Many traditionally-animated characters express themselves with eyes that are able to deform from perfect spheres into egg-shapes. In most computer-animated films, though, character eyes are perfectly spherical. This is purely a trait of anatomy and the medium: it is much more difficult to represent a ball-joined sphere on paper than on a computer. But spherical eyes tend to convay expressions less expressively. A lot of emotional information travels through the shape of the eyes.

Realizing this, I made one final change to Laika’s model. I added facial deformers to the skin around her eyes, instead of just the lids and brows. The difference can be seen in the image above: on the left, I try to show surprise using only eyebrow deformations and on the right, I show surprise by adjusting the skin around the eyes to make them look taller and narrower.

Confident with the range and fidelity of Laika’s expressions, I completed the film’s animatic and began to set up the final animation and renders.

As I mentioned before, the relationship between Laika and her flight engineer rescuer relies on the visual metaphor of a game of fetch. The act of running free — it is essential that Laika is never leashed or tied — allows me to convey the trust that the flight engineer gives Laika and the loyalty she returns.

After the first scenes I describe in my last post, this dynamic guides the film through its second minute and its only montage. The montage is necessary because this sequence spans the time between Laika’s rescue in the winter of 1956 and the launch in the autumn of 1957. (For context, this is also the approximate length of time it takes to make both a human and this film.)

As Laika continues to play fetch, her doomed rocket steadily comes together around her. She is completely oblivious to its construction and instead cherishes the metals and pins which are cerimouniusly attached to her flight suit.

I designed the scenes so that the face of the Soviet engineer is never in the shot, a characteristic which is both convenient and artsy.

The night before the launch, the montage ends to a real-time shot of Laika and her flight engineer as the sun sets over the rocket. Every betrayal needs a Last Supper.

The next morning, the engineer throws Laika ball into the tiny capsule. This film is critical for story and animation. Laika hesitates at the entrance to her capsule, reluctant to go into a tight space, but eager to bring the ball back. As soon as she enters, the airlock doors slam shut. Almost immediately afterword, the rocket launches.

Laika does not realize what happend until she is perplexingly and inexorably in orbit.

I had initially planned to follow Laika’s journey from her lift off to her death, but I realized that the most compelling part of Laika’s story occurs before she enters the capsule. She was found the winter before the launch on a Moscow street. Her hardiness against the Russian cold was one of the major factors that lead her to her selection.

Surely an abandoned dog would have some sort of connection with her rescuer, with whomever showed her affection in the warm intior of a Soviet research lab. (This angle follows one of the storylines in Nick Abadzis’s graphic novel about the event.) The same researcher would use her trust to lure her into the capsule when the time came, betraying Laika

The idea appeals to me because it contains a story arc and two characters reacting to each other, both of which my initial version lacked. The visual metaphor of their interaction is a game of fetch, which they play throughout Laika’s training. The betrayal continues the metaphor: Laika haltingly enters the capsule to retrieve a ball and the door seals shut as soon as she enters.

With the complete storyboard laid out, I began creating the animatic. The animatic is a low resolution visualization of the entire film. Rendering is extremely time consuming, even more so with a thick layer of fur and realistic lighting, so the low resolution and the exclusion of shadows, anti-alising, and radiocity raytracing. Creating an animatic helps me outline the camera movement, the rhythm of the edit, and, most importantly, the character animation without the superfluous expense and distraction of a good render.

One of the most animotionally demanding scenes calls for a run cycle as Laika plays fetch with her rescuer. Rendering it as an animatic made it much easier to see problems in the animation.

Studying the motion, I realize that the run cycle needs to be more about the dog’s body than the legs. There should be a crunched but tuck in keyframe 2 and a full extension in keyframe 4.

And finally, here is an animatic of scene three, which shows Laika’s first consciousness after being rescued from the bitter cold. The lighting and coloring are inconsistent (the full render will look more like top image) and the arm model is a stand-in, but Liaka’s model and animation are nearly complete.

My Original Laika Model

But something about my original Laika failed to appeal the audience. On my last entry I received a polite but negative review by an anonymous apparent animator. The commenter said,

“I must tell you that this dog’s model is FAR from being
appealing.

