MAKING THE FILM This will just be a very brief section, hopefully showing how the film progressed technically, and a touching a little on the creativity. The catalogue of old test renderings and images I've saved should come together here and make some kind of semi-interesting collage of mildly cohesive information. This is obviously for you to decide. I'll hold back my sketch book scribbling so as not to offend you with my deadly drawing skills, although my 'storyboards' may well make an appearance somewhere in this section (they're really great). Christ I might even break out some things from my Dissertation (this film was made mostly for my final year project in University, and as such comes along side a superb 12,000 word chunk of never-to-be-read-again material). I'm going to look at it now and see if there's anything useful... DRAWING - BUILDING - TEXTURING - LIGHTING - ANIMATING - RENDERING&COMPOSITING - EDITING - STORYBOARDS - SOUND - CLOSING Drawing Obviously most of the development work for the Thesis was done after the project was finished, but I have found some detail and information surrounding the project which is both true and accurate. Here are a selection of images from the duration. Some of the better sketch work I managed to do. Some early character posing and set work. Building Character development, wire frame style. These pictures show the detail of the character, as made from NURBS extruded surfaces. All the characters in the film are just modified versions of DAD. Because these characters are quite high when it comes to the triangle count, I used surface approximation in Mental Ray to only render high res surfaces when they were close to the camera. Distant DADS were automatically reduced for rendering, meaning I could work with low curve-step value DADS. And here are some of the sets from the film. All set work is basic polygon modelling. I WANTED it this way, for a rough and harsh environment: contrast to the characters. Texturing I can remember spending a lot of time watching a lot of short films, and noticing what made some of the computer generated pieces stand out - the use of mixed media, or natural sources. I'm not talking fractal clouds and panel scoring. For DADS I was going to whip out my rusty paintbrush (borrowed from a friend's 6 year old daughter) and make something pretty. Dirt and nastiness was on my mind all through the project, and I found it rather easy to do that with a paint brush and some kids club water colour paints. A short trip to the shared bathroom in our flat was great for reference material (see window sil). I also used this texture, which I made with masking tape and some ink wash, to pick out the edges of the tape. The window sil. Real toothpaste! These are my watercolour skills. Three of these paintings were done, scanned and mapped into the bathroom for the wallpaper. One was created for the ceiling but never used. Trivia! Over the top of the base wall paper, I applied a large number of extra detail textures. These were alpha mapped on, and mirrored, stretched and altered all over. Above is a small selection of detail textures from the film. Notice the bottom left texture above, which is the grout underneath the bathroom tiles (see below). In just the bathroom there is over 130 textures applied. Lighting Lighting was a big area for me, and I'm a big fan of good lighting. This was an ongoing process, and steadily evolved as time went on. Many factors went into the layout and choice of lighting. Number one was always aesthetics. Second was symbolism (no jokes). I like contrast in pictures, so I wanted contrast. As most of the film is played in a bathroom, it had to look good. After all, looking at a bathroom for 5 minutes was going to test any audiences' patience. One way of holding that was for me to make it look interesting. And interest through light is a very interesting topic. As well as making it pleasing to the eye, it was an aid to storytelling. The window is bright and dominant in every shot because THAT is the escape (the shining light if you will). It tells what time of day it is, and lets me show time passing in a very dramatic way. Good textures look terrible with a rubbish light, and so I think it works that bad textures can still look good in an excellent light. The following two stills are from the exact same frame in the film. One is an old lighting setup, looking quite boring and lacking in contrast and depth. The other has had a lot of work on it, and gives a much better sense of light fall and space. During the production, I was getting to learn a new lighting technique that let me get the lighting I wanted (Global Illumination in Softimage 3.8). This let the light do its natural thing, and bounce of every available surface to illuminate others. This occurs off non-reflective objects like in real world light transport and helped a great deal (obviously not without 6 months of testing and head scratching - documentation was on the small side). Still not perfect, Global Illumination doesn't take into account what material the surfaces are made of, but super realistic wasn't my goal (no need!). In the final setup, only 1 light is being used for the bathroom scenes (and its actually outside the window) Here is two of the surviving renders made without textures. They clearly show the light transfers around the bathroom. Animating Not much to show here for this, its all common sense. Animating inside Softimage, using no