Base14

Animators are perfectionists. Or, to put it more accurately, perfectionists often end up becoming animators. Just look at Robert Zemeckis. Even the largest Hollywood live-action budgets still cannot bend to the tiniest nuance of a dedicated director’s mind. But animation can. Animation gives us the (somewhat dangerous) ability to go back and endlessly tweak a piece of cinematic storytelling. This is the trap I have intentionally fallen into this month.

With six whole weeks between Fall and Winter quarters here at SCAD, I am utilizing the extra time to fix every irritating detail of “The Girl and the Fox” that has bugged me since the first “final” cut back in May. The goal is to polish up the entire film to be festival-ready by the start of the new year. And so far, things have been going along very well. I slated about 75 major corrections that were needed throughout the film, and as of yesterday we just passed 30 completed items. Some of them are so minor that no one will probably ever notice except myself (I doubt you’re going to care that there’s one less rock in the background of Shot 34), but each correction is one more step toward sanity for me.

First off, we also are going back and tweaking all the audio for the film. Our composer, Azniv Korkejian, has already graciously returned to the score and added a few small flourishes that we requested. We also have another sound guy working on some higher-quality drone frequencies, which is sort of the other half of the musical score. Finally, when SCAD opens back up during the first week on January, myself and our remaining audio team will re-sync the final sound mix with the new music and sound effects.

Other major changes you will notice are focused on lighting, color and animation. When we started this project, the total amount of cartoon shading experience I had was from the scattered color comics I have done over the past decade. But this was the first time my process had to be implemented in full motion, on an industrialized scale. To put it lightly, it was a learning experience. But after a lot of hours practicing and a lot of heavy thought put into color schemes, lighting charts and friend’s feedback, we’re now making things right.

Another major change you’ll notice are some seriously cool new particle effects and 3D lighting. I’ve taken the compositing process to a new level on this film, dynamically generating many of the character’s previously nonexistent shadows through 3D layers and lights. Granted, this was something we experimented with back on “Ara,” but in this case the 3D is always aimed at serving the 2D look of the film, while adding as much depth as possible. I create false three-dimensional ground planes that match the painted background, then cast diffused lights accross those surfaces to match the characters’ movements. It doesn’t work with every shot (some tricky shadows will still have to be done the old-fashioned way, by animating them frame-by-frame), but for many of the shots this process has been working great.

Of course, what would a Base14 film be without some sort of crazy effects animation? We had snow in the May version of TGTF, but it received nowhere near all the attention it deserved. No more. I’ve tossed out the old particle engine used for the old snow and replaced it with something ten times as powerful. Now we can simulate lumpy snow with gravity, wind, air resistance, depth of field and lighting falloff. And it’s all simulated in 3D space according to the camera I set up. We’re not stopping at snow storms, either. I’ve been looking into other effects like smoke, fog and vapor. It allows us to try out some really neat details like this:

This is the sort of thing that keeps me excited about a project that we’ve been working on for so long! And I think in the end, it’s the little details like this that will allow “The Girl and the Fox” to really stand out. The month’s not over yet and we still have a lot of work to do, but rest assured come January, TGTF is going to start shipping out to festivals everywhere. Let’s hope it makes it into a few.

As stated in a previous post, I am also serving as a blogger for the Voices of the Fest website for the 2010 Savannah Film Festival. We’re in the third day of the festival now and so far it’s been a huge delight talking to filmmakers, sending out tweets about events and writing articles about the day’s highlights. This was essentially my entire plan for this year’s festival, to act as a media representative who is both a student and a featured filmmaker alumnus. So imagine my surprise yesterday when I learned I would have to step up and play filmmaker again this year, at least for one day.

You have all followed the long development of “The Girl and the Fox” over the past year as we’ve worked tirelessly to get it ready for a festival run. And, to be honest, it’s still not ready. The SCADanimate screening was immensely helpful in showing us what the strengths and weaknesses were of the film in its current form, and I’m taking full advantage of that knowledge by working out a list of corrections and adjustments to the visuals, music and sound of the film before we start spending good money sending it to film festivals. This included the Savannah Film Festival! The plan was to hold on until the call for 2011 entries comes in Spring, and then TGTF can be a competition film next year. But The festival also has a block of non-competition films, strictly work of SCAD students, and apparently “The Girl and the Fox” has wound up in there this year.