“I’m really trying to say something positive and help you to make
an interesting movie. One of the 12 basic principles of animation
as taught by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston say that our
characters need to be appealing. Unfortunately yours is not, and
this is a bad thing if you want a good response from your audience.”

With this in mind, I decided to recreate the mesh from scratch. (The fact that an anonymous commentator with a Braizillian IP address can bring a project I have been working on for months to a halt is at once the greatest promise and the worst annoyance of the Internet.) The commenter suggested the classic style of Disney animator Preston Blair, so I began by opening up a blank Blender project and trying to determine what makes Blair’s characters so appealing.

Preston Blair Bulldog Sketches

Of course, there are many reasons why this character, and all of Blair’s works, are so compelling. The model implies flexibility and motion. Even in a static pose, the buldog does not look like it was just randomly placed there – it looks it has a purpose, and could move at any moment.

But what about the actual design of the dog? I noticed that the entire character starts with a two or three basic shapes. Basic shapes help make the character easier to recognize at a glance while ensuring consistency thought the film.

So I applied shape-centric idea to my new model. I sculpted the head out of a sphere from a 2D view and a mussel out of a cube. The outline of my old model appears below in the background for context.

A circle for the head, a rectangle for the snout, and an oval for the body

From a modeling perspective, there is a dramatic structural difference between expressions, known in animation as “squash and stretch”. It seems as if the entire face changes structure with change in expression.

The Blair sketch that looks most like my imagined Liaka is this expression chart of a young pup. The pup is deformed using squash and stretch techniques.

Pup Faces by Preston Blair

Using these figures as reference, I created a mesh with a significantly-reduced snout and drastically-increased eyes compared with my original model.

Floppy Ears, Big Eyes, and a Short Snout

With the rest of the body, I took care to emulate the flexibility of Blair’s sketches. The end result leaves a much simpler body structure than the original model.

Laika's New Body

To judge any improvement, I put the two versons side-by-side.

Old Dog, New Dog

I am well aware that a redesign which lifts a few tips from a classic 2D animator will not necessarily lead to a more appealing character model and a more appealing character model will not necessarily lead to a more compelling short film. But there is a lot a computer animator can learn from the pioneers of hand-drawn animation.

My latest project aims to eliminate this problem through its design. The protagonist pooch is confined to a tiny space and the animator is confined to her face to show the audience how she is feeling.

I approached Laika’s model with these restrictions in mind. Since she can’t walk or turn around, making armatures and detailed models for her feet is unnecessary. Instead, I was free to focus on her face, which requires the right mix of realism and cartoony expressiveness.

Initial wireframe model

The facial structure of a dog is elongated and low, as you can see in this reference image.

Everest, the reference husky

With expressiveness in mind, I raised the area around the eyes into only a slight slope down the muzzle. For the skin I used UV mapping, which I painted over a furry texture in the GIMP. The UV texture maps a 2D image onto a 3D object, as seen below, and ensures that the distribution of brown and white fur is seemingly random.

UV Mapping

I then duplicated the mesh. One became the skin and the other, with help from Blender’s hair simulator, became the fur.

Frizzy Dog

I had a hard time with the fur, in part because of limitations within the Blender simulation and in part because of the tricky guesswork involved in varying lengths of the hair over different regions of the head.

Slightly Better Fur

Much of the realism of digital fur depends on the lighting, so I turned my gaze to her eyes. They are based on the same models I have been using for years, with concave irises to collect as much light as possible from the rest of the scene. After experimenting with brown eyes, I decided on green eyes to match the beige green “70’s refrigerator color” of the hardware inside the spacecraft. I made the irises much bigger because dog’s don’t seem to show much white and to exploit their cuteness.

Big, green eyes

The nose is visually delicate. It still looks like it was simply glued onto the rest of the mesh, which is essentially what happened. One problem is that the skin was visible behind the nostrils, which can be easily fixed by a shadow of blackness. The harder problem was figuring out how to represent the pattern of tiny holes near the mussel.

Bigger eyes, wider tongue

I like the idea of imposing limits on my work to force a better film. There is no reason the audience should not read the dog’s face to figure out exactly how she feels about being launched into space against her will.