special techniques to mention. I do remember that the Jitter effect was very useful, the way it could be applied over an existing function curve... very useful. I haven't seen anything that useful in another program yet (I'm using Maya at work at the moment, and I find it to be a very frustrating user experience). I did a lot of acting things out, and got many people to sit on toilets and skip down hallways (nice one Nicki). And that's about it. Rendering & Compositing Rendering was exclusively Mental Ray (the best!), and everything that goes with that. Motion blur was only used in 2 shots that I can think of - the cars in the street in shot 1 and Dad walking past the camera in shot 4 (you can see those numbered in the story boards). The motion blur was rendered separately in mental ray, and then composited over the background. Normally the Global Illumination setup would take a much longer time than just ray tracing, but I could get by with using very low settings (not too many photons) and still get the good effect. By using low settings, it created quite a blotchy effect which would normally be undesirable. This suited my project nicely though, and made it look a lot more scabby, without looking cheap. As I mentioned before, once I had my lighting system fine tuned, I was only using 1 light. This, together with extensive compositing kept render times down to a minimum. Most shots involved some sort of layered compositing, due to the level of ant-aliasing needed on the characters (since they are so scrawny, aliasing was very prominent). In all cases I'd render the characters with high anti-aliasing, taking a long time, and layer those over the faster rendered backgrounds. Here's a simple breakdown of shot 16, where the lighting has changed quite dramatically over a three shot sequence. In some scenes there were more layers than this one, but the process is all the same. I did the compositing in Digital Fusion (now called Maya Fusion! - tshh). Editing The editing for this type of work is pretty much pre-determined. No cuts should be made at this point, because everything has been calculated to such a degree as to eliminate time wasting cut scenes and frames. You cannot hold this or that shot longer to correct any timing issues (you haven't animated it longer!), and you cannot cut shots short (you can if you like, but you've most likely wasted lots of time animating your cut scenes). This is sloved by employing... Storyboards This section should probably be at the top of this page, but if I did that, the drawings would have sent you to your list of bookmarks before you could say *something witty goes here*. So I've saved them till last! I did drawings, cut them out and stuck them onto cards which I could re-arrange and change the order of shots. This was a great step to take, and it was good to be able to walk though the shots in my mind while reading the cards and making notes on them. Any bad flow of action could be picked up here, and played with. Here is a photo of the cards on the floor: Pink cards were the obvious choice for this. As you can probably see, the cards are labelled with information. This information was the Action (what happens in the shot), Duration, Transition (e.g. dissolve, straight cut, fade to black etc) and Sound. I fiddled about with these cards for several months actually, but it was not wasted time. With a concrete storyboard that worked and didn't confuse the viewer, the final film would match it, AND work as a STORY. After that, I scanned them, and made an animatic out of them. The complete animatic can be found in the WATCH IT section. This was used to nail the timings down before anything else was done. MOST IMPORTANT. I added some bad sound effects on to it and the music (which was always in my mind to use - this obviously effected the timing of the piece), and saw how I could implement the sound, as it is a big player in the story. Sound From my rough sound mix, my friend Clive Tonge made a proper mix for the film. He knows all about sound, whereas I do not know anything. He even extended the music to fit exactly with the loud BANG at around the 4:20m mark. I was quite impressed - thanks! Closing Looking back, and also writing this website, the project seemed like a giant that didn't want to go to bed, or something similar that makes more sense. It very nearly didn't get finished, due to an array of side projects and their associated exams. But I'm very glad it did. I think on another future project, ill have a good reference for a time frame, and know what's possible (with regard to having a life outside my bedroom). I learned a LOT about narrative and story telling, which I see as valuable and often ignored skills. Its also a very interesting topic. Around 8 months after I finished the film, re-settled in Sweden, I began pushing the film in the festival circuit. That's quite an interesting thing to get into, and especially if you get the chance to attend some of them. I was lucky enough to go to the Annecy Film Festival 2001 in France with my girlfriend, and saw my film screened in front of over 1000 people. Quite a buzz. So now, was it worth the sweat and bloodshot eyes? (If I have not been clear, this THING took 18 months of my life and wringed it dry like a wet tea towel). Yes! Hopefully you've found this bit of writing interesting, because its (actually) been quite fun for me, in a nostalgic sort of perverse manner. But, as always - take it how you will.