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24 Dec 04
Scene 0302 is complete, along with 0301 (added in as an afterthought).  It's a brief section of the film that sets up the premise of one part of the story.  This is the scene that first appeared in my imagination when I began writing this film oh so many years ago.  While the vision in my head was (and still is) very different from what it turns out I'll be commiting to film, I am pleased with the results.

Pulling the scene off took a lot, technically.  It wasn't difficult to animate, as far as the acting part of animating goes, but terriblyt difficult to coordinate all of the technical effects that go into this shot.  I don't want to describe too much.  The wonder of the moment would be lost in the final film if I reveal it.  Let's just say: Ravel thinks he is witnessing one of his unattainable dreams, but in fact he is overlooking a better dream- which, as is turns out, is still unattainable.  All of this takes place while he is sitting on the ground writing a letter to a woman in Paris about the libretto to her ballet.  He is responding to her request for Ravel to compose the music for her ballet: Ballet pour ma fille.

I put a still or two up from this part of the film, but, again, I'm playing close to the chest.

13 Dec 04
Shhh!  Don't tell anyone.  I've been animating stuff *while* in the middle of a school term.  Normally I don't have enough brain power to spare to do this but... things have gotten so bad at school I HAVE to animate to stay sane.  I'm working on a really big shot with loads of "special effects."  Airplanes, wind blowing plants, stuff like that- fun to do.

17 Sep 04
Part 2 is DONE!  Ten more to go.  Each "part" varies by how long they are in shots, and part 2 was technically more challenging than part 1.  It had 14 shots, while part 1 had 10 shots.  It also involved 4 characters, 3 locations, and a lot more acting/interacting than part 1.  Learned a lot during this section- fixed one major problem that had been plaguing me often (you can read about that below), and learned how to do a lot of things more efficiently.

The film is now 6 minutes in length.  It's going to be longer than I originally enisioned.  II've been expanding shots as I go, even though I'm following story boards.  It's interesting because sometimes "business" takes longer than I had expected, like Ravel is supposed to carry his bag to point x, put it down, and walk to point y, then kneel- and I thought it would take a certain amount of time but it ends up taking the little actor a lot longer to do it than I thought it would.  It's funny because each character has a certain pacing they just use.

Also, as I think I wrote somewhere else, the "snappy" hit-a-pose-snap-to-the-next-pose style is just NOT RIGHT for this film, and the more open ended appraoch to pacing each shot really works.  Sure, I could force it, but I think that would be a mistake.  None of this is to say that hitting certain moments on a schedule doesn't happen- there are dancing moments in the film which are very much about hitting certain poses on key frames, and other moments (non dancing) in the film *very* closely timed to music, so they also have heavier pose-to-pose animation.


7 Sep 04
Thanks to the folks at Hash, the problem I was having with overlapping looping actions killing each other is SOLVED.  It's still an odd little bug, but I can see now exactly what happens that kills the other actions and can fix it.  This has upped the ante significantly in what I expect to be able to add to a scene and to how complex  a level I aim to animate scenes.  Now instead of 3 actions or so on a character (and a whole lot of worrying each time I adjust an action that it might kill a walk cycle on another character) I've overlapped up to 7 actions on one character just to bring out little details that *I* think add a lot.  So nice to have conquered what had become a MAJOR stumbling block.

Well between the above and my developing (but nascent) skills,  I'm noticing that things are accelerating in the animation department.  I'm getting faster.  I'm also getting more picky and demanding of each shot.  The net result is I'm faster, but I'm finding new things to add in that mean the earlier animated scenes may get a touch up when I'm all done.  Just finished up animating a 40 second shot.  That's 960 frames...  It involved 3 characters, two with a *lot* of stuff going on- interacting with the environment, putting objects down, manipulating others... whoa.   Talk about constraint city- had hand control bones constrained here and then there to other nulls, and partially between two... it was a lot of fun.  It's an important scene, meant to be very poignant... so the performance of the character's really had to be done well. I think I'm close enough.  Not pro, for sure, but... working hard.

School starts up in two weeks, but prior to that I'll be doing some screening of kids at local schools for the next two weeks... means my time is now not my own anymore, but this summer has been very productive: successfully made the transition from amassing assets to create the film, to USING the assets and executing the film.  Nice to be truly in production.