So with that, I’d like to announce the second public screening of “The Girl and the Fox,” hopefully this time the Fall 2010 cut, with revised soundtrack and some visual adjustments. It will be happening as follows:

Savannah Film Fest 2010 SCAD Student Showcase (Featuring “The Girl and the Fox”)
- Tuesday, Nov 2nd at 11:30am – Lucas Theatre

I am told there will be an opportunity to have question and answer after the screening, so certainly if you’re in Savannah and want to see me say a few words about the film that consumed the last 14 months of my life, please stop on by! If you’re farther away, though, hold on to that ticket money. “The Girl and the Fox” will be coming to a festival near you eventually!

As you all may be aware of by now, I love film festivals. I love the films, the people, the excitement… the prizes. There’s just so much to enjoy. So, it was an interesting dilemma I found myself in when I realized the Savannah Film Festival was coming up this Fall, and I don’t have any films in it! Last year we saw my film “Duck Heart Teslacoil” entertain the masses as part of the SFF student block, but this year “The Girl and the Fox” wasn’t ready before the submission deadline, leaving me with no all-access director’s pass. Refusing to give up the high life I enjoyed last year, I applied to serve as a student blogger for the Savannah Film Festival website, which would include another shiny all-access media pass for the entire week.

And bingo! I got the gig (hopefully thanks in part to my large amount of experience blogging here at Base14.) So for the next month, I’ll be churning out blog posts not only for Base14 but also the “Voices of the Fest” section of the SFF website. Go ahead and check out my first post published today!

I’ve also opened up my personal Twitter account with plans to use it as a stream of updates for my blog presence at the festival. This way people can know where I am and what I’m doing instantaneously throughout the week. So join up and follow along as I take you on a private tour of the entire festival! Should one helluva ride!

This Saturday is SCADanimate here in Savannah, and that means the new official premiere of “The Girl and the Fox”! I couldn’t be sure until I had seen a final programming list, but now that  I got my hands on a flyer for the event, we know “The Girl and the Fox” will be shown. So come one, come all. The version being shown has an all-new musical score by Azniv Korkejian and several visual corrections and clean-ups. Here’s the details:

When: Saturday, September 25th, 7:30pm
Where: Trustees Theater, 216 E. Broughton St. Savannah, GA
Why: Because animation is awesome.

You didn’t think “Duck Heart Teslacoil” was done yet, did you? Well, not quite. The plucky little film was just featured in this month’s issue of Animation Magazine, as the second place winner of the magazine’s annual Student Reel Awards!

The write-up uses some highly laudatory language that left Alysha and myself more than flattered. “It takes a lot of finesse and graphical know-how to really work Flash/After Effects.” Animag writes, “The flat, impactful characters are imbued with a kitchy liveliness all their own, and the humor is spot-on. Duck is the ultimate evolution of the animated webisode and we truly hope to see more of these adorable, violent critters.”

Well, thank you, Animation Magazine! We appreciate both the kind words and the fabulous prize pack you sent us. Hopefully we’ll find ourselves gracing your pages again, someday.

And as for the suggestion about seeing more of the characters from “Duck Heart Teslacoil,” what do our loyal readers think? Would you like to see more of Duck and Monster, or something totally new?

Earlier this year I was in a motion media theory class where, for a final project, I decided to examine the way that digital tools are designed to emulate old-fashioned physical tools. For example, Microsoft Word is a typewriter emulator. iTunes is a jukebox emulator. Skype is a telephone emulator, etc.

So I set my sights on Adobe Photoshop, which is an emulator of a darkroom and an art table, and ended up with the above video art piece. You can view the YouTube page for the full description and theory discussion, but just to summarize, I used a combination live-action video and stop motion animation to simulate Photoshop occurring in the physical world. Whereas the digital usually imitates the physical, by inverting the process I call attention to its strengths and weakness as a user interface design methodology.

Heavy stuff, huh? Well, if you don’t like all the theory you can just watch it and laugh at how funny looking Windows 95 is by today’s standards. Haha! Look at that copy of Norton.

This was the question everyone was asking me last night. Well, in a pretty tragic turn of events, “The Girl and the Fox” was not screened last night at the SCAD Animation Graduate Show. There were so many submission that the programmers had to limit it to only graduating filmmakers, and thus TGTF got axed. This is sad since we lost that opportunity to see how a large audience responds to the film, which might of helped prioritizing production retakes next month.

Still, we did get the film finished to a presentable degree, and soon I’ll be sending out a test screener to people I know and trust to give me valuable feedback before the final cut of the film is sent to festivals. It’s good to have the extra time to finesse.

Next week I’ll give a run-down of all the films I work on this quarter. It was a pretty interesting variety!