Much of the remaining work on the dog revolves around the animation. I need to decide whether to focus on realism or toonisim in Laika’s restricted motions. And so I expect the final mesh will undergo some minor motion-inspired tweaks before the final version.

For the Ancestor’s Tale, I included a shot of an asteroid hitting the Earth 65 million years ago. For this model, I used a single sub-surfaced sphere mapped with a NASA Blue Marble image. The texture map was edited in The GIMP to distort the shapes and positions of the continents to account for continental drift. I duplicated the sphere and changed the material to a Blender halo effect to create the blue atmosphere.

Earth 1.0 in The Ancestor's Tale

Earth 1.0 has many problems, but the unrealistic lightening is perhaps the most glaring. I used multiple light sources in different locations to ensure that the sphere was illuminated almost uniformly, forgetting that there is essentially one light source in the solar system.

About a year later, in Primitive Welcome, I made a similar scene featuring the entire Earth against a field of stars. I used a high-resolution satellite photo, which included clouds, and mapped it around a more-heavily sub-surfaced sphere. The atmosphere was a simply a separate, slightly larger sphere with a transparent blue hue.

Earth 2.0 in Primitive Welcome

Earth 2.0 looks much more realistic because of the single light source and shaders which create the nice falloff effect on the dark side of the planet. The stars are too bright and too consistant for realism.

For the latest model, I followed this fantastic Earth tutorial by William Chamberlin to the following result.

Earth 3.0 in Laika

The tutorial led me through the process of using multiple spheres, each with different materials and textures, and compositing them all together using the node editor. The clouds, for example, are mapped onto a sphere which is only very slightly larger than the surface sphere.

Earth 3.0 will only be viewed from the point of view of the Sputnik 2 satellite, so the full Earth will never been in a frame. Instead, the audience will see the Earth from an angle like the one below.

Earth 3.0 (closeup) in Laika.

I am satisfied with the result and encouraged by the steady increase in image quality through the years. The end result of a frame of animation will always be a mixture of realism, technical limitations, and stylization. I have yet to develop the look and feel of this film, but conveying the beauty and distance of the Earth is essential to the plot.

Dog's Head Modeling

The project is so exciting because I see potential in capturing the dichotomy between the pure joy of being the first living thing in space the harsh reality of being trapped on a suicide mission.

Laika was found on the streets of Moscow and was deemed a prime candidate for space travel. Soviet scientists assumed that a stray dog would be well-prepared for the cold of space. Without much fanfare, she was placed in a tiny capsule on the top of a multi-stage variation of a German V2 rocket three days before the launch. She became the first animal in space before dieing from heat and stress several hours later.

The film opens with a close-up shot of Laika in a tiny, undefined capsule. She lazily opens her eyes and scratches herself. A low rumbling noise gets louder and louder until, in an instant, Laika’s eyes jerk upward and her ears perk upward in exaggerated surprise. The scene changes to a wide-frame view of the launch already in progress at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Model of Sputnik 2 Launch Site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome

It is essential to highlight the contrast between the hastily-designed R-7 rocket of Soviet engineering and the elegance of the evolved dog inside. During the launch sequence, the camera follows the rocket from an aerial observation point, using simulated lens-zoom effects to avoid a video-game camera feeling. The close up happens to capture some of the inefficiencies of the design: screws bolting off, rocket stages burning up, and the capsule shaking violently.

When the dog reaches space, she plays in the weightless and wags her tail happily. Through the window she can see the deep blue atmosphere against the blackness of space. She is the first living thing to see the curvature of the Earth. The iconic Sputnik beep doubles as Laika’s excited heartbeat.

Fur and Skin Texture Tests on Laika Model

Slowly and deliberately, the mood changes from the exhilaration of being in space to realization that there is no method for return. The reconcilable Sputnik beep is altered to sound more like an oppressive master. Laika paws with increasing desperation at the window and looks longingly at the Earth below. As the music intensifies, the tiny craft with paper-thin walls is shown hurtling silently through the blackness of space.

