Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2009

Thoughts at years enD.

A year's end is just a punctuation mark on a sentence you can choose to ignore... but for the sake of clarity and the need to organize, process and drive forward I will totally like write some year end stuff... - Seems like now more than ever before... most normal people assume that the quality of something is directly related to how much money it makes and vice versa... if it has made a bajillion dollars it must be the best...if it has made 10 dollars it is the worst... the mainstream has always been the mainstream but now social networking allows the stream to build faster and stronger (read... dumb and DUMBER ^_^ ) - Even if a film isn't a pre-sold franchise the visual style, narrative and thematic elements are... its the same thing in a new way (read... gay3(cubed and shet) not in a 1950's way) - Joseph Campbell said that a culture/society needs to be infused with new mythology periodically to remain healthy, vibrant, alive... most films have been shoveling the same ol

Thanks to my producers! ^_^ You!

So after a little over a week we have raised over %50 of the money thanks to: Ian Ricky Thorgin Tyson Bob Jemilla Brad (donated 2x yer crazy! ^ ^) Ed Zach So thanks to you awesome generous people for supporting studio strange we got to $1,368.00 or the $2,000.00 BUT thats enough for Endika to get the gear he NEEDS to get working on the score and sound design... the other $600 is planned for some fancy ribbon mic he used once and said was awesome for strings... So I transferred the money to my bank account as you can see in the image and I will write him a check today as I leave for my Xmas break tomorrow... I've been getting dizzy a lot while working so I should prob take it easy for a LITTLE BIT (3 weeks) then come back twice as fast ^ ^ So as YOU are my producers I want to show you something so that you know I'm not wasting the money on whatever less hardcore "filmakers" waste money on... So far I have finished animating 7 sequences of the films 41 sequences... 5 o

M dot: the producer with no money needs yer help

Hello allS... as you know I have been working away like mad animating the film and I can tell you that it is coming out AMAZING! ^ ^ As you may or may not know my friend the composer d00d Endika is going to be handling ALL of the sound on the film... thats creating, performing, recording, and mixing all the music and sound design. We have a little work space donated to me by a friend that we are going to use for all the sound stuff... as Endika has begun to start working we noticed that the place is not ready it and we don't have adequate equipment... Producer ME already spent all my money on the things needed for the visual side and I neglected poor lil Endika so we need yer help... Once again I'll turn to the only place I can for help... the cold and unforgiving internets... ALMOST as cold and unforgiving as the studio as its been freezing lately and there is no insulation 0_o Now instead of begging for paypal donations like I have in the past I thought I should try to use o

Post first swordfight thoughts

So I only have one more shot to do to finish off this first swordfight in the film... - Motion clips work great for blending together multiple separate actions like... running + jumping + slashing... The only problems I've had with them is when a character is spinning 180 degrees and that motion clips is mixed with others that are not rotated... I tried using a pivot object to rotate the other clips but it ended in chaos... I'm sure theres a correct way to do it but I couldn't spend too much production time trying to get it to work... - Good sword fight scenes are all about good strong opposing poses... get the poses right and half the work is done... watch J Samurai films from Gosha or Okamoto to learn how to do it right... I also learned a lot about showdown poses from DBZ... DBZ used still poses with minimal animation to GREAT effect... the action in Samurai showdowns really comes from the music because its not like Chinese swordplay with lots of superfluous action to ma

Grind and move forward

The last couple days of production have been a grind... tough shots that just eat through the hours... I'm still on schedule though... they are all action shots and I could have made them simpler/less awesome and it would have been easier BUT ya know being on schedule is fine and all but if your not making awesome stuff whats the point ya know? So I'm doing my best to do both... To do awesome stuff while not taking 10 years to do it... haha actually I'm trying to finish in less than a year from now ^ ^ We'll see how it goes... BUT I'm thinking if I'm not going to do my best, craziest and most complex work on this film when/where am I going to do it? This is my stage and I have to go all out! About moving forward.... So I'm animating shots while previous shots render... when a sequence is complete I watch it and take notes on error to fix LATER... in the past I couldn't stop my tweaker self from fixing them NOW but I've changed and its a good thing...

Something! better than nothing ^ ^

Since I do want to show yall some stuff from HSM but I really can't before its done because there isn't anything in the film that isn't totally new and original... I pretty much developed and created my own universe...with its own look, rules and way things work in a way... So as to not blow the whole surprise, or let someone else borrow it and claim it as they own new and unique style 0_o ... here's a tiny somethin... just a skeleton animation of the monster the main character is fighting right now... its a super quick, nothing fancy... just him trying to decapitate the hero But that is my standard skeleton that ALL of the characters share... his neck and arms are elongated though ... but I used the same skeleton for all the characters because theres only one rig to learn how to animate AND I can share motion clips between ALL the characters... I can't enough about how AWESOME motion clips are in Cinema 4d... without them this film would take me 3 to 4 times as lon

Gamma: what it is?!

