2008 January | Open Source Animation

En-route to Sundance

January 19th, 2008

I spent last night in the Atlanta Airport because of flight problems. With coffee and computer in hand, with the air of one who briefly smiles and nods at anyone who happens to pass, I wandered around the massive, dark airport, podcasting on the moving sidewalks and plotting my next film.

As I edit the podcast for public consumption, take a critical look at the plot of my next film.

The film opens with a scene of the subway roaring trough a tunnel. We cut to the subway pulling onto a populated, brightly lit platform, where our protagonist, Madeleine disembarks. She is cute, but has an air of masculinity with a beret and trench coat. With wonder in her eyes, she goes to a corner of the platform, kneels and opens her lunchbox. Inside are three red balls and a tip cup. Picking them up, she juggles as the music chimes in rhythm. All day she juggles. At night, when there are a few newspapers floating unconcernedly in the background, she stops to find her tip jar empty.

At away from the station, on her dirty, cramped desk with the tip jar in the corner, Madeleine does not loose hope. She sketches some robot ideas, which fade into a crude, homemade trash collector robot. After a bit more work involving her working on montages of gears, she pitches the robot to the subway authority, who dismisses it with a wave. Montages of juggling continue, along with more advanced robots, which all get dismissed.

Back in her desk, she sighs, the music slows, and she looks in the mirror. She is alone. Her robots are useful for actual work, but provide her with no confront. She jumps into bed, pad of paper open on her pillow. Skillfully, she creates a robot that mimics the human form. More montages, music becoming exciting. Out of the scrap metal comes a humanoid robot. She lays in bed with, embraces it like one would a lover, but he is lifeless and does not embrace her – for now. She is transferring her human qualities to her. More work. Now he is doing the embracing, shielding and protecting her with his metallic arms as she lies there smiling warmly.

After a fad-to-black, she brings out the red balls again, hands them to him. Still very much a robot, he goes to the platform and he juggles while she watches her creation from the back. This is fascinating to the people on the platform. They cheer and throw in tips. He looks at her over the pattern, and smiles back at what she made with both her mouth and eyes. Fade to black. Fin.

It’s nice to have this all written out before the actual animation begins. I’m in Park City now, Sundancing away. The weather could not be better, the people more interesting, the atmosphere more excited.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.

Music & Madeline

January 14th, 2008

The missing piece of my movies is the soundtrack. I make everything except the music, even going so far as not beginning a project until I find the right music. Indeed, Eros was first imagined on an airplane some years ago after simply listing to the music for the first time.

Recently, such a reliance on other people’s music makes me uncomfortable. Copyright, while a good reason in itself to stop using other people’s works, is not even half of it. Music is limiting when making a film — you can’t make a scene happy when the music is somber. I’ve never had any musical training, no instruments, no clue how it works, so I’ve dealt with it the best I could so far.

Over the winter break I spent a lot of time with some friends, breaking down (different from breaking it down to) various songs. Ridin’ Dirty becomes exactly like a Girl Talk song when you remove key tracks, which in turn shares the same basic beat as Madonna’s Like A Prayer. It’s all layers! After getting that, I spent some time working with a real keyboard, learning chords and theory while understanding little of it. But no matter, it’s all layers — pulling up a virtual keyboard and a whole orchestra of instruments on my laptop is all I need.

So I’ve spent the past few days working on this. It’s the opening sequence to my next movie, and is a mere 20 seconds long. Only the first 16 seconds are “finished” — it falls apart after that, but the file can be found here in the hopes that it will inspire comments.

Now, on to the movie itself. I’ve steered it in a much different direction then I originally planned. The movie follows my first human female protagonist, Madeline, deep in a Paris Metro station. The movie still has robots and now has nudism, but the story is robust enough to use both as plot advancers. As ever, it is subject to further change, but I am as excited as ever about this film.

Let’s continue were we left off with Madeline’s development.

Still using the reference image, her nose is taking shape with loops from the noose and mouth.

Without the reference image, it she comes into her own.

Global editing.

Some skin textures and hair modeling created with Blender’s particle simulator. Note the transparency on the ends of the strands.

Eventually Madeline will sport a French beret and a trench coat, but for now her character is ripening for the animation rig.

On Thursday, I will fly to Park City, Utah for my first ever Sundance Film Festival. My excitement exceeds even this movie. No doubt I will return brimming with new podcasts, plots, ski bruises and, most importantly, wisdom.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.

Facing “Istanbul”

January 3rd, 2008

Early in 2007, I began sculpting a realistic human face. The result can be seen in the two protagonists of “Istanbul”: obviously human but creepy in a less obvious way. The hard-to-identify creepiness came from the concept of the uncanny valley, which states that the more realistic a creation becomes the more unsettling it is to look at (up to a point).

Face modeling in Istanbul.

The long climb to the other side of the uncanny valley is what persuaded me to not focus on realistic character for Eros, despite being a film which focused more on the human condition then my others. But now I am brave enough to climb, and eager to make realistic human caricatures, even if they are secondary to the robots in my next film.

I started with a deeper understanding of mesh modeling — a character in “Istanbul” began his existence as a cube witch was deformed and sub-surfaced into a face. This girl’s face began as a simple, tiny plain on the top of her nose. The focus here is of the facial features, not the shape of the head as a whole.

Notice the Natalie Portman reference image. Below, the nose begins to take shape.

I’m editing the face from two reference images: one from the font, one from the side. All three dimensions are represented.

The action is focused around the nose, mouth and eyes; this gives the loop structure an easier-to-animate quality since most complicated parts of the face contain the most vertexes.