Unforseen problems

Mouth up was HORRIBLE!!!!

I've probably spent like a full day's session on it. Each new blend shape is as hard as all the previous ones combined almost. Fortunately, mouth down was easier, and the lip curls are really easy. I also came across another layer of complexity. When u smooth the head, there are many artifects appearing whenever I push some blendshapes to the max. Especially mouth wide in combination with the mouth down and up shapes. It's sooooo tough to smooth it out. Remember I was talking about how simpler characters are easier? Well, they're not! If he starts having rinckles around his mouth when he smiles or does mouth wide he looks really freaki. It all needs to be flowing and smooth - flawless. I also realize I must have modeled him inapropriately too - they're shown us here in sony, that for cacrtoony faces, they really try to have the geometry made with perfect squars. As close as possible. And they try to have the mouth corner line go directly across - totally horizontal. Although my model was pretty darn clean, and all quads, I wasn't aware I should make the faces as square as possible. This causes problems when I try to tweak a few BS simultaneaously, because u lack refference when u try to squash or stretch a certain area. But it's too late now I'm afraid. I rather have a few tiny artifects at the end (or just not push the BS to the max when I animate), than to toss everything I have, and go back to modeling (thus throwing away a month's of hard work, and risking not finishing the film).

Oh well. Next time I'll know better........

Need help...

I'm quite certain that without anyone taking some of the load off this film cannot be completed, at least at its current format. I might found someone in Sony, who'll be helping me with the modeling of clone. Also, one of my buddies from school, Alex Liebert, might be doing some animation and rendering work with me, which could potentially save my ass. Additionally, Efrat, a talented artist and a friend, who helped me come up with the idea for the whole thing, might be, maybe, helping me with texturing. These are all maybe's. I need to find someone who'll be as devoted to this project as I am. If I can find someone like that, hopefully another senior in Pratt, I'm pretty sure I can complete the film. If not, if it's all up to me, I'd say it's like 60%-70% I'll make it (maybe a shorter, simpler version, which is a shame). The remaining 30-40% scare the shit out of me.

Oh, by the way, I managed to move myself into a better place in Imageworks for the remainder of the internship (I'm gonna be here for another 2-3 weeks): I'm now officially staying in a big room which houses the entire animation department for "Surf's Up", Sony's next feature animated film (with surfing penguins). I had a 20 min. conversation with Barry Weiss, senior vice president of Imageworks, and he told me I should establish a mentoring relationship with one of the senior animators while I'm here, so he could help me with my film throughout the year, and also help me secure an animator position with Sony once I'm done. So the next few weeks are critical.

Still mouth shapes

Made narrow and realNarrow shapes. It was tougher than I thought. Every new shape has to work together with all the older ones, and I f ound myself tweaking away for a full day's session. I also discovered a lot of vertixes which aren't supposed to move on many of the shapes, and I had to go in with the default shape and snap hundreds of them back in place.. geesh. I should check my weighting, cause it didn't happen with the earlier ones..

Today hopefully I'll finish mouth up and down, puffy lips up and down, and narrow lips up and down. If I'll manage to do this, there's only about 1 or 2 more days left till I'm done with this monstrous stage. I think this is the most frustrating technical setup in the entire film, so I'll be really happy to move in to more fun stuff.

So far I was only able to work on the project during weekends, and occasionally at nights, because I was busy working as an intern in Imageworks, and taking many drawing classes during the week. As of yesterday, however, I'm not officially an intern anymore, so I'm hoping to switch to a way higher gear this month. Only a month to go till I start school again, and I really want to start animating. I figured even if I'm not done with Lucy, the clones, texturing, scene modelign and cloth, I can still pick a dialogue scene where u just see homie talking, and begin animating right away. It'll be a sort of a test to see if his rig and modeling's ok... I'm pretty sure I'll have to go back and fix this scene towards the end, when I'll get increasingly better, but it's essencia to just have something moving right away. So this is a good goal: pick a scene and BEGIN ANIMATING it by SEPTEMBER 1st!