NOtes: Have been using the AWSOME linear workflow plugin DeGamma for the whole film...it also comes with some great lens distortion filters I've been using a ton... but ANYWAY the plug automatically switches everythang so you can render in linear space BUT what I just noticed that by default it ignores bitmap textures... what does this mean? it means it doesn't adjust the gamma of bitmaps used as textures so they are a lot darker than when you made them in like... nonlinear space... So far I didn't even notice as most everything is looking fine... BUT I've been having a hard time illuminating the ground on some shots... and guess what the ground uses a bitmap texture.... so I opened the bitmap in PShop and shifted the gamma to make it brighter and now the scenes look even better than before ^ ^ The SUCK thing is I already sent about 70 shots to render with the floor texture that I'll have to fix... BUT they haven't rendered yet so its no big deal... it would hav

Teh SECRET of Japanese animation!

THATS the SECRET! GAINAXING!!! Now I often wondered why all these anime shows I liked had either one or ALL of the female characters sporting huge boobs that bounced all over the place... Like in GunXSword, Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, Gurren Lagaan, now in the Book of Bantorra I r watching now.....I was like hmmm well it's on in primetime in Japan so I guess to get ratings thats what they have to do? Then I read about fan service and all that... BUT thats not the secret... YOU see... GAINAXING is a mysterious power than can be used by you to cover up all the problems in your shots *for male viewers... So like say I animated this shot of these two samurai d00ds fighting and I did a crappy job that I'm totally embarrassed about... NO PROBLEM just add a character in the corner of the shot Gainaxing! No one will see the crappy swordfight animation because they will be staring at the hypnotic boobs... So thats all YOU HAVE TO DO for your animations! And its totally easy! Cinema 4d ha

Pacing yourself...

Well it seems the only problem I'm having so far is working too hard 0_o This week I've been dealing a bit with burnout... but I'm still working... took a day off and have been making sure to sleep enough because as much as I'd like to think so.... I M not a machine that can keep working indefinitely without sleep or food.... So I eased back off the quota for a bit so I dont make my self sick or something before I go to Paris... I left a week open before I leave for my Xmas vacation so now that I'm not working that hard as I recover this week I'll just work then to make up for it.... BUT the shots are coming out awesome ^ ^ Looks amazing n'aLL that... Also my hard drive issues are not so pressing anymore... After the second sequence finished rendering I delete the shot folders off the render server and that free'd up about 500 gigs of space... there was a HUGE texture file sequence used in a bunch of those shots that probably was taking up all that space

A different strategy + notes

So on this film what I'm going to do is edit the film without sound... I mean the shots are already timed for the dialogue and the like as I animated to the dialogue but I gave them all a little extra head and tail... Why r I doing this? I like building things from the bottom up... like making sure something can stand on its own before I add another level on top of it... So I'm going to make sure the film works visually before adding in music, dialogue and sound design... and well also before the skies and other extra stuff is added in the compositing phase... right now I'm cutting the raw shots that don't have skies, atmospheric fx, post processing etc... Running my 4 quad render boxes + 8 core render server 24 hours/day for a month adds about $125 to the power bill... So budget that in before you start your cg film... I started work at 2pm today and finished just now at 2am... I'm going to posting a like casting call thang here for the voice acting soon... So if y

ErrorS keep them LoW+ notes

So the second sequence of the film that I finished animating weeks ago finally finished rendering... here some notes... It was 117 shots which in a RAW unedited form was 18 minutes and 45 seconds long... Those shots took up 125gigs of space.... Two EXR sequences for each shot.... the RGBA and the Depth pass from Zblur Out of those 117 shots there were errors with 14 of the shots... mostly all flickering texture issues probably because I had them set to alias or something... there was only one animation error, some weird ik glitch I didn't notice in the preview... So when a sequence finished rendering... I backup and organize the renders and the project files... then I import the all into AE making folders for each shot and a folder to keep the error notes so I can come back later and fix them before I composite... Also some of the "errors" are that I realized a few shots need artificial fill lights... I say "artificial" because all the environments are lit with