Finally, Laika chooses to hold her own leash, so to speak, and end the mission on her own terms by jumping out of her hurtling craft.

-

I am very excited to be actively working on a film again after a year-long, school-imposed hiatus. The skills I learn while experimenting in 3D space are just as valuable as those I learn in the classroom, but I had doubts about defining myself in an academic environment without impressive courses.  Now I am convinced that creating a short film is a more effective and enjoyable way of presenting myself – even in an academic environment – than excellency in my classes.

I reach for the Blender hotkeys and end up clumsily changing edit modes without realizing that I have also unintentionally deleted the vertexes I wanted to extrude.

But I realize that Maya is a very powerful tool, that learning it is helpful, and that these problems are the same as those I encountered when I began working with Blender. My Maya class assigned me to create a character, so I decided to make it in both Maya and Blender.

The initial sketch is not mine; it was drawn by my friend Etai Dvora. As can be seen from a highly recommend trip to his gallery, Etai works solely in 2D. He was kind enough to sketch a front and side views of an invented character for me to see the quality of the 2D to 3D translation.

The Original Sketch by Etai Dvora

The process is the same in both Blender and Maya. I begin with a cube, apply a mirror effect, and extrude the vertexes over the sketch.

Modeling in Maya

The front and side views are usually sufficient for creating the general outline and keeping consistent proportions. Since this is all the assignment required, I did not continue to add details with are only useful in 3D.

Modeling in Blender

Final Render

I hope this is the first of many 2D to 3D projects to become bilingual in the language of modeling.

An interview with Etai is scheduled for a future episode of The Blender Show.

In real life, not all the light particles react with the surfaces in the same way: some bounce off at each angle, some are absorbed by the surface, some shine right through. The model determines how each light particle will react based on the location of the light source and the properties of the object in question. The characteristic of the surface will determine whether the object will cast a shadow, refract the light all the way to the other side, or reflect the light back to the camera. It is useful to direct the computer’s resources to focus on the digital light since shadows, refractions, and reflections are all properties of light.

The image below highlights a normal, non ray traced technique. Notice the lack of shadows and the ghostly feeling that the colored balls are not three-dimensional objects. This is because the light is simply a flat projection and does not calculate how the light should react with the other objects.

In the ray traced image below, it possible to see the reflections, the shadows, and the refractions of light. The relationship of the individual objects to one another and each object’s position in digital space are more clear. The final ray traced image has greater definition and better subtle illumination than the non-ray traced image.

Ray tracing is computationally intensive. Because the system needs to calculate the path of millions of light particles, it takes time and computing resources to create the final image. As a result, the current application of ray tracing is limited to visualizations which can be created in advance, such as computer-animated films. Video games, for example, have a basic structure similar to a computer-animated film but cannot take advantage of ray tracing because the environment is being continuously updated by the user and cannot be pre-visualized. As computing power increases, however, it will be possible to utilize the technique in real-time.

This was the case with me. While I was encouraged by online tutorials and inspired by other people’s work, the majority of my knowledge came from getting my hands dirty with the program. I pressed random keys and clicked vaguely-labeled buttons until I became competent enough to model and animate comfortably using Blender.

But this semester I decided to take a class in Maya. Even though I will still enthusiastically use Blender (and continue to update The Blender Show), I would like to learn other interfaces and methods. Because of my lack of formal training, there are plenty of 3D topics that I don’t know about or understand. I tend to stick to whichever method I am shown first, so I am sure I have inefficiencies when creating in the Blender interface.

The class has just begun. Maya seams clumsy and awkward so far; it feels like I am manipulating the objects from inside a space suit. Being able to identify operations based on function and translate that into various programs would inevitably make me a better animator.

Luxo in Blender

At the basic level, the open source programs I use are similar to the propriety software that Pixar uses. They both summon a relatively basic engine to matrix individual vertexes in 3D space and define their relationship to one another. From there, the rendering software takes all the vertex information, along with surface values and light sources, and creates an image.

