring the set to life, giving Lou the ability to fully interact with the intricacies of the environment he inhibits. Once again, a contrast is seen between the rigid, hard-edged perfection of the factory structure and the soft bodied organic imperfections of Lou. Regardless of the visible differences, Inspected By is able to seamlessly mesh each complex element together to create an enjoyable short film.

However, the most important consideration is the ability to make the complexities appear transparent so that the audience is able to enjoy the simplicity of the film. If these complexities are made blatantly apparent to the audience, the simple charm of the story can easily be lost. The vehicle for achieving this task will be pantomime acting.

Pantomime dates back to ancient Greece, encompassing the theatrical genres of tragedy and comedy. It is an extremely effective method of conveying emotion and characterization due to its exaggeration of body language, perfectly suiting it to comedic animation. Andrew Stanton, director of the animated movie Wall-e, explains “the traditions of pantomime reach back to the roots of pure cinema. Storytellers of the silent-film era invented a pictorial language of montage that still defines how we watch movies” (Hauser, 9). Staging and stylized acting are expressed solely through facial expression and body language, void of any dialogue. Earlier examples of this can be found in Commedia dell’arte, an expressive form of theater that originally began in Italy. Cinematic examples can be found in silent films featuring acting greats such as Charlie Chaplin, or Buster Keaton. These performers were able to portray comedic characters while still maintaining levels of depth that weren’t immediately made apparent throughout the story. In animation, pantomime becomes especially relevant, as the goal is often to create exaggerated personalities with exaggerated characteristics. Animators such as Richard Williams, Milt Kahl, Grim Natwick and Ken Harris all mastered the art form, breathing an immense amount of life in to their characters that had never been seen before in animation. Many of these animators utilized the traditions of pantomime in order to develop their own style, and this is exactly what the intentions of Inspected By are.

Drawing from many inspirational sources, Inspected By hopes to tell an entertaining story that is reminiscent of the classics many people admire. Primary inspiration can be found in such movies as The General (1927), starring Buster Keaton. The plot is relatively thin, but the characterization is phenomenal. Keaton is able to portray each individual emotion strictly through his body, evoking moments of laughter, concern, or pure entertainment. Though his particular brand of slapstick comedy does not entirely apply to the desired style of Inspected By, Keaton’s perfection of pantomime is enlightening. As Stanton explains, “it makes you realize that we actually lost more storytelling skills than we gained as a result of going to sound” (Hauser, 9). Silent film actors such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin are the epitome of cinematic pantomime, and provide a robust supply of inspiring material. Animated inspiration is even more extensive, however, as it relates directly to what we’re doing. Among the best are legendary Disney animators such as Art Babbit or Ken Harris. These are artists who pioneered the world of animation, discovering its intricacies and sharing them with the world through their creative storytelling. Falling under the umbrella of Disney is the most influential resource available: Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar is ultimately our greatest source of inspiration, not just from the work they have down, their cultural influence. Primarily, they have created an abundance of memorable films and short films, each one a successive masterpiece to the last. Their short films such as One Man Band (2005), Lifted (2006), and Presto (2008) have all earned their success and appreciation through creative story telling and wonderful charm. Their feature films are even more renowned, earning multiple awards and nominations in a variety of fields. Pixar has unquestionably had a significant cultural impact, ranging from inspiration from their films to education through their school. Though Inspected By will not be able to match the massive scope of Pixar’s cultural contribution, we hope to make a similar, yet respectfully smaller contribution.

Inspected By will have a place in the community. The learning process of its realization will be documented and shared with the public. We hope to contribute to the community by providing inspiration and education to those who are in a similar position to us. (Hauser)Ultimately, we aim to contribute a greater understanding of animated story telling as more than just shallow entertainment, but a true art form.

Research Plan and Methodologies

Workflow

Our production pipeline is very straightforward and simple. It consists of software that we already own, or have access to so purchasing licenses will not be included in our budget. It is as follows:

Reference

The largest area of research for the film is reference. The reference we collect is groups of photographs of various elements, articles of clothing, items for the setting and objects that show us what the digital models should look like. Flickr and Google Image search are great resources for finding reference images. These images can be used to help better understand our character, setting and props. Using these photographs as reference, we can pay attention to the little details of these objects to make the film more realistic.

FPN541/2

We both took FPN541/2 taught by James Warrack, which are introduction to and advanced Maya classes. These classes teach foundation skills for modeling and animating in 3D software packages. The hands on section of the courses are taught by an industry professional, Sherwin, who is our mentor on this project. Sherwin provides us with professional workflow tips and tricks that make rigging and animating our character easier and more efficient.