They can't all be heroeS

The fancy shots you see in trailers for animated films are probably mostly all "hero shots"... not that they have heroes in them... its just an animation term for a fancy or complex shot... They tend to slow things down when working because well... they are more complicated.... So lets say a normal shot is a character looking up and saying a line.... and a hero shot is like a character running at another, slicing his head off which rolls on the floor then jumping through a window.... I've found I can kick out 1-3 hero shots per day... I've done up to 20 normal shots a day... if they were all heroes I would finish in 2020... luckily there's lots of villains so I try to finish before 2011 ^ ^

What film festivals and can do for YOU and ME

Physical film festivals have been dying a slow death of irrelevance as the interweb gains ultimate power but they are still useful to filmmakers for getting some press BUT I still think the way most of them in US work is BULLSHIT Wanna know why the "indie" filmmaking scene is mostly rich kids who go to expensive film schools? Here's how it goes... You pay a fee... $50 - $100 for a feature A) You get rejected AND they are nice enough to keep your money B) You get accepted THEN they send you a page of EXACT technical specs you must meet so they can screen your film Example: "We are the Strange" was HD.... so my cheapest full quality option was HDCAM which cost about $1,500.00 for one copy When the film screens at the festival... people PAY to see your film yet you get NOTHING and yeah you just had to pay out of your pocket to make a tape for them AND you had to pay for your flight and lodging to attend the festival. So why would a filmmaker do this? To get exposur

Knowing what you want....

Since I'm working so fast now I'm wondering why I was so slow in the past.... Most of it had to do with not knowing what I wanted... NOW I am much more prepared and confident so I just make a decision and go because I know I did all the hard time refining and researching so I know what I'm going to do is on the right track... in the past I jumped into doing things before the ideas, concepts and everything else had enough time to marinate.... You have to dig deep to get the good stuff... What kills you is second guessing... Now when I'm about to final a shot and send it to render... my tweaker self starts to rise up and cast doubts but then I say out loud "I'm down with this" and I click the button to send it off.... What has really helped as well has been my new workflow where if there are any problems after shots are rendered I make a note in the same folder as the shot and I will fix them when everything is done.... In the past it would bore into my brai

After one month: Many many terabytes

Finished another sequence today... I'm through 3 of about 40.... I haven't done an exact count yet but I think I could through over 200 shots in the first month... The render's are about 140 shots behind me though 0_0 On average 4-8 shots finish rendering a day....but I add 7-14 new shots per day as well... All and all I'm pretty happy with the way things are going... one looming problem I can see is storage space... the first 6 minutes that were rendered took 59 gigs of space.... The film will be about 120 minutes so figure that out 0_0 AND thats just for the 3d renders.... then I need to comp all the shots and render them to a 10bit video file etc... So yeh its a good thing drives are relatively cheap...its too bad a 2tb drive is the biggest you can get though... I could use a few 4tb drives... BUT thats not a problem right NOW so I won't let it eat my brain...I just make a note then I'll deal with it when the drives are %80 full.... then I'll probably try

MUST...Urgghhhh...meet QuotA...

Some times its a grind... it is animation which YES is fun and exciting but after a couple hundred shots you start to get fatigued and lose inspiration and its a struggle just to sit still in front of the computer... this is where all the planning and workflow projections come in handy... if you did your homework you know exactly how many shots you need to do a day to stay on schedule... my minimum is 7 shots a day... BUT I try to double that or do at least 10... but on those GRINDY days I barely make it to 7... and thats good enough....everyday you can't be a super speed world beater... some days you just gotta do what you gotta do to get the job done... The important thing is to NOT stop EVER do your quota even if your crying and bleeding from your FACE.... because all it takes is to give in to procrastination ONCE then it festers and takes over and before you know it..FAIL. Some times I don't want to have to do everything but I just moan and do everything anyway ^ ^ Its weir

Mistakes make things great

The above photo I took while on a morning bike ride is full of photographic errors..mistakes... chromatic aberration, lens flares, lens glare, grain, circles of confusion...all kinds of crap ^ ^ but I love that stuff... The thing that SUX about 3d is that the "camera" takes perfect photos every time... so unless you work to add in them errors your going to get perfect plastic pictures...which I don't like... NOW taking the "mistake" thing a ways past photography and into animation itself...Stop motion gives you TONS of mistakes for free haha... things are shaking, grimy, gritty...they can go out of focus easily...the light may flicker... you get all that with no work.... you have to work to make it clean... Seeing that HSM is all 3d... I guess many would assume that my work will lose its creepy jittery edge or somethin... well it is a lot more refined but I did a TON of work so that it looks handmade...and not just in the construction but in how its animated...

