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.