Pixar and and other effects companies use orders of magnitude upon orders of magnitude more computing power than I do. It routinely takes my laptop an hour to render a single 30-frames-per-second frame. With more computer power, they can afford to do much more advanced simulations. For example, I use a raytrace approximation technique to illuminate my scenes, while Pixar’s computers will actually trace each of the millions of light particles as they bounce around the set. But things are improving. Former ILM employee Alex Lindsay podcasted in MacBreak Weekly about the machines used to render the finished shots of the first Star Wars prequel, noting that the iPhone in his pocket was more powerful.

Pixar is also highly specialized. The person who animates a character’s body movements is different from the person who animates the facial expressions; the person who sets up the lighting system is different from the person who creates the sets. My work is all my own, from the modeling and rigging to the textures and simulations. This holistic approach is one reason I became interested in animation.

Perhaps the most important difference, however, is the legacy that Pixar animators seem to understand. There was a great deal of mistrust between traditional animators and computer animators in the 80’s and 90’s: many hand-drawn animators thought that the computer animators would take their jobs and reduce their art form into a bunch of clean, shiny reflective surfaces while many computer animators dismissed 2D as useless and antiquated. The mistrust became so bad that Disney set up boot-camps for the animators, essentially forcing 2D animators to learn 3D and vice versa while elevating the animation itself above the means.

The legacy that I refer to comes from this lighter focus on the method and a heaver focus on the animation. It is so easy to get lost in the wonderful aircraft cockpit-style array of buttons in an animation software and forget about the reasons behind a character’s movement. In this way, computer animation is no easier than traditional methods. Sure, if you want to create a simple bouncing ball, it is no more complex than turning on a physics simulator. But when it comes to making movements that tell the audience something about the character, making different characters behave differently in the same situations, and (most difficult of all) knowing when stillness is a appropriate for a scene, the toolbox is irrelevant. A good animator is a good animator in any dimension.

From what I can see from afar, the industry has embraced these ideas and have become more open to different styles and methods, while not allowing the method to overshadow the story. As an aspiring animator, I can only except that the next few decades to yield fantastic changes in the possess of creating animation.

I love the idea of taking Blender to a remote place and doing some inspired modeling and animation.

These are characters developed for my new webcomic, Nexus Neighborhood. The models were created in Blender 3D with some basic composite nodes. The dark black lines were added later in the GIMP.

I love the idea of drawing freehand. I imagine it is freeing to have an immediate result unfiltered by various computer programs. But instead, I am making a model in 3D and applying a more 2D style in an image editor. I wonder if that is a disadvantage to the expressiveness and overall quality. I have to go through several different programs and techniques, akin to picking up a pencil in a spacesuit.

Whatever the production, I am satisfied with the end result. Now I feel it is more important to get this thing off the ground – the project, technique, and style can change once up in the air.

There might be some value in my Twitter streams (if you’d like to search for it, you can look here and here), but I am beginning to see how important a longer form is for organizing my thoughts and creating original commentary on Blender 3D, animation, and creative production.

So, in an effort to make this blog relevant, I am rebranding and secluding more time to write. There are exciting projects in the works if I can build up enough focus to follow through (like The Blender Show, new films, and a new webcomic), and the number of people who continue to subscribe even when the updates dry up just makes me want to work harder.

So I have taken the liberty of hosting and broadcasting “The Blender Show”. As the first episode mentions, the video podcast is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license and will feature tutorials, screencasts, interviews with Blender artists, interviews with artists outside the Blender community, showcases of works people have created with Blender, and connections with Blender developers.

I fully intend for the Show to be open in the sense that everyone is encouraged to add content. I have no desire to commercialize the podcast or do anything other than administer the content.

The tag-line of the podcast, “A Journal of Open Source Art”, captures the spirit of the project. In the end we are all artists, from the casual Blender user to the developer who writes the code, but we have the unique ability, through technology, to freely share what we have learned and what we create.

The Blender Show can be found here. You may also subscribe to this podcast in iTunes, in Miro, or by basic RSS. You can also access this podcast by Twitter.

The main purpose of the podcast is to educate, entertain, and inspire the Blender community. Any content, content ideas, suggestions, or criticisms are welcome. I hope you enjoy it.

