Work done (for now) with GSF

Ok I know I've been really bad about updating this blog lately, but I have a good reason: I've been working - a lot. Somewhere in there I also got pretty sick and found out for the first time just how fun running through the fire of health insurance in the states is. However, I am done with the minisodes for GSF for the 2009 NBA season and I've come to post the goods. Let the eyes feast:





I have some other things to tend to that probably won't be able to be posted but be sure that I'll do so when I can. As for GSF, we're going to be tackling the 2009 MLB season next so it'll be a few weeks until I can post any videos on that. I also have to update my website since it's just too much to bear anymore; it must be done! I'm going to be adding a music section so stay tuned for that.

"Three's Horrible" Wins at SBIAFF

This last weekend was the South Beach International Animation Film Festival down in Florida. “Three’s Horrible” was shown and picked up a win in the Series/Comedy category. I wasn’t down there myself but I got a very nice e-mail from the coordinator congratulating me.

Off to a good start this season, as that was the first film fest at which “Three’s Horrible” is premiering. In light of this I’ve added a “Film Fest Watch” on my website homepage where you can track the progress of “Three’s Horrible: Part I” this festival season.

So far, “Three’s Horrible: Part I” has been awarded twice and is making a good run in July and October. It’s nice for my first time out to get a couple wins, but what I’m really looking forward to is finishing up “Broken Egg” and submitting that for the next festival season. Next on the plate would be “Three’s Horrible: Part II”.

But first thing’s first... back to work.

GSF, Cyprus, and 2 (count 'em, 2) videos

I’m going to Cyprus for vacation but since I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks I thought I would post the two animations I’ve done so far for GSF.

The first one has a swear in it, so if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing I won’t judge you for skipping it. I'm not entirely sure what happened during the uploading and encoding but the video is supposed to be 16x9 and YouTube decided to envelope it. In any case... enjoy!



The second here was a lot of fun to do because there’s very little movement and I had to pretty much do everything with cuts, pushes, angles, and to try to play on the repetitive theme of the shots themselves. I put in some little jokes in the background with the help of the guys at GSF though I’m not sure if everyone can see it due to the resolution, but they’re there if you care see. Enjoy (again)!



Ok that’s all I got for this post. I’m going to be gone in Cyprus until May. So... see you in May.

'Short' Diversion (bad pun, good work)

I didn’t disappear, but I’m afraid my work on “Broken Egg” will... at least for the time being. I just signed on to do topical animated minisodes for the guys over at Global Sports Fraternity.

All of the clips will be based on this season of the NBA, so the agreed turnaround time is about a week to keep things fresh and relevant. What that means for this blog, and my work on my own personal project “Broken Egg”, is that I most likely won’t have enough time to devote to them for the next couple of months to produce any significant content.

That being said, however, I will still be producing content; it will just be for work and not for play. I'm very happy with the way these guys work and the sense of humor they have is right up my ally. These webisodes are going to pop up a day or two after I finish them over on their site, their YouTube account, various sports related blogs and you will also be able to view them via links and playlists on my site, this blog, and YouTube account... so I’m still around; and I’ll see you there. Thanks for the support, as always.

Music Stage - "Broken Egg"

Last week I was skiing in Italy so I wasn't able to do any work on "Broken Egg". It was a really nice break for me to get out of the office and recharge - then again, so is the Music stage.

What I love about the Music stage isn't just that I love to write music, it's that I'm able to work it strategically into my workflow so that I can break up the art basically into pre-production and production phases. The other thing is that since there is so much artwork that goes into something like this, having a week or two to just break away from that side of things, after all the concept art and storyboarding, and flex a different part of my brain for a bit is a welcome change. I think it really keeps me fresh for when I start the actual production and go back to doing art.

You’ll have to bear with me on this post because I think it’s going to be a long one. There are a lot of things that happen in this phase and they usually happen pretty fast... in other words: this week. If you want to listen to the music while you read just look for the play buttons below.