Homie's face

MOUTH

So I started with a closed mouth bored face. First, I built many seperate joints on his face. For the first ring, just around the lips: almost joint per vertex ratio. Second ring, about the same ratio. For each ring I have a middle joint + 5 for each side + corners. Then about 4 joints for each cheek, 5 for the chin, 3 for the nose, and 3 for the inside of the mouth. My original plan was to rely on good weighting to produce perfect blendshaped by using these joints, but, as it turned out, I don't think I have enough joints, or I didn't weight them right (only spent a day or two on weighting), so once I have it pretty close to what I need I duplicate the head and tweek it to death by using clusters, and plainly moving vertexies around. It's trickier than it sounds, because I have many layers of blendshapes, and they all need to work togoether. Fortunately the model is very simplified, but it also takes time too keep it smooth and slick - artifects tend to be more visible on simple, smooth models.

I have made these blendshapes already, and they all work pretty good together:
Upper lip: left, middle and right down; left, middle and right up (6 blendS).
Lower lip: left, middle and right down; left, middle and right up (another 6).
Mouth wide.

Still to go:
MOUTH OPEN, Mouth narrow1 + Mouth narrow 2 (tweened blenshape to preserve roundness), Mouth up, Mouth down, corners up and down. Upper lip puff, lower lip puff, upper lip in, lower lip in (11 more).

Maybe ---------ROB LOOK AT THIS:
Jaw forward, back, turned left/right. Mouth rotations (6)?

Then once all these babies work fine, I'll set up the controller system. It's going to be stick on controls. I have it all figured out, it's going to be great. the emphasis is on easy animation. It's a little complicated to describe, but I'll provide an illustration once I'm done with the blendshapes.


MOUTH SECOND LAYER

After we have a seperate head which is going to be a BS for the mouth, the actual head is going to have a lettice around the mouth area (my character has a droopy mouth/chin area, and I want it be highly strech/squashable), which is rigid bound to a 2 joint IK (which is setup with squash and stretch). This way I can have nice arcs and overlapping action for the lower part (I want it to have a big-drop-of-goo feel).

Additionally, the tonque is going to be Spline Ik or something. The teeth are seperate pieces (modeled already), and they'll be set driven-keyed to the controls.


UPPER HEAD

Haven't thought about it too much yet, but it's definately easier than the mouth. The eyes are going to have scalable pupils. Eyebows are going to have around 4-5 BS each, with some influence cylinders to creat forhead wrinkles. Oh, and Eyelids would be plainly clusters or joints, pivoting at exactly the middle of the eye-ball, weighted properly to the lids (1 joint/cluster per lid), then SDK to the eye controler.

Then, lattices with set driven keys around each eye / brow area. And maybe anothe nonLinear on top of it all for the entire top :))))))


HAIR

Haven't figured it out it, but probably modeled hair with jiggle deformers. I want to have a possibility to pose the hair too, to make the facial expressions even clearer. ROB - Problem is, see, I tried to do this with another character, and I just used 13 different pieces of geo with a small IK chain in there, then I SDK to the controller, but it took me forever to do, and homie's gonna have at least 50 of these!! any suggestions?

Later!

So how will I do it?

So everything's storyboarded out, the shots selected, the dialogue recorded (might need to be recorded again at higher quality), the characters designed, and the pre-prod stage is nearly complete. I started geting into production about a month ago. That leaves me about a month and a half from now to finish most of the preperations, and hopefully begin to animate by mid september. There are a couple of unresolved issues, but I'll limit this particular post to cover the stuff that I've already figured out.