Video Tutorials

We have access to an entire library of 3D modeling and animating video tutorials. The topics covered by these videos include: “Creating Cartoon Characters” and “Creating Cartoon Sets” to name a few. These videos provide excellent suggestions and techniques for 3D cartoon animations. In addition to our library of video tutorials Sherwin has also provided us with print tutorials as well. These documents focus on modeling characters for a professional rigging and animation pipeline.

Animators Survival Kit

Richard Williams was the Director of Animation for the feature film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He wrote a book titled The Animator’s Survival Kit, which describes and illustrates formulas, principles and methods of animation. This book is well respected in the animation industry and is a very helpful aid to character animation.

The Art and Science of Digital Compositing

After all the animation is done in Maya, all the rendered layers and passes need to be composited together. There are many different compositing techniques that will give professional results. Ron Brinkmann’s The Art and Science of Digital Compositing is an excellent guide to using our compositing package, Shake. This book will be very helpful understanding 3D compositing.

Lucas Martel – Pigeon Impossible

Lucas Martel is a 3D animator that has spent the last four years creating a digitally animated short film titled Pigeon Impossible. He produces a weekly podcast where he walks through different stages of his planning, production and postproduction of his film. His podcasts are very valuable and have tips for saving time during production and while rendering.

Feasibility

Inspected By, requires a demanding skill set in the areas of modeling, animation and compositing. We have these skills and using the resources stated previously, we will further improve upon them to achieve a better result.

Budget

Our goal is to create a professional 3D animated short film using off the shelf software on a limited budget. With independent animated films, the majority of the budget is spent on software licenses and computer hardware. We already have access to powerful workstations as well as a thirty-node render farm for our final renders. These computers are fully licensed with all the software stated previously in our production pipeline so no additional software licenses need to be purchased. This makes our estimated cost of production very small.

We really only require one item to be purchased for the production of Inspected By, storage. We will be rendering all of our images at 2K resolution (2048 px by 1080 px). This creates very large file sizes throughout the production and postproduction pipeline. We will purchase our own 500GB external hard drive that will allow us to store an estimated 40 minutes of assets. This is an excess amount of storage seeing how our film will only run a few minutes in length. This hard drive will be backed up daily so that a copy is always available if there is any type of drive failure.

This said, having extra storage and render nodes will be of huge help to us. While we might have enough storage (in GB) splitting the storage up among different render nodes will allow renders to finish much faster. We plan on rendering the majority of our project on a personal render farm of three computers at Cam’s house. Additional funds would allow us to purchase extra nodes to add to this render farm, and can shave days off our final rendered passes.

A miscellaneous amount of $100 was added to our budget. This refers to any textures, rigs or extra storage that we may need to purchase to finish production.

We have already acquired some of the funds needed to create this film and will work and apply for awards to pay for the other costs.

Bibliography

Brinkmann, Ron. The Art and Science of Digital Compositing. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008.

Hauser, Tim. The Art of Wall-E. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008.

Martel, Lucas. Pigeon: Impossible. 1 October 2008. 2 October 2008 .

Maya Video Tutorials. Dir. Digital Tutors. Digital Tutors. 2008.

Warrack, James. “FPN541/2.” Digital Animation Concepts. Toronto: Ryerson University, 4 September 2007.

Williams, Richard. The Animator’s Survival Kit. New York: Faber and Faber, 2001.

Yahoo! Flickr Users. Image Search. 6 October 2008. 6 October 2008.

Inspected By - Draft

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Inspected By (Working Title)

Digitally Animated Short Film

Cameron Kerr & Justin Cerilli

Concept

Setting

Present day, in a toy factory. This particular factory specializes in the production of simplistic dolls that come pre-packaged with an abundance of manufactured joy.

Characters

Lou: A post middle-aged man who takes great pride in his position on the inspection line. A 30 year veteran, he has unquestionably earned the plethora of “Employee of the Month” badges that he wears with such honor. He credits his success to his uncanny ability to detect the most minute defects in a seemingly perfect doll- a skill that many of his coworkers seem to lack. His area of expertise happens to be with irregularly proportioned, yet still socially accepted, miniature female dolls. He regularly goes months without having a single defect slip through his fingers. Of course, having fingers as thick as smoked Kielbasa sausages makes such an occurrence all the more rare.

Story

Another regular work day for Lou. As he approaches his workstation, he cycles through his routine preparatory tasks before officially beginning his work day. He eyeballs his desk to make sure it is aligned perfectly parallel to the conveyor belt, and that it rests precisely 1 inch from his control panel. He dusts off the top of his desk, then the control panel, then of course his shoes. Lastly, he takes a moment to ensure that his coveted and much envied “Employee of the Month” badge glistens just right under the not-so-flattering fluorescent lights overhead. After placing his feet in the same spot they rest every day, he quickly makes two-dozen simple adjustments on the control panel without looking and the motors of the conveyor belt start chugging.

