strange frame: Love & Sax

The web changes and I’m busy making my movie.

Reed and I put together a very arty website a couple of years ago that really was a fancy blog (before there was Wordpress). Mucho mahalo to Reed and his infinite patience on helping me put it together. It is very cool looking and you can still see it here.

Even before that I struggled with my limited HTML ability and put together a site back when strange frame was a TV show. Liz ended up working with it for a bit and that one is here.

Wordpress (this site’s backend) is more flexible and I can add features without a lot of coding like on my old site, so that is why I’m retiring the old ones.

strange frame is featured on Hawaii’s Reel Stories
Premieres Thursday, June 25 at 8:30 PM on OC 16
Also playing 12 more times this week:
Friday at 2:30 AM
Saturday at 3:30 PM
Sunday at 10 AM & 11:30 PM
Monday at 5:30 AM & 6:30 PM
Tuesday at 12:30 AM, 10:30 AM & 10 PM
Wednesday at 4 AM & 4 PM
Thursday, July 2 at 9:30 AM

Our Saxophonist – Jessica Lurie -
playing all the most saxiest sax
in strange frame: Love & Sax
is on tour through Europe
this summer in
Italy,
Slovenia,
Austria,
and Switzerland.

Check her out!

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.

From the final render. The guitar is built from 6 layers laid out in 3 dimensional space to give it thickness. The layers of the guitar are some hand drawn artwork and pieces of video. I used some video of television static for the strings.

So, after the art is complete in Photoshop, I lay out the parts in After Effects. In this shot part of it is laid out in three dimensional space to allow for dramatic camera motion. Once the parts are in place, I work on the camera motion. Then I begin the character animation. These are stills from when the character animation is complete, but the lighting and background has not been done and the guitar is still a placeholder.

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.

My favorite music composer and best friend is here in the island for a week of intensive music writing. She will be up at the studio banging on my Gibson and her MacBook Pro (which is loaded to the gills with music software). We’ll post some of the samples here later.