The idea of animating a film against the setting of a subway platform has always appealed to me – the constant exchange of people and rumble of subway cars seam like the perfect place to nurture dynamic characters. The specific story outlining the struggles of creating anything worth something has also floated in my creative conscious for a while with no surprises pertaining to its origins.

From there, I used the motif of juggling (one common in my previous films) as the end result of the creative possess. Madeline, an introvert whose only contact with other humans is through her creations, juggles on the platform to try to support herself. But the common itself is not worth much, and she realizes that more ingenuity is necessary.

I finished a shell version of the film in April but it was plagued by problems, not the least of which was a poor execution of the plot. My failures with that version of that film are discussed in detail in a previous blog post.

Over the next few months, I reanimated every scene to my liking, made the film longer and easier to follow, and made the action less subtle.

I am anxious to hear what you think of the film, how it compares to my others, and any other comments and criticisms.

The plot follows a girl trying to make money in a metro terminal. Madeline tries to street perform by juggling, gets frustrated by the lack of response cash, and retreats to her postmodern dwelling. She tries a different approach: she designs and builds practical machinery and tries to sell it. This fails as well and the discouragement continues until she decides to build a humanoid robot. Here, she is not concerned with making money and the robot serves no practical purpose. Closure is achieved when she realizes that a robot juggling is much more interesting (and profitable) than a human juggling. As I alluded to in my pre-film plot summary, Madeline gives the robot a telling smile just before credits.

A good plot must be straightforward, involve a strong central conflict, and end with a clear resolution. Madeline did none of these very well.

In fact, the best parts of the film where those which have little to do with the plot. One of my favorites is the extended first scene (which is common in my films), which sets the mood, introduces the setting and silhouetted characters, and plays with camera movement. Another is the abstract visualization of the design process, which was not in my original write-up, but felt appropriate to the mood and was largely a result of Blender experimentation.

Most of the short is plagued by seemingly-random images, which make sense to me but not to my audience. I used filler shots, reused scenes, and did not spend enough energy on scenes that mattered – like Madeline’s epiphany about making a humanoid robot just for herself.

My recent films (notably Eros) are good at setting a mood and conveying a basic theme, but telling stories is the the ultimate goal of any filmmaker. Hopefully my future films will watch more like a well-thought out short story than an improve poem at a poetry jam.

The unwelcoming swimming pool shimmered below as he entered the main arena.

——–

From his perch on the second floor, the stranger tracked Ian’s solitary path across the packed showroom floor. He spoke into his radio: “”Subject is where we want him. The market is up.”

“Roger that,” came the crackled reply. “Permission granted to hedge your bets”

——–

Below, Ian surveyed the displays. As he passed the long line outside of Lehman Brothers’ booth, he reflected on the years past. This is like my Middle School Science Fair, he thought. He was right: the booths were more professional-looking and there were many more words like “synergy”, “competitive”, “solutions”, “industry-leading”, and “global corporation”, but the fresh-faced, well-dressed youths standing in front of poster boards bore uncanny similarities to their middle school counterparts.

But his thoughts quickly turned to the more pressing issue. Can I find synergy in a competitive internship, focusing on solutions for industry-leading global corporations?

——-

He was on the same level as Ian was. He chuckled softly to himself as his long, identifiably foreign fingers toyed with the switch-blade in his pocket. This should be easy.

——

Ian heard the voice calling his name and turned around.

“Hey, how’s it going?”, the caller asked, with the air of a friend.

“Oh, hey!” Ian had absolutely no idea who this was, but was determined not to let it show. This sort of thing had been happening more often since he started college. “Great to see you again!”

“Yeah it is. What have you been up to?”

“Oh, since we last met? Umm, not much. Keeping it real, you might say”, said Ian still straining his mind to make a connection. Perhaps we have class together? Did we meet at preview? “Some showcase, eh? Hey man, I should be going. Send me a Facebook message sometime, okay?” So I can figure out who the hell you are.

Wishing each other the best, they parted, Ian calling back for good measure, “take care” before speed walking into the booth for the Alabama Department of Transportation only to pretend he had done so intentionally.

——

“I’ve failed, master”, he sobbed trough the radio, preparing for self flagellation. “He just played it so cool – as if he always runs into people he does not recognize – and slipped away like a fish.”