Like I posted in the first Storyboard post back in February 18th, I usually start orchestrating in a simple program called JazzWare. This program allows me to very simply put down the tone and melody of the song without luring me to get caught up in the packaging of the piece. There is a screengrab back in the Storyboard post I mentioned above.

When it comes time to start rendering the track, I use a more powerful sequencer: Cakewalk Sonar (I’m using version 6 at the moment). There are a couple ways I go about this; I can manually mark the MIDI notes with my mouse in the piano roll view of the sequencer, or I can record in real time and play the notes on my MIDI keyboard. The keyboard I use now is the M-Audio Keystation 88es. It’s relatively cheap, full 88 keys, and plug-and-play with Windows. Like I’ve said many times before, I like my products to be simple and straight to the point. A note to anyone looking to purchase this keyboard... if you play piano you’ll notice that the key rebound is fairly considerable which makes playing delicate pieces a chore – but that’s what the sequencer is for: adjustment. Here is a screengrab of what the Broken Egg score looks like in Sonar 6.

This is the second pass of the song in general but the first in Sonar. For the virtual instruments I use East-West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Gold Edition (EWQLSOGold for “short”) for the orchestra, obviously, and Steinberg’s The Grand for the piano. If you have a keen eye you’ll notice that back in JazzWare I was using a Rhodes Piano for the driving undertone but when it came time to pull up instruments in Sonar I went with a Concert Grand. Both EWQLSOGold and The Grand are VSTi packs. I load the soft synths into Sonar and queue up the instruments in their respective panels for what I need and just assign them to the track they apply to. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s ok. As much as I love writing music, the process by which I have to go about doing it digitally is pretty much a jumble of nonsensical words anyway.

I should write a word or two about the VSTi’s though. The Gold Edition of the EWQLSO is really just that middle ground between Silver and Platinum. I’ve heard good things about Platinum, but for double the price of Gold I just don’t think the articulation will be THAT noticeable. I think the Silver is going for around $200 now which is half the price of Gold, but as I had tried Silver before I can tell you that there are more instruments and better articulations by a fairly wide margin in the Gold pack.

As far as The Grand is concerned, I have to say it’s not really the greatest virtual piano out there. Though, again by power of halves, it’s half the price of the East-West Piano’s pack and most people honestly can’t tell much of a difference between pianos unless they’re compared side by side so there’s really no reason to go more expensive in my opinion.

So after I’ve made another crack at the piece, this time with soft synths, I make any adjustments that have been bouncing around in my head since then.

If you’ll notice bars 21-28 from the topmost screengrab has now been doubled to bar 36 (as shown in the screengrab immediately above). This was a timing issue that came up when I was storyboarding and I realized that the storybeats during the main conflict were starting to outnumber the time allotted for them in their corresponding music segment. It actually gave me more freedom to add some variety into that part which was much needed. The other thing you might notice is that I’ve started playing with Volume Envelopes which is basically half of my virtual mixing board process

The second part of the virtual mixing is done in Sony Acid. Sony Acid is also what I use for mixing dialogue and soundtracks as a whole so it’s not just a unitasker for the sake of adjusting volume on my one exported WAV file; but in this case, that’s what I do. I export a WAV from Sonar and I import it into Acid and use its Volume Envelope to smooth out the volume over the entire mix so that there are not such drastic peaks and valleys as far as the volume is concerned.

So now after all that is done, I have a rendered audio file that I will use right through the process and maybe until its release if I don’t feel I need to change anything before that. Below are two audio files. One is the MIDI that I made first in JazzWare and the other is the audio that came from the rendering I just described above with Sonar, the VSTi’s, and Acid. Next stop – animatic.


1: Rough MIDI



2: Final Render

Storyboards Stage - "Broken Egg": Part II

Ok so here we are with the second part of the Storyboard stage. If you didn’t catch last week’s blog you might want to do that before you read this. Last week I did the thumbnail storyboards on a bunch of Post-Its; this week I took out my sketchbook, 2 pencils (H and 2B), a kneaded eraser, straight edge, and a pencil sharpener and sat at my drafting table to do the proper storyboards.