From a first glance, this project seems like its too much for one person to handle. There are ways, however, to keep it simple and at the same time, create strong emmotional impact. I believe that story is king. If u tell a good story, u could tell it through stylized stick-figures, and you can still make the audience cry and laugh. I have full confidence in my story, so u could say the toughest part's behind me already. Wishful thinking.. No but it's true! It really hit me after I was modeling Lucy, and I tried to mess around with her face, make her more reaslitic and detailed. The more I messed around with it, the less real she seemed. Sure, she had nostrils, and eyelids, and lips and ears, but she lost her essence. And now I'm going to get a little bit philosophical so bear with me (This theory is based on Milan Cundera's writings, and one of my best friends' theory): As conscious beings, we are granted with the greatest gift - imagination. Imagination is taking stuff we learned from our experience, and enhancing it with our thoughts. More specifically, we combine the known, with the unknown, the infinit, and somehow it makes perfect sense. For example, when we draw lose, merely suggesting the gesture and the character, if people are willing to take their time and look at the drawing and imagine what the artist felt when he drew it, they would have a more engaging experience than if they looked at a finished drawing. That's why a lot of times we have a tendency to kill a rough drawing by finishing it. That's also why reading books is more enjoyable than watching films to those who are fully engaged with it - because its the things that the author DIDN'T describe that make the reading experience subjective to each and every reader. Thus, keeping this in mind I stumbled across films by legendary storyteller and puppeteer Jiri Trnka. If you ever watched one of Trnka's films you'd know exactly what I'm talking about. His characters are so simple they could be stick figures, yet the shots are so wonderfully composed, and the music and lighting are on the money - everything just suggests reality - it is up to the viewer to create his own interpretation of it. That's why his films are so moving - each of us connects with them in our own particular way. A simple doll-faced Lucy is a symbol for girl+cute+innocence+infinity in our minds. She becomes a personal feeling for each viewer...

Animation masters from the golden age knew this all along. If you watch Pinoccio for example, or even Aladin, the characters are simplified and symbolic. Sure, one could claim it was done so so it'll be possible to draw them twenty times per second, which is also true, but, come 3D, please compare final fantasy the spirits within (the most realistic looking animated film) with the incredibles. Which character seemed more real? Bob Pfhar or the main heroin from ff? Let's even pretend ff was written as well as the incredibles. Visually, the more you simplify a character, exagurate and use symboles to enhance emmotional CLARITY, the more the audience connects with it, and believes, on some plane of existence, that it is real.

OK, you get it, it's going to be symbolic and simple. Now, symbolic is not easy, it's just faster. If you symbolize something you didn't want to, or if you're not direct, it's a film-killer. The way to really make sure your shots and characters work is to test them by showing them to as many people as possible, which I'm trying to do. Also, drawing ability essencially is learning a lot of symbols like these, and find out what works and doesn't by trial and error, and I'm fortunate enough to have a significant drawing experience, so that's going to help a lot.

So I've already modeled Lucy and Homie (homelss guy), with their clothes and all. As far as rigging goes, I don't think the bodies are going to take me more than a week for all three characters. I'm going to use a ready-made rig called loMan, fit it to the body, and tweek at to my liking. As for facial expressions: Lucy's easy - as you could see from the story she doesn't need more than a could of blendshapes for the eyes and mouth and a jaw bone. Maybe a little squash and stretch blendshape. In all her closeups she's expressionless; The clones are always expressionless so I don't even think need any facial rigging whatsoever (maybe brow down and blink). They're fat, but I'm not going to worry about jiggle deformers or anything. The newspaper's going to be a little tricky - it folds twice. I have to figure this one out.

So the bottom line - the only technically difficult thing in this entire production is Homie's face. He's a talking character, full of emmotion, with many closeups. His face is in front of us 70% of the film, thus it is THE main focus. In the next post I'll describe my plan for his facial rig.

Peace.

A Sysnopsis of the story

Camera emulates the front of the subway as it goes forwards in a dark tunnel, it's front lights illuminate nothing but a few feet ahead. The occasional red light goes towards us, revealing the direction we're going. Then we turn to the right, and the tunnel opens up into a pitch dark, desereted station. Suddenly the lights reveal a six year old tiny girl standing on the tracks, holding her puppet. At the last second she turns her head with apathy, it has not occured to her she's about to die.

Breaks SCREEEEEECH!

Homeless's guy's head appears from the bottom of the screen, whiplashes back as he screams, "LUUUU- CY!!!! He then realizes he woke up from a dream, gatheres himself, looks prolongly at his palms, as if to make sure whatever was on them is not there anymore, regulates his breething, and, very carefully looks ahead.

"Oh. Thank God," he whispers to himself, and then, out loud, "ss.. sory for scaring you like that. But it's alright now. It's alright. Daddy loves you very much Lucy."