But his master wasn’t listening. Earlier, he had just advised another accomplice to postpone a debate. To the stranger, he said: “Good news. I’ve just secured your spot as the villein in the next Dan Brown novel.”

——

Ian had just learned that there were over 11,000 bridges in Alabama’s Highway System, and also learned that he did not want to spend his life taking care of them. Intel was cold and AMD only politely looked over his résumé.

Again, thinking of his mother, he vowed to be persistent.

He finally got to Walt Disney’s Imagineering booth. He told the representative about his experience, his awards, his desire for change, his audacious hope.

“Actually, we’re looking for those interested in corporate management positions”.

Screw this, he thought. I’ll just write novels.

Over the summer, I had planned to update my travels in the form of podcasts and blog entries, but my laptop (which acts as my sole broadcast platform) got stolen in a crowded train station. The trip turned into much more of a vacation without the pressures of creativity. I realized that much of my free time with my laptop was focused on production of some sort, and the theft allowed me to take a break and drink my life slowly and thoroughly.

Since I returned, brimming with new experiences, thoughts, and writings,  I redesigned and rebranded my studio – Orange Marble Studio became Cique Studios. The name change comes with a desire to create a unique identity, something that has not been done before. This idea textually presents itself in the new studio name: Cique (pronounced “seek”) does not mean anything, allowing me to bring my own meaning to the word.

But the idea of bringing a unique meaning must extend beyond the branding. I feel as if a studio (or any organization) functions best by doing something fundamentally different then others.

The problem is Cique Studios does not do anything fundamentally different. In many ways it is unique: it utilizes open source to the fullest, distributes content online for free, and is, so far, simply an extension of one person. None of these factors necessarily lend themselves to better movies.

Better movies is the ultimate goal, and of course there is no systematic way to achieve this. But I hope that the next few years I will discover a unique niche where I can truly bring something new and exciting.

I was asked to design the cover for my highschool’s graduation show last year. Then I stayed iconic to my generation, choosing to edit an image of a 5th generation iPod and putting on the cover. It went over well, but was severely lacking in originality and relevance to the school. This was not art – it was a design, made to look as aesthetically pleasing as possible and not offend anybody.

This year, I was asked to do the same thing. I now felt that mere design was not satisfying enough (the next evolution of the cover would have been an iPhone, which means nothing), so I created this image.

My class is the butterfly, pinned down like butterflies often are in museums and science classrooms around the world. There are several things I wanted to accomplish with this image. I wanted to comment on the Aristotelian focus on classifying everything to better understand the universe. I feel it’s important to make distinctions and categorize for scientific advancement, and nothing could be closer to the heart of my school’s IB program. In addition, I glorified my class by giving it the gift of metamorphosis. The pin, which I figured might arouse some feelings, connects with the past nature of our highschool years, a life which I predict will quickly fade into its own dusty museum piece.

I ran the design past my program coordinator to make sure the image was not offending to the program, and she enthusiastically gave it the green light, saying that the butterfly was beautiful in a much more sophisticated way than she had seen before and that censoring the image would go against her own artistic integrity.

But, when presented to a counsel of parents, the image was caught in a crossfire I had not expected – people were upset about the representation of other classes, the pin reminded them of torture, and the classification was seen as irrelevant. Some of the parents enjoyed the image, though, and so did some of my classmates.

I am not interested in drawing people apart over symbols – indeed the contrary would be much more satisfying. What I like is the power that my work had to draw such passionate arguments and heated response. People were actually offended by it, which simply illustrates the power of art.

I was able to narrow down all my movies into a single theme: the melding of science and art.

This theme mirrors my own experiences. The entire art world was foreign to me only a short time ago. My parents vigorously encouraged and stimulated me in the sciences, and while I could tell they appreciated art by their collections of music and literature, they felt ill-advised to teach me about actually creating my own art. As a result, I was very much the science and math type, one who would not put any faith in anything, not the least of which emotions, and I even began thinking of science and art as mutually exclusive. It was not until several years ago, when some people convinced me to enter IB Art class based on animation tests that I had a hobby of creating on the computer. In the class, art started to make sense, and I realized that merging of science and art exists at the level of form and content.