This shit is easy ^ ^ it's all in the pre-pro

I don't mean to be too cocky about my speed of production on this new film so far... but it looks like in the first month I'll be able to do 20 minutes of finished animation... thats full 3d animation with many characters, crazy huge complex sets and it looks amazing like nothing seen before....if people thought WATS looked like a 30 million dollar film this one looks like a 200 million dollar film ^ ^ NOW seeing how fast one d00d can work I'm wondering WHY small no-budget teams all over the world are not kicking out high quality 3d animated features? Cause seriously this shit is easy! The tools are so powerful and flexible and allow you to work really fast and a few decent quad core boxes give you lots of rendering power... Well the reason I am able to work so fast is because I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I WANT... from each shot, each character....from everything...there is no hesitation because everything was worked out in the LONG pre-production I did... most people dont do en

Production notes 10-21-09

Notes on workflow etc.. Copy exr renders from render server folder onto workstation media drive... copy project file from render into archive on render server... import exr sequences from renders into After Effects... organize and rename each shot... save AE project file as Sequence name... render out temp quicktime movies to do offline edit and to give composer/sound designer something to work off of... as I go through the files in After Effects I made notes of problems with shots... I have a folder in the AE project that holds the notes... just folders using the description text to keep notes.... So when the whole film is animated and I reopen these AE projects to do the final comps I will fix/re-render the shots that have notes... I'm not doing that now because I want to move forward... seems like a better way to work for me... Just finished editing the first sequence...which is a little over 6 minutes... looks good... on one shot the alpha channel was missing for one frame?! an

3 weeks/ 10 minutes

So I've finished animating the first 10 minutes of the film... I've broken the film into 45 sequences based on location for workflow purposes... So I did Sequence 1 & 2... As you can see in the pic two more shots need to render...then I can load all the img sequences into After Effects to make the temp .mov's to drop into the edit... I think its more than 10 minutes though cause I added a lot of shots that weren't in the animatic... but yeh... Then all the shots from sequence 2 that are done will go on to render... THoughts so far... Running out of drive space... My render server drive is a 1tb drive and it only has 335gb free right now... I'm rendering 1920x802 exr sequences... an Rgba pass and a depth pass... on average a 10 second shot is 1gb total for both passes... Deleting the project folders off the render server for the finished shots will reclaim a lot of space but its apparent that I will need to buy more drives (Thanks to THorgin for donating to the h

Do you really want to be pwned by these guys?

Ya know I get a lot of " you should make movies for Hollywood" comments from well meaning but unknowing peoples... Well once you sign a contract ANY of the cogs in the system your pretty much owned by one of these old men... Pictured are Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch... two "media moguls"... Americans responsible for turning popular media into the TRASH it is today and subsequently eroding American values and the minds of all of its citizens...just to make a buck..yeah/// So the people in the Hollywood system can PRETEND to be all edgy or whatever but in the end they are OWNED by these old men... They cannot do anything without the approval of old men like these... yeh sounds great 0_0 They push they warped values and distorted ideas on the world...and everyone bows down to them as they slaves just to make a buck... maybe your a slave to them? How does it feel? Is it great? I mean your "successful" you probably own a nice haus and car and wife and hav

Voices of HSM: Meet JP teh mophuCiN Genius ^ ^

One of the things I'm really excited about is the voice actors that are going to be in HSM... So the first person you should meet is JP Anderson... known to peoples around the world through his amazinG band RABBIT JUNK ... and also as the digital hardcore pioneer with his project... again, its amazing THE SHIZIT ...he just released a new SHIZIT album and its is SO WIN go download it! Here's the first SHIZIT video I saw..its an old one but I've been a fan ever since I saw this.. I've never met JP in person... I've just been a fan of his music in which he pretty much does everything himself and he like owns all other bands... and he's just one d00d ^ ^ Inspiring stuff... So yeh then I made that video for one of his RJ tracks Yeh then I was listening to a new EP he put out in which he does a little voice acting and I was like I HAVE TO ASK HIM IF HE'll do a voice! I emailed him and much to my excitement he was into it ^ ^ So JP will be the voice of THE main cha

ChallengeS+

The biggest challenge so far has been working on shots with multiple characters in... right now I'm working on a shot with 7 animated characters... I use the c4d layer system to solo the chaR I'm working on then switch the others back on for previews... with 2 characters I can play the scene back around 24fps... but with 7 it slows to 3fps...which isn't really useful.. So I have to animate the scene is passes...2 chaR at a time... which works but slows the workflow down a lot... thankfully there aren't that many shots with gangs of characters....OR maybe there IS?! looks over storyboards ^ ^ Something I've been fighting is being TOO resourceful... I know tons of animation shortcuts...meaning I know lots of ways to complete shots as fast as possible with as little animation as possible... I learned this rushing through wats trying to make a deadline... BUT in HSM I'm not doing this... I'm fully animating everything...it takes longer but since I don't have