We can see through the window, which is located behind him, that the train had pulled into a station. Several people are waiting to board the train. While the guy talks, the camera follows the people, who all look the same, dressed the same, and move the same. They walk in a line, and like a choreographed dance, their movments are synchronized so that every of their actions resonates: They all sit, put their suitcase down and open the newspapers, burying their heads in it. "Are you OK lucy? Don't you worry, it's.. it's just a few more stops. We'll be home soon Lucy, just you and me. Like before, it'll be just like before, I promise Lucy." Camera ends it's movement by resting on a little girl, her head sloopped, holding a puppet. she doesn't move at all, except for her head, which bobbes back and forth with the train's movements, and her scrawny feet dangeling below the seat.

We cut back to the homeless guy. "What's wrong lucy, wh.. why don't you say something? Come on Lucy, you wanna play?" Then his voice breaks. "Come on Lucy p..play with me...." Gathering himself up, "Are you hungry? Are you sick, s... sick, I'm not sick, are you sick?! I'm sick, don't be sick Lucy, please don't be sick.."

"What's wrong with you Lucy why won't you move?!" He begins to panic. "Come on we'll play, we'll play a little game," he cries, "we'll play a little game..."

Then, exhausted, he leans back in dispare. "It didn't have to be like this. Things could have been so great - just like they were. Don't you remember?" He looks out the window behind him with a dreamy expression. Camera moves to show the darkness outside is slowly broken by a single spot light, which gradually reveals the father and his daughter sitting on a living-room carpet, playing with a round-circuit train-set. The train is going round and round, little puffs of smoke coming out of it's chimney. Lucy gets up and stands in the middle of the track, holding her favourite puppet. She smiles, her head follows the movements of the toy train, and she dances and spins around. Then she puts her puppet on the tracks, pretending she is in some kind of a westerner, where the villain has strapped a young lass onto the tracks, in the purpose of killing her. She saves her doll right before it gets hit by the toy-train, and jumps on her father with joy, to his surprise. The spotlight fades out as the two roll with each other on the floor, Then complete darkness again.

Two lights suddenly lit up, shooting their ominous rays straight into the camera, making it hard for us to see that they are actually eyes. The character behind these shining eyes is hard to distinquish, and as we begin to make out that it is standing in the middle of a tunnel, right on the tracks, we suddenly cut back to the homeless guy's face, as he startles and flips his head back.

"Lucy?! Oh no... no... no...." He stumbles to the opposite bench. Lucy's no longer there, only her puppet. But something is different about it. As he picks it up he notices the puppet is completely torn appart - it's rotten filling is bursting out of a huge tear in it's stomach, resembeling spilled intestins, and they explode out of a hole of what used to be its face. "no.. no... no... no.." he mumbles as he looks slowly towards the other benches. They are empty. There is no one there. The train rattles and squeeks, the monsterly green neon lights buzz and crackle. "no... no.. not again.. please not again.." The lights suddely shut off one after another, starting at a distance, then closing in on the homeless guy. They all shut off except one, its frantic spasms light the guy's andulating body like hellish disco lights as he screams, "NOT AGAIN!!" And then shuts off.

Pitch black.

Suddenly a spotlight turn on abruptly with a resonating 'clunk'. Daddy and Lucy are standing back to us in what seems to be a subway station. Daddy is holding a grocery bag on the one hand, and Lucy's hand on the other, while Lucy's holding Puppet's hand. A train goes by swiftly with lights and noise. Lucy's hair flatters with the wind, which was caused by the train's movement. Lucy sees something on the right, and she tries to breaks off from her daddy's grip, which she finds impossible. After a few tries, she gets mad and stomps on his foot, which sends him flying in the air, gripping his wounded foot, spilling the groceries. We can't hear what he says to Lucy, but it's pretty obvious from his frantic body language, and poised index finger, which excentuates his every yell. Lucy hangs her head, insulted. Daddy bends down to pick up his groceries, and the moment he looks away, Lucy is able to sneak and run away - the spot light follows her all along, leaving daddy in the dark, still picking the apples and bread and putting it back into the bag. Lucy is now running away, stopping and turning around after a while, looking back to make sure she's really free. She dances with joy, spinning around with her puppet, until suddenly she trips and drops the puppet onto the track. She looks down, and then quickly up again as a train horn is heard.

