We have been really busy lately (more on that in a bit) but we wanted to give you an update on Project 40.
We are very excited about the story that is shaping up. We are nearing completion on the outline and will soon start the scripting process. It is a pretty dense story and every element has to fit together perfectly, so we are ironing out the last details.
Brigitte has had some writing opportunities come up this year and she has been working on finishing the second draft her comedy feature. She has also been developing a comedy television series that she plans to start pitching soon.
Daniel just started working at Method Studios, where he is part of the tracking & matchmoving team. The company works on high profile films and commercials and Daniel is enjoying the challenge. Check out the link to the company’s demo reel below. We’re sure you will recognize many of the projects they have done!
Also, here is a new animated piece we just worked on. Daniel did the animation and Brigitte voiced the Mom character. We are very grateful to our 3-year old friend Tilly for providing an authentic child voice.
Happy New Year!! (I know, I’m almost a month late – when I started writing this it WOULD have been New Years Day)
This is part five of a series of blog posts where I documented my process of taking a scene from the default materials stage to a finished textured and lit piece. If you missed the rest you can find them here:
I know, I said that I would post this the Tuesday after my final was due. What can I say? I’m sorry.
The job that we have been working on took over so we could get it to the clients by the first of the year – today to be exact (remember, I started writing this at the first of the year). We made the deadline and are awaiting feedback on any final tweaks. More on this project soon.
So, here it is, the completed piece. Below it I will also put a “making of” video that shows many of the steps in the process and some of the layers that were composited to make the finished piece. (watch it in HD)
There you have it. Weeks worth of work for 13 seconds of animation (months of work if you count the modeling and animating as well).
For the nerds, geeks, curious and family (obligated) all of the “Making Of” stuff is below. It’s full of tech stuff, data, illustrations and examples. You’ve been warned…
To recap: I started with a scene that was grey with only the default material assigned to everything; I assigned materials that gave each object its color, texture, reflectivity, among many other attributes and then I added lights to create an environment and set a tone. Then came render time...
Rendering – an art unto itself. Of the many ways that you can render a scene it all boils down to, really, two ways – the lazy way and the hard way. To render a scene the lazy way you make sure the scene looks the way you want it, you set a range of frames to render and you start the render. If you have a complicated scene this can take a looooooong time. In my case, to render out one frame with this method (without motion blur or depth of field) took 4 minutes – multiply that by 376 frames and you see that this scene would have taken 25 hours to render. Not as long as the hard way but I only get the scene in one layer – if I want to change or fix anything, I have to start all over again.
To render a scene the hard way you divide the scene up into separate passes – a pass can be anything from a single object that you want on its own layer, all of the reflections for the scene, a character that you want to isolate, the background, shadows… – basically anything you want control over can be rendered out as a separate layer.
Once you have the separate passes (layers) you have to composite them. Which means that you take all of the separate elements and put them together into one seamless piece. This way you can adjust each layer individually – a little darker here, blur that a little bit there, ad a little contrast to that layer…Also, as I said before if you need to change one element you can do that without having to render the entire scene all over again.
Here is a screenshot of the layers it took to put this together:
(as always - click the image to see it bigger)
On the left is the layers palette and on the right is my other monitor with the video image.
In upcoming posts I’ll get into more detail about each stage in the process individually. It’s taken me way too long to post this one so I’ll wrap it up here and let you enjoy the rest of your day.
The nerdy details: 3 computers took a combined total of 76 hours and 1 minute to render all of the separate layers over a period of 4 days. There was a total of 37 render passes 47 Layers in After Effects 131 hand painted photoshop texture files (see below for an example) 39 lights in the scene 6085 frames rendered Average render time per frame - .74 minutes Longest render - environment occlusion pass– 11 frames in 3hr 43min = 20min/frame Average amount of sleep – 3 hours/night.
Pretty soon we will be posting some of the recent work that has been keeping us so busy lately – So keep checking in!
People have been asking us when we were going to post our film "Marlena" online. For those of you who don't know, it is a short film we did back in 2006. Here it is...enjoy!
We actually shot this film over our wedding anniversary weekend. We had just bought our Canon XL-2 and were hesitant to spend more money on an anniversary trip. But then, in a stroke of genius, we decided that if we could turn the trip into a shoot, we could justify going. We chose Las Vegas and set out to write a film noir (perfect for Vegas) that we could do with just one actor and a one-man crew.
Over the next month, our story began to take shape during nightly brainstorming sessions on walks to the Santa Monica Pier.
"We can't go anywhere for our anniversary this year. We spent too much on the camera."
"What if we went out of town and made it a shoot?"
"We would have to drive."
"Santa Barbara? Wait, no. Vegas!"
"Perfect!"
"So what happens in Vegas?"
"Stays in Vegas."
"Stay on track...stop kidding around."
"How about noir?"
"That works. And in black and white, too."
"We'd have to shoot it in the hotel room."
"I have my old wedding dress. And we have a bottle of champagne..."
And from there the seed of a story was planted. We had been watching a lot of classic film noir and knew it had to be a downer. But what kind of downer...murder, kidnapping, betrayal? Things began to fall into place. Daniel's background as a wedding photographer inspired the use of stills. We also knew that we couldn't control noise in a hotel, so it would have be told visually, and remember, one crew member, one actor.
Luckily, we were blessed to have an amazing musician friend, Craig Henry, who in turn, had wonderful musicians in his circle. The music was an essential element that contributed to the success of our film, and we are eternally grateful for the work that they did.
We built the story around what we had available. We played to our strengths and interests. We planned ahead, budgeted, storyboarded and wrote a script. In the end our film cost us $1398 total. If you subtract the travel costs, it set us back $849.
Throughout 2007 and 2008 it was accepted into Reno Film Festival, Big Island Film Festival, Crested Butte Reel Fest and Sedona International Film Festival.
Everybody has stories to tell. A film doesn't have to bankrupt you. Get creative, plan ahead and you don't have to spend thousands of dollars. Good luck!
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