To whomever created the HSM imdb entry

Thanks for adding the film ^ ^ but there are a few errors in it... In the details it lists "St8nime" which is spelled wrong as its missing the r.. its "str8nime" see related link And "Heart String Marionette" will not be in Str8nime... I have developed a new style for this film.. the name and details will be released as the film is closer to being completed...its way more pretentious and complicated ^ ^ My name is also spelled wrong as it has a period that shouldnt be there its " M dot Strange" not "M. dot Strange" Its wrong on the "we are the strange" imdb but I don't know how to change it... Also the country of production is not "USA" it is the "Internets".... this is something I'm doing on this film... I do not consider myself an "American Filmmaker" anymore as I don't have much in common with American people and if you want to get into details I'm more Draconian in nature...

Starting to move...

So I've animated 106 shots in the first two weeks of production... I haven't gotten to the crazy swordfights just yet but I'm pretty confident about everything ^ ^ The last shot I animated was an 800 frame one... It's a bit too soon to make any projections but I'd like to do 250 shots a month so thats what I'll be shooting for this month... I haven't looked at any of the finished 3d renders yet as my emphasis is on moving forward instead of wasting time and ruining momentum by tweaking off minor issues on shots... all the shots are organized and saved so if there is a prob I just open the scene file...fix and re-render... So on my workstation I have a "SHOTS" folder..this is what the hierarchy looks like... SHOTS/Sequence/Sequence01/Shot_0001/C4d project file+audio files for lip sync+text file for notes So I have a folder for every shot on the workstation.... then on the render server I have a folder with folders for each sequence and inside of tha

Boundaries?

I was listening to this podcast in which this d00d was talking about the Australian film industry in the 1970's or the lack thereof ^ ^ So all these crazy hardcore filmmakers just went out and made crazy fucking films full of sex, violence, and car crashes... as that kind of subject matter was still "taboo" back then... Now if your an internet filmmaker like me who bows to, and answers to no one when it comes to subject matter why would you not go beyond the boundaries where most filmmakers stop? I mean seriously you can do anything you want and no one can stop you.. you can put in online where people will be able to watch it...so what is with the boundaries? Today sex, violence and car crashes are pretty normal in film ACTUALLY if you've seen Cronenberg's "Crash" he mixed all three ^ ^ And now that Hollywood has a bankable genre like torture porn you can't really "shock" people anymore... I still think its funny that those films are marke

Twas the AO that was killing meh

After tweaking the shots that were taking forever it seems it was the Scene Ambient Occlusion that was causing the taking of forever to render to go along with the single threaded plugin... I had NEVER used AO for whole scenes before as it was too computationally expensive to render in a non-ridiculous amount of time... but I was like I got a quad core 3.4ghz lil farm with 8gb of ram each shUD be ok... well it wasn't... was too slow to I switched it off on all the scenes and now they are rendering at a good speed... So when that plugin goes multithreaded my renders will FLY ^ ^ Seems the gfx card fix hasn't stopped the random freezes on my main system... it froze earlier today while I was animating... after restarting I tried to open the project file I was working on and it was corrupt and wouldn't open : ( BUT then I remembered Cinema 4d has like a crash log folder where it tries to salvage project files that were open when there's a crash I went in there and found th

Single threadING kills MEH

So now my render computers are about 60 shots behind me... the thang thats makin em lag mostly is the plugin I use to generate the depth passes for compositing... when it calculates and processes the depth map its a single threaded operation... so it only uses one CPU... In 11.5 Cinema is pretty much multithreaded all around so it's really fast... and there are workarounds for things that are single threaded like hair.... I emailed the plugin developer about a multithreaded version and he said he was testing one... I hope he comes out with it soon 0_0 Because at this rate I'll finish animating the film in like 6 months... then it'll take another year to render 0_0 If sHET gets really bad I'll have to go into each shot and crank the detail down and remove thangs... the crazy detail thats in there now will probably never be noticed by anyone anyway haha... its just my tweaker perfectionist self thats all NO YOU NEED THAT.... yeh I have to remember that I'm just a d00

Lunch break thoughts

I'm on my lunchbreak from todays work... here's some thoughts and thangs on production... Was getting random crashes with my gigabyte 4870 card... found the fix here applied fix now tis fine... Had my first challenging shot yesterday... 10 second shot took me 4.5 hours to do... mostly because I was trying to use pivot objects in place of nulls to move a walk cycled character