28 Aug 04
Just finished up even more dialogue.  Lip synching is becoming very simple (relatively).  Nice to have the lines stored as actions, then it's as simple as dropping the action onto the character in the choreography and voila.  Then timing the lines between the characters is so simple I feel almost feel guilty.  Almost... that is.  There's a little sample in the sweatbox.  I'm sorta pushing the Wallace and Gromit type look to their lips- a little pushed beyond real, and a lot of phonemes pushed into as much an "E" shape as possible.  I just like that look.

Ok, bye, back to animating.

13 Aug 04
Yeah dat's right, I got that mofo scene done.  It took two weeks.  It's done.  But it TOOK TWO WEEKS!!!!!  OMG... Ok, it was a long scene and there aren't many like it in the film, but I am winded.


07 Aug 04
Running into all sorts of technical glitches in the current scene I'm animating.  Three characters, all walking certain places, and doing what characters will do, and my overloaded actions are killing each other.  For the life of me I cannot figure out why changing the length of one character's stride action KILLED another character's actions entirely....  I still have no workaround for this once it happens, so I have to avoid it- that means NO animating in the chor. until ALL external actions are in place.  Fortunately it's a scene that I can drive mostly with actions and not a lot of hand tweaking...

I was tempted to get the latest update to AM (v11 or so) but after ordering it I chickened out.  It's like this:  With AM you get the software and all its updates for 1 calendar year.  That means 4 more months of updates for me at this point.  Not enough time to convert to v11 the huge number of assets I've created in v8.5 without running into some bug that will need an update or something that will happen in next year's release- and then I won't have the money again to update.   Such a hard rock and a rocky hard place.

Anyway, back at it.

30 Jul 04
Still singin' the animatin monster song!  Got through a brief lip synch bit.  It went really well, and very fast.  I'm still going to avoid a lot of lip-synching shots when I can without compromising how the film looks, though...  With this thing getting longer... and longer... as I shape the final shots; I'd like to see the end of this tunnel one day.  I'm not telling anyone, but this puppy is clocking in at about 30 minutes now, maybe even 45.  It's not that I'm animating super complex scenes and such, it's just that I find the pacing is much better when I take time on a shot and let the character' sort of... occupy the frame.

 The style is certainly not -snappy-snappy- pose-to-pose animation.  In fact, I find I'm using a sort of straight-ahead animation style a lot more than pose to pose.  Sure, I'm framing the characters with as strong a silhouette as I can, and hitting certain key poses as I go, but I find the life to the scene is closer to what I want when I start... know where I'm going... and go for it.  I guess I'm saying it's a more photographic style than a real animation show case type thing I'm doing.  And why not?  I never set out on this project thinking my animation skills would be the greatest contributor of the skills I bring to this piece.  I'm better with story, design, and photography.

Well, back to playing in 1920 Paris....


15 Jul 04
Animatin' monster... animatin' monster... go go go.... go go go.... (That's the theme song for now).  Wish I was a better animator.  Very deep into animating the second part.  Had some difficulty with an important special effect in one shot, but through an action comprised of about 12 elements from 5 different textures, I got it to work out ok. 

Because of the slower pacing I've taken to the scenes, the time for this beast is looking to be about 20 minutes. It's already 5 minutes long.

The 3200+ has been up for about a week.  FAST FAST FAST.  I lied about the x800.  I think I'll be skipping this generation of vid cards, as the benefit is too little for the cost.  The 9800pro will be fine.  It's not like I'm playing games or anything...  ;o)

Ok, SING: animatin' monster animatin' monster... go go go... go go go...

30 Jun 04
453!  That's how many different procedural textures there are in this film.  Just some trivia.  While I made a lot of them from scratch- some are very tweaked Darktree materials.  I think the most that are ever loaded at once in any scene so far is about 75.  Later on, in one scene I'm thinking of in particular, there will probably be a few hundred.  That just blows my mind.  The sheer amount of data and power now at the fingertips of one user these days is staggering.  Time to go watch my Tron DVD. :o)

Finished shot 3 of scene 2.  Another long shot- 520 frames.  I've gone a little crazy in anticipation of having bucket loads of CPU's rendering out this film and decided I wanted a somewhat thoughtful pace to the filming.  So longer, settled shots, rather than quick things whizzing by.