I settled on an old picture book style back in the Art Direction stage so I know that this is going to be a more graphically emphasized project rather than animation. This tells me that I want to properly lay out the storyboards because I’m going to basically be using them as direct blueprints for the final graphics.

I’m not going to show much of the storyboards here since that would give away what happens in the short, itself, so I picked three pages that should give you a little taste.

In every panel I’m making sure that it’s readable from the last. You want to have a little knowledge of cinematography here so that you don’t make mistakes like crossing the line, but you must also keep in mind principles of artistic layout like the law of thirds.

I’m sure you’ve probably Googled it already, but in case you haven’t – not “crossing the line” is simply making sure that when transitioning from one camera angle to another camera angle, you keep each character or major object on the same side of the frame. Notice in the image below, when I change camera angles from looking to the back of the newspaper boat (lower-left panel) to looking towards the front (lower-right panel) the carrots are still on the right and the cabbage is still on the left. “The line” that the phrase refers to is an imaginary straight line running between the principle characters (in this case, it’s a line down the middle of the boat from front to back), and if the “camera” is on one side of the line in one panel it needs to stay on that same side of the line in the next panel so that everything has its own place in the frame: readability.

Rule of Thirds is, again, something you can easily Google. It’s a pretty simple concept really in that you split your frame up into 3 columns and 3 rows so you have 2 vertical lines and 2 horizontal lines; where those lines intersect is called a power point, and that’s where you want to aim to put your major object in the frame. In the image below, the boat is always on a power point and so are the baby carrots (baby carrots... clever huh?).

It’s important to this project, specifically, that I do the storyboards like this because it will make my job much easier when I get to doing the final graphics. When all is said and done I’m going to essentially have 3 to 4 renderings of the same scene, but with each successive one being a step or two up from the last. Thumbnails help me play with the composition by taking away the commitment; proper Storyboards help me to better visualize the final product – it’s my missing link between the ugly thumbnails and the final graphics.

The next post will focus on the music (a nice break from all the visual stuff).

Storyboards Stage - "Broken Egg": Part I

Ok, storyboards... I love them. This stage is where I get to have a lot of fun. It’s basically where the images I’ve been developing in my head and feeling out in the Art Direction stage meet story which meets stream of consciousness imagination (I wrote that four times; it’s seriously the best way I can explain it).

I’ve already roughed out a bit of the song with a really old midi sequencer called JazeWare; I think I got it in 1998. I just tried to look up their website and it’s not up as of this post; though if you can get a hold of it somehow, it’s freeware. I paid the $15, or whatever they were asking at the time, to “register” it, but it’s really just out of support. I’ll talk more about the music stage when I get to that post but this is where it started. A really simple straight forward app – just the way I like it.

Anyway, I sit on my Big Blue Chair (I’m sure you’ll see my type that a lot; I’ve had it since I was a kid) in front of an empty section of wall while playing the music on repeat and just close my eyes and have a couple run-through’s in my head. After that I take out a sticky pad and a pen and start sketching linearly. I’ve already bulleted the major events in the story back near the concept stage so I already know where it’s going; what I’m doing now is hashing out some of the in-between parts: “how does A get to B”, kind of thing.

I did say that I use pen for this. The reason is because I don’t want to do “art.” I’m not looking to make anything look particularly good, so by using pen I’m not tempted by erasers and I get a constant intensity for the lines (so as not to get caught up in making line weight or shading). I like the beginning of all my stages to be exactly what I liked about JazzWare: no frills – just get to the point; the frills come in the later stages. Any standard pen will do fine.

As I finish each little thumbnail sketch I stick it up on the empty white wall in front of me: my storyboard.

You'll notice I have two different colors. That's not because I ran out of post-its, it's because at that point there is a mood change in the music and I use that to remind me. By having this on my wall I can see everything laid out in front of me at any time. I can move things around very easily since there are no tacks; and because they’re really sketchy and don’t look good at all, I have no hesitation about ripping any post-it off the wall and crumpling it up if it doesn’t work at any point down the road. This is very valuable: you have to be able to let go.

That’s going to be it for this post. I’ll be posting next time on the second part of the storyboards, which is where things get a little more into focus, art-wise.

