strange frame: Love & Sax

Lena Horne, graced our planet with her beauty, sensuality, stunning musicality, and redefined film for minorities, died yesterday at age 92.

Here she is in ’strange frame’.

“Don’t be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it’s just death.” – Lena Horne
Lena Horne on Wikipedia

New “Content Aware Feature” coming in Photoshop CS5

Amazing time saver

Florida state is trying to pass a tax credit for filmmaking in their state ‘as long as the film has no gay and lesbian content’. This makes me very sad, angry and determined to make ’strange frame’ a big thing. It makes Parker sad.

Scene 122 shot 4

I did the artwork and animation all on Monday.

I’ve been a little wary of comparing our film with others, but I think I found a film that has some similarities, had only a slightly larger budget, and was produced at about the same time: Wonder Woman (2009).

Both films are animated, of the same genre (sci-fi/fantasy), with a similar audience. Since this story of Wonder Woman started out in an all woman community, it could have had some empowering lesbian themes and inspired a generation of young heroines, but alas it wasn’t to be.

It did have a great cast (Nathan Fillion for one), some fantastic voice direction (Andrea Romano), and is worth a gander.

Of course, Wonder Woman has a built in audience, a great franchise opportunity, and tons of established backstory. We have to do all that from scratch….without super powers.

At the studio, I was looking over the shoulder of Kali. She was doing some great work hand animating the shadows created by wrinkles in fabric of one of my characters. I thought about how CG animation has all these very creative people working, but the very medium removes this kind of personal artistic interpretation of how a shadow should fall.

John Lennon was asked once:
When you record, do you go for feeling or precision?

I like both, but I go for feeling.

When I watch a Bakshi, Nick Park, Selnick, Peter Chung piece, I can see their hands in the work. Though I love Nemo and some of the other Pixar and Dreamworks animation, it is the story I’m engaged with. The writing is great. Editing precise. Pacing near perfection. The characters well conceived and excellently acted, but I can’t see the animator’s hand in the work. There is some element of feeling missing. There is a sterility that bothers me. I remember someone saying that modern CG animation is more akin to puppetry or marionettes, but in those traditional versions the hand is so directly tied to the movement the humanity is readily apparent.

I’m not saying there is a lack of artistry in CG. On the contrary, there is so much art and creativity that goes into the process and some of the top animators are working in this form yielding incredible imagery.

Your thoughts?

Almost my whole crew
has gotten the swine flu.

We’re a little behind schedule, but hope to make it up soon. Kali is coming in for extra hours this week and I’m getting about 5 seconds of screen time done each day that I can focus on animating.

Daniel is making a great documentary about our process here within the context of the Big Island. Hope to have it up here next week.

21st Century Digital Boy – Bad Religion
A Moment 2 Myself – Macy Gray
Alone Again – God Lives Underwater
Any Colour You Like – Pink Floyd
Awake – Godsmack
Eclipse – Pink Floyd
Idiots Rule – Jane’s Addiction
I’m The One – The Descendents
Na Pressão – Lenine
Never Know – Angelique Kidjo
Shine On You Crazy Diamond – Parts 1-5 – Pink Floyd
She’s Your Cocaine – Tori Amos
Speak To Me/Breathe – Pink Floyd
Take 1 – Brooklyn Funk Essentials
The Big Medley – Dream Theater
The Great Gig In The Sky – Pink Floyd
Today – Erykah Badu
Us And Them – Pink Floyd
Vodoo Chile (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix
What Is And What Should Never Be - Led Zeppelin

One of the reasons I love animation is the ability to control the mood of a shot through color (both saturation and hue)image , density, focal plane, motion (both camera and character), and, of course, sound.

I have shot many low to medium budget live action projects as well as a feature film. You rarely get the time and never have the budget to get all of the above. The shoots are always a compromise of time of day, shot lists for that day, local environment (rarely have I had the opportunity to build a set), etc.

With animation, I can have my cake and eat it too.

The feature I was director of photography on we did 20-40 shots a day. That’s 3-5 minutes of final screen time each day! Of course that is with a 25 person crew with 5-15 people on site as talent and extras. 

A good day at my animation workstation, I churn out 8 seconds. The 4 second shot on the left took me 2 days. Seems way slow, eh? But if you divide even our indie live action shoot screen time by the number of people it took to get that footage, you end up with a similar kind of progress.

After the Photoshop elements are ready, I do the rough animation. The camera motion and they way the character moves through the shot. This saves a lot of time down the line knowing what parts of the face/body will need to be animated and which will be framed out. 

Then I do the gross (large) character movements: The walk cycle, head tilts, arm motion. Also, any important foreground and background elements.

Then I do the beginning of the subtle movements and facial expressions: eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, eyes, eyelids, lips, teeth, etc.

These are done without effects so they can be viewed in real time at full resolution.

Then I start with the effects driven moments. These are done with distorting the Photoshop layer: the sway of the hair, the breathing, the deformation of the lips, the jaw, cheeks, neck, etc.

I have to do preview renders to check these, but these renders rarely take more than a few minutes.

Then comes the lighting, color, contrast, backgrounds and foregrounds. I play with the RGB curves, tint, hue, and add glows for atmosphere or lack thereof.

Lastly, I smile because nothing gives me more satisfaction that seeing my artwork come to life.

Last week Shelley suggested we add a guitarist for a scene I will be animating this week. I love drawing new characters. Shelley requested a musician from a hair band. First I start by imagining the angle and the motion of the shot. Then I draw the character and put together a mock up for animation. The character will look a bit different when animated. The guitar here is just a place holder for one that I will build out of chunks of video. There will be holograms and glows and the motion will be real instead of simply implied by the motion blurs.

I’ll post the actual shot when I am done animating it.

Test render

During the process of animating we go through countless test renders, especially with the CGI. Part of the reason for my choosing to do this film in 2D is the immediacy of the process. Often CGI scenes take days, weeks, or in the case of one shot, months to render. Our 2D scenes are almost real time with the individual frames and rarely take more than a few hours to render the full motion. This shot will be mostly CGI and we do both full resolution renders of sample frames and unshaded/untexture mapped renders to see if the motion works before putting the shot into the render pipeline.