As for form, the majority of the creative process is concerned with the science of the software. At its most basic level, it appears mathematical, and my first animations were little more then proofs of concept of technical ability. With each progressive film, however, my films began to include more and more elements of artistic composition and aesthetic concerns. I paid attention to the story, included motifs and symbols, and took care to address the visual quality in each of the thousands of frames in my movies.

The content of my films sits at the crossroads between science and art. My first serious film, The Ancestor’s Tale, was unabashedly about science. it told the story of evolution and history straight from textbooks. Even in Ancestor’s Tale, though, an element of art came though with the relationship of the image with the music, and the scenes of history and evolution which I chose to recreate. As time progressed my animation tests became films rich in imagery, plot and meaning. My later films became ever more focused on the artistic element of the narrative, while still featuring an element of science or technology which I am conformable with. Primitive Welcome, for example, carries the primary theme of the wonder of life. In the film, a robotic alien probe lands on a primitive Earth and explores the landscape with wonder. Soon, its path is blocked by a primate, which, while more natural and alive than the probe, is more reserved and suspicious of new things then the probe is.

Science and art are not mutually exclusive, and each brach has much to the give to the other. The visual element of style must be complemented with technical skills. It is here, at the crossroads, that I delight.

And speaking of delight, Madeline is nearing completion. IB Art is almost over, and after that, my attention can focus on some Eros-level films.

This caught me off-guard. Just like a journalist is different from a writer, an entertainer is different from an artist. My films have been, in my mind, for entertainment. I wanted to make people laugh, to tell a good story.

Then something happened that made art seem a little less cryptic. It starts in the summer of 2005, when I saw someone get raped in Sofia. I was sleeping on a couch with the windows open to a 7 story balcony, I heard unmistakable sounds and saw what was going down on the street below. There were many offenders, and I did not do anything… no calling the law enforcement, no waking anyone else up. I just paced.

So, in my high school Philosophy class a few days ago, I brought it up, leading to fresh thoughts on the matter.

Many people say art comes from such experiences; or indeed, the only way you can create good art is if you have experienced a great amount pain. While most of the time I wave this idea off as silly and insist that most of my “art” (it always sounds so pompous to call yourself an artist, no?) does not come from pain. I realized that much of my memory of that night comes not of the event but the fact I convinced myself to make a film about Sofia, and as the sun rose, made a time-lapse.

That film, the first one I made, was unintentionally born from that experience. But watching it again, my Impressions of Sofia were pretty favorable. Though the will to make a portrait of the city was fueled by what I saw, but the portrait itself is almost optimistic. Check it out; the first scene is from said balcony, on that morning.

I’m amazed that my own art could come from this, without even making the connection. All of a sudden, art makes more sense. What a wonderful feeling.

In Istanbul, the structure of bones (or armatures) in the characters did not use a system called IK kinetics to control the structure of the bones. Instead, each bone was rotated separately and manually like moving a wireframe model. IK kinetics stets up a set of rules for the software that will automatically move the bones near the one moved manually in a realistic (and user defined) manner, making the mesh behave much more like a puppet.

A perfect example of where this is useful is the (almost infamous) scene in Istanbul where a character reaches for an orange. Instead of simply moving the hand and letting the rest of the arm deform itself realistically, I animated it by manually moving each part of the mesh until it looked realistic enough. Of course, it did not look realistic enough.

So, the protagonist in my next movie is fully set up by IK kinetics. Here are some early versions of the character with a disjointed head and stubs for arms, very much borrowing elements from ancient Cycladic statues.

I began by creating the bone structure and modifying it outward into the fingers like so. There are no IK kinetics here.

Once the structure is complete, adding the IK kinetics allows for better control over the mesh, and I maneuvered the statue into a sitting position and moved the hands onto the knees.

And here is a frame from the final render showing the stature complete and expressing loneliness.

Since the style is very similar to that of Cycladic statures and figurines, and since the characters have no facial features other then an elongated nose, all the emotional elements must be communicated by body movements. It is interesting how much faith we put on body language, something that has been lacking in my previous films.