Art Direction Stage - "Broken Egg": Part II

So this is the second post in the Art Direction stage for “Broken Egg” so if you haven’t read that yet, you might want to in order to get the whole picture of the Art Direction stage. Ok, on with the post.

Now that I’ve gotten a feel for painting with Corel Painter to get the art style I was after, I’m going to move on to the characters. Depending on the project, you can do the characters first (which actually is usually what I do), but with this project each story element will be an art panel so the backgrounds will play a little more of a role than usual being that there is no movement in the foreground to wrestle any of the focus away. Each image will have to be composed with that in mind when I go forward with production so that the action within each image is clearly visible.

For the character study I usually start with a piece of paper and a pencil. I sketch out fast and very rough some interpretations of what the characters might look like. In this short, the characters will be anthropomorphized food items – which lead to some interesting problems to solve as far as style clashing. Like I said in the last post, I’m going after a picture book style so I’m lucky that I have some reference on how to achieve a textured and painterly background with characters that have cartoonish features and not have them fighting for style rights.

My job at the moment is to study the food items the characters are based upon first so that I can figure out the best way to attach the facial features later. It’s basically still life sketching.

There is a cabbage, a couple carrots, a carton of eggs, and two tomatoes on the vine: sketch time.

When sketching the eggs, I hate to make sure I could handle the different angles, but also that I could handle the carton being thrown around and how the torque on the carton affects how the eggs sit and how much movement I could show the eggs going through while still being within reason that they would stay within the carton.

When I got to the tomatoes there was a specific scene that I wanted to try out. The female tomato is hanging off an edge (note the edge is something bendable; it’ll make sense in later blogs when you start to get the story) while the male tomato is holding onto her. I needed to know that I could do that scene because I wasn’t quite sure about it when I thought it up (I thought of complications regarding the vine that it might not look right). I sketched on some faces and I felt pretty good about them. They’re simple, uncomplicated faces which go with my kid’s picture book theme in that hopefully when they’re first seen it’ll be a bit disarming – that nothing too bad could happen because they’re so cartoony. However, again while going forward I have to make sure that the styles don’t clash.

Since I did that with the tomatoes, I thought now would be a good time to go back and put faces on the main eggs and see if they work the way I want them to.

They do. Now I need to put all the character’s together in one place and unify their style.

I put some simple color in there just for reference (not that I don’t know tomatoes are red and carrots are orange haha).

I have to make special mention at this point that this is not how I will paint these characters in the end. I’m going to make a bit of a faux pas here and just move on to the next stage. Technically I should put all the characters together in a mock up scene with the background and test it out, style wise, but I’m falling a bit behind schedule due to other commitments and I think I have a feeling for how this is all going to come out; so I’m going with my gut on this one.

The next post will be on storyboards (one of my personal favorite stages).

Art Direction Stage - "Broken Egg": Part I

Since, for this particular project I don’t have any dialogue to write, the script portion is just made up of bullet notes – just putting in the list of events and actions that happen in chronological order. I’ve gotten that portion down on a few sticky notes and I’ll revisit it before my storyboards phase to make sure everything still works on both a conceptual as well as visual level.

Right now, however, I’m doing Art Direction. All this really means is that while building on the concept, I had a few art styles pop into my head and this is the time that I figure out what I want the look of the short to be: vector, raster, realistic, cartoonish, textured, flat, and the list goes on and on.

I knew that, given the slightly somber and desperate tone, I definitely didn’t want the look to be too clean; so with that, vector is out. Through the whole process of discovering what would fit this material best, I kept thinking about some of the children’s picture books I grew up with. If you take away the beginning and the end those books would be quite sad and rough, which is exactly what I decided to go for. Much of the “Broken Egg” story will be in mountain stream-like rapids, with many rocks in the path, dead trees on the bank and up the rock walls – a rather uninviting area for something so fragile. Now I’ve decided: texture is in.