Dolls pass by for Lou to inspect, each one pausing for 2.5 seconds to verify perfection. They used to pause for 5 seconds, but when you’re as good as Lou is, you only need 2.5. Lou pays no attention to the reference poster on the wall in front of him, and instead focuses on each doll, with an occasional glance at his clipboard to make sure he is checking the right box. Everything is going by the books today.

As the dolls pass by, Lou seems to be slipping in to a mechanical state of perfection affirmation. So much so, that he almost lets a tragically defective doll sneak past him. He suddenly notices and his arms fly up and a look of horror consumes his face. One of his heavy hands slams down firmly on the emergency stop button of his console. Alarms go off and his entire work area is illuminated by red and blue flashing lights. A rookie may suspect a squad of police cars to somehow be inside the factory, but most employees know by now that this is just what happens when Lou does his job.

The conveyor belt quickly reverses to bring the potentially defective doll before Lou’s qualified inspector eyes. Using his handy “Inspecto-Arm” he searches for the problem he is certain he saw. Unsurprisingly, resting just behind the ear on the doll’s head, is a single strand of hair that is drastically out of place by almost 3 entire millimeters. Lou fumbles with his clumsy hands, but due to his unfortunately chubby fingers, he is unable to grasp the strand of hair. Using a few other tools and a bit of fumbling about, he is finally able to correct the defect and restart the inspection line.

His routine resumes, and so does the steady onslaught of perfectly crafted, over enthusiastic looking dolls. As he once again slips in to his robotic routine of drawing a check mark every 2.5 seconds, a rather peculiar defect passes before him. This is not one that he could possibly miss, either. The doll seems to be doing a jig with an eye patch and large handlebar moustache drawn on its face.

“Something seems wrong” Lou thinks, and is paralyzed by his disbelief as he watches the doll pass by him. Slowly and cautiously, he reaches out to his console and reverses the line. With the doll before him, he takes a moment to compare the doll to the reference poster for the first time in many years. He notices many significant differences.

He struggles to fix everything, but can’t.

He starts getting a little worried.

He looks at the clipboard, and realizes he can’t check it off as perfect, so he hesitantly sends it to the defect line.

As it travels down the line, it passes in front of the giant scoreboard that reads “No defects for 298 days!” Feeling his pride is on the line, he rushes over and frantically takes the doll off the defect line. His eyes dart about as he struggles to find a hiding spot for it. Eventually he hides it in his desk, and feels relieved.

However, even more obviously vandalized dolls start appearing on the line in front of him, taunting him more and more. Unwilling to give up his spot as “Employee of the Month” he continues to hide them in his desk. Eventually the drawer is full and he needs to start hiding them elsewhere.

He begins getting creative. He tapes them in obscure places, dangles them here and there, and does anything he can to make the defective dolls that he cannot fix disappear.

He eventually becomes so overwhelmed that he calls it quits for the day, and shuts down the line. As he leaves, he takes all the dolls from his desk drawer in his arms. After nervously looking around to be sure nobody is watching, he lifts up a part of the floor revealing a chamber stuffed with defective dolls. Lou adds all the day’s defects to his stash and carefully closes the chamber.

With a sigh of relief, Lou takes a moment to admire his “Employee of the Month” badge.

Method

We began with sketching our character and set design on paper. These sketches will be the basis for our model and set creation in our 3D software package, Maya 2008. All of the modeling, rigging, lighting and animation will be done in Maya 2008 and rendered using Mental Ray. The files rendered out of Maya are TIF image sequences for diffuse, ambient occlusion, shadow and specular highlights. These image sequences will be brought into a compositing package.

We will be doing our compositing in a nodal based compositor, Shake. This allows us to edit each image sequence individually as we use it to make our final composite of each scene. Shake also has native integration with Maya 2008 and our editing platform Final Cut Pro. Once we have shots completed in Shake, we will then transfer those shots into Final Cut Pro and put together an edit on a timeline.

From Final Cut Pro, we can lay down our audio as well as send shots to Color for primary and secondary colour correction. These colour corrected shots can be brought back into Final Cut Pro for the final render of the short using Compressor.

Why is it Important?

Both of us want careers in the post production or visual effects industry upon graduation. However, this type of work is extremely time consuming. The industry judges your ability based on a demo reel of your work and it is very hard for students to put together a good demo reel due to the lack of time they can dedicate to it during their studies. We feel the creative freedom of the final project gives us a perfect opportunity to create a professional level animation, and ultimately a worthy submission in to our demo reels.