Base14

So I know it’s been a while since you’ve heard from the animation side of Base14, and all my sincerest thanks to my sister Alysha for keeping fresh posts rolling out in our absence. But the reason we’ve been so silent is also because we’ve been so busy. And all that effort has finally paid off! I am hereby proud to officially announce that “The Girl and the Fox” is a finalist in the 32nd College Television Awards, sponsored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation.

This is actually a pretty big deal. On April 8th, myself and producer Nick Allred will be flying out to Los Angeles for the Gala award show to held on the evening of April 9th. There, we’ll get to find out if we placed first, second or third and claim our prizes. In addition to the award show there’s a reception where we get to mingle with other award-winners and industry professionals. It should be pretty amazing.

We’ve been fervently sending out “The Girl and the Fox” to other contests and festivals every chance we can get, and have already gotten a few acceptance letters. I’ll be back soon to announce the official world premiere of the film along with other international screenings that have already been confirmed.

And we’re not taking a break when this is over, either. Base14 is already about halfway through production of our next animated film which, as usual, pushes our art and technology farther than ever before. We’ll have more on that the closer we get to completion. But rest assured it’s gonna be big, too.

So stay tuned! This is going to be an important year for Base14!

A year ago today I drew this celebratory Pi Day greeting. It was the beginning of what is now an obsession with random, poorly illustrated messages of endearment and goofiness that I feel the need to occasionally bestow upon those who are most important to me. And you, my loyal blog reader, are a person of utmost importance to me. pIe Love you!

It’s been one year now since I first introduced the “Kissy Kiss” necklace. To celebrate this significant anniversary, I am now happily offering it for sale! After all, ’tis the season for little tiny kisses and big time lovin’. Each eensey person (only 7/8″ tall) is handmade out of clay, painted and glazed. Because every piece is made individually, each necklace is unique. You can get your own little pair of lovers for only $40 USD, but make sure to hurry because this production run is as tiny as these cuties!

Here’s another look from my current collection that’s coming out in April. This is the companion to the men’s look shown in my previous post. Sarah is wearing a linen scoopneck shirt with back zip leather shorts and a vintage Boyscout pocket knife necklace.

Riddle-me-ree: What keeps this blogger so busy?

Answer: My senior collection!

But here for Base14 readers only is a tasty little taste of what is coming in April. My handsome gent, Rob is looking fly in a linen button-down and leather shorts.

“Leather shorts, did she say?”

Yes, leather shorts.

That’s not all. This collection is an adventure into the land of textiles. Pieces are hand dyed and printed. Even the fabrics themselves lend to the mood, with everything from soy to hemp to organic cotton getting in on this fashion action. Look for more progress updates in coming posts. Most importantly, make sure to keep April 2nd free so you can attend the Annual Purdue Fashion Show and see these garments in person.

It’s been a long month. We’ve now up to over 50 corrections made on “The Girl and the Fox” and we’ve still got several more to go before the year is up. But considering how far the aesthetic and quality of the film has progressed in the last 30 days, I felt it was finally time to share some of the finished footage with the world. So, as our holiday gift to fans everywhere, we would like to officially announce the release of the online trailer for the 2011 film “The Girl and the Fox.”

The trailer sticks mostly to Ilona, our protagonist, and the earlier parts of the film as she enters the forest. Only at the end does it offer a small glimpse of our supporting character, Baru the fox. Nearly half the film features Baru, actually, but to maintain an air of mystery and hide the progression of events throughout the film, we’ve omitted all his scenes. Still, this trailer shows a lot of whats been done with lighting, colors and particle systems, and how all the shots are beginning to work together.

The film will be finished in the first half of January, so even though it’s been a work in progress since September 2009, it will be a year 2011 film. This will bode well for its festival run, though, since it won’t already feel outdated with a late 2010 stamp. We plan on submitting it to all the previous festivals we ran “Duck Heart Teslacoil” through, plus a swath of other festivals we feel this film may also suit. Once it starts getting accepted, we’ll bring back the “Tour” tab on the website to list out all the film’s showings throughout the year. This one is not going online anytime soon, so hopefully people in every region will get a chance to see it on the big screen!

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.