Placed the order for the next rig: AMD XP 3200+, 1 GB, and it'll eventually have an ATI x800.  Added another 80GB worth of HD space to the render farm too.  Ooh ooh and DVD writers are cheap enough now for me to get one- heck that cost less than my first CD RW drive!  When all the pieces get here I'll slap it together and see what's what.  Moore's law failed this time, though... didn't even double the CPU speed, but ah well- 1.53 to 2.2 Ghz isn't too bad.  I am very lucky I get to keep my previous rigs and don't need to sell them.  Very lucky indeed.


29 Jun 04
Got through the latest scene.  When I began animating it, I just about gave up.  the scene doesn't look like much, now that it's nearly complete, but all the "thinking" Ravel had to appear to do in coordination with- well a lot of other movement (hence, animating) made me feel despair.  I muddled through.  Ravel actually came a little bit alive.  I'm no pro though, but this is working out OK.

The non-linear way you can animate these days and the layered way I ended up animating the scene in AM ended up working really well.  AM was a trooper and crashed only once during the four days I spent on this scene.  It's in the Sweatbox now if you'd like to go look- "Ravel at the door."

I'm a little amazed at this point but I had to modify Ravel as a model a little bit.  What was very cool about this was I redid a few things on him and didn't have to do anything else- it was all fixed in the Choreography too.  I just love that.  Animating like this kicks ass over the way I did the Firefly short- having to calculate transformations line by line and- ugh, nevermind!

26 Jun 04
Have been in over my head in school.  Need to survive.   Must not fail.  Animation has been a low priority.

I saved up some money and have just enough to add another computer to the farm.  Not quite enough for an Athlon 64, but a top of the line XP will be coming in- I don't like to overclock processors, so I'll probably get around a 3200+ rather than a cheaper 2500+ which I could overclock to 3200.  I just want stability.  I'll be assembling the computer once all the parts I've decided on hit prices I can afford, which will be soon.  The power supply and case are on the way.  I enjoy getting to assemble a new rig every now and then.  Anyway, rendering this film will simply not be a problem with 3 computers working away at it.

Worked a little today on another scene- had to re-envision a few storyboards as the way they were drawn out was not working for the story.

No new images to share at the moment, however.

13 Feb 04
About 2:33  of animation is now at 90%- the film is shaping up to be about 15-20 minutes long.  Ran into a few problems with embedding a CHOR action inbetween two dropped in actions.  Never really found out what was wrong, but Ravel's walk cycle would die everytime I placed a walk cycle on the cat.  Eventually got the scene to work- it's 501 frames long!  Took days to animate well enough to move on (the old 90% threshold)!

I spliced together my working print of shots (low-rez poly renders that are FAST) and synched up the music and voice track- things are looking very good to my tired eyes...  This film may see the light of day yet!  I imagine 2004 isn't a totally wrong-headed date for finish.

Had the voice actress who plays DGM come over; she's a pro actress who's done tv commercials, some stage work, etc... We recorded her lines- she was GOOD!  I'll need to rerecord some of the other  dialogue now to match her professionalism. :o)  Inspired me to up the ante some more!  may need to find a pro male voice actor now to re-record Ravel's and RAF's dialogue.  I am SO pleased at this point with the investment in a professional microphone.  It picked up the nuances in her voice splendidly.


4 Jan 04
Posted a little animation test of an action I'm working on for the cat in the first scene where gets pet.

 School starts up tomorrow.  It'll be tougher this term than any other as I'm involved in research that is really over my head and will also be in a practicum that'll make me nervous and sick for at elast the first few days- but that's how I wanted it: gettin' edumacated!  Anyway I suppose stuff will slow down for BPMF, but with about the entire first scene animated- I imagine final rendering will start (woohoo!) this year, and by xmas I may have a completed film on my hands.  YES!  So stay tuned, the ride, though always a little slow, may actually get a little more interesting to people who ":just want to see the film!"