With all this talk of texture I knew I was talking about painting... and if I’m talking about painting I’m talking about a lot of work per image. It’s OK, though, because while settling on the art style in my head and going with a picture book style from my childhood, another light bulb went off: Reading Rainbow. Reading Rainbow was a show I used to watch on PBS here in the states that would take kids’ picture books and voice over the lines in the book while panning and scanning each image on the screen. That’s exactly what I want to do... although, slightly different (with music instead of VO’s and a more specific approach to this being a moving picture story rather than settling solely on panning and scanning. More on this later)

So here’s what I’ve got: texture, painting, motion graphics of raster images. That’s it. Now I need to pick my workflow and try it out.

For the painting with texture I settled on a program I had gotten called Corel Painter which, since the addition of their artists Oils, gives a great replication of real painting. I’ve never taken too easily to it for two reasons; one: I’ve never been a very talented painter – two: the learning curves from something real to something digital to me have always been a bit steep; however, using a program to do this as opposed to actually painting means that I can produce it faster. Faster is not always better, but when you’re producing everything on your own and you’d like to keep things moving so you can get to your next project, faster is a pretty valuable thing. I just need to get comfortable with the program enough to be confident that I’ve made the right visual and workflow choice. This is exactly what the Art Direction stage is for.

I started off by sketching a few mountain stream scenes until I got what I felt was something I could work with; it didn’t take long as I had a pretty good idea what I was after before I even started.

Before I paint over one of my sketches, I just wanted to oil up (pun intended) the gears and make a dry run through the program making a background without sketching first.

After I felt that I put the digital mechanics into my muscle memory again (translation, felt like I had control of the brushes) I took the sketch I liked into painter and started putting the style down that I was seeing in my head. For those of you that use the program or that are looking to pick it up, I used the smeary_impasto brush with the impasto_palette_knife as well as the mixer_thin_flat and the occasional swipe of the grainy_blender to fog up some of the background and water edges. I tried slightly different techniques for each rock face and I’ve decided that going forward I’m going to use the technique on the middle ground rock face on the left.

Now that I’ve got a good feeling for the backgrounds and the texture I could get with Corel Painter, it’s on to the characters; that will be in the next blog.

Concept Stage - "Broken Egg":

I’m working on my new short “Broken Egg” and now’s a good time to make a post about the first stage: concept. This stage is not a very complicated... well... concept; very simply it’s where I decide whatever I want to do with the project - where I want it to go, what I want it to say, etc. This is where notebooks, sticky pads, unused envelopes, and napkins come in handy. Usually an idea pops into my head as a feeling or something abstract but, at that time at least, reachable. I need to write down the bullet points of that feeling or idea quickly when it’s there, that way when I go back and look at them later they’ll either illicit the same or similar feeling or idea... or they won’t; most of the time I read them later and think they’re crap. Sometimes, though, I get one that I think I can explore more.

In this case, the idea was pretty simple. It came from a thought I had on this desire for so many people to have excitement in their lives and not appreciating what they have. I don’t mean excitement with things like skiing in the Alps; I mean desiring actual tragedy and drama because it’s compelling but somehow not grasping the obvious fact that real tragedy is painful. That led to other thoughts and examples I had run through in my head and out popped the concept for “Broken Egg.”

The concept needed to be fleshed out from the initial idea I had so I took out a notebook and ran with it. I jotted down some general feelings about where the idea applies and got this (below are the notes jotted in my hand notebook and below that is the translation for those that can’t decipher my brain-droppings):

Someone feeling that he’s stuck in monotony and nothing gives him spice of life. His only wish is for something - anything - to happen that will make his life more interesting. That kind of deal with the devil is always a double edged sword and, while he does get the excitement he’s after, it turns out that catastrophe and tragedy are the way he finally finds what he’s looking for. When all is said and done, is he happy that he got what he wanted or is he remorseful of what he had to go through and give up to get it? Is it both?

That's a setting for a bitter-sweet ending and one open for interpretation depending on how someone sees it. That concept has always interested me and it was one I wanted to explore more. It sat in limbo for about a year or so and since I’ve gone back and revisited it, the concept still holds up to the feeling I had back then - so I’m going ahead with the project.