Again the camera is the front of the train. The scene from the begining is repeating itself, only it is broken at times to reveal the same mysterious character from before, with his front-light-eyes, still undistinquishable in the darkness of the tunnel. When the train hits the curve and pulls into the station, we cut to a shot of the tunnel, as seen from the station. We hear the train horn as the two lights come closer and closer to the openning. Then a monster leaps out of the dark tunnel: it is a hybrid of the homeless guy and the train. His metalic face is contorted with unlimate pain and disbelief, as he races through the station, the trainhorns coming out of his mouth still have a trace of a human scream. As we watch from his point of view, his daughter's apathetic expression changes breifly into slight surprise, as she falls beneath us. Right before we pull into the tunnel on the other side, we look at our train hands, which have tiny spurts of blood on them. Then darkness once more.

"LUUUUUUU- CEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!" He screams as the camera pulls out of his mouth. Then he gathers himslef, checks his hands, and regulates his breathing. "Thank god you're still here..."

"Daddy loves you very much."

Then the train pulls away from us, and after a few seconds dissappears in the tunnel, some old newspapers flutter.

Fade to black.

Here we go...

O.K. So I set up this Blog in order to keep track of everything related to my production of a short film titled "Cycles" (for now...). This film would essencially be my final project, and its success basically determines where I'll end up in the industry.

If you happen to strand on to this blog, and you don't know me or what Cycles is about, I'll attempt to explain breifly. So when I said industry I meant the feature animation industry. I'm an animation student, going on to my fourth and last year in Pratt institute, brooklyn. My no. 1 passion is drawing and animating traditionally, but as hard as I try, I can't dis 3D animation, because, let's face it, it looks great. And could potentially produce better movies (visually) than any traditionally animated film. I say potentially, because I don't feel that any 3D movie so far, perhaps other than the Incredibles and Nemo, had surpassed Disney's best traditional films such as Pinoccio, Beauty and the Beast, Aladin, the Lion King, Tarzan or Lilo and stitch. Yea. Anyway, so I'm majoring in 3D animation, and Cycles is going to be a CG short, around 3-4 minutes in length.

I started working on the film officially about 6 months ago, but the idea first originated before that. I can remember that night pretty clearly. I was hanging out with a couple of my friends, and one of them, Efrat, who's a graphic designer / crazy artist, showed me one of her works. It was a medical illustration of a man with all his muscles and veins showing - only from the shoulders up. He was lifting his head, his mouth slightly open and his eyes closed, showed from the side. All around him were wonderful juxtapositions of subway maps, with the subway lines converging with the man's veins. The message was shocking and clear - animal man has evolved into something else, more mechanic. Society's noisy roads and subways are like veins in the human body, transporting resources wherever they're needed.

A couple of ideas originated, but one of them in particular cought my attention, as I could see it's enourmous potential, revolving around a homeless guy, who decided on living inside a subway train. This subject is also kinda personal, as I'm riding the infamous G train on a semi-daily basis. If anybody rode said line, you would agree with me saying that there are a lot of strange things going on in that train.

So a homeless guy on the G train, going about, being dellirious and what not. I came up with some crazy illusions he sees a la Requiem for a dream (the mom).. But that wasn't enough. You see too many student films who go along similar lines. After a couple of weeks another idea hit me, following a viewing of the documentary 'Dark Days', which depicts the lives of real mole people in new york. One of the guys there was talking about how his daughter was brutally killed by a gang, which made him lose any intrest he had in living amongst society. I still need to check the statistics, but I'm pretty certain most cases of homeless people are caused by some kind of severe psychological trauma (even if becoming homeless is the direct result of substance abuse, most cases of people deteriorating into doing that had some kind of childhood or family trauma, so indirectly, there's almost always a reason for people to become homeless). I decided my main guy became a perminent resident on the train as a result of his little daughter's trajic death. The story started to connect once I realized what could be the classic cause of her death - she was run over by a subway, when her dad was distracted and didn't pay attention to her: That's why he became a homeless; That's why he lives inside the train; And that's why for the remainder of his life he is to re-experience his own private hell over and over again: the moment his daugher is run over.

In the next post I shall cover the basic story, which is pretty much final, 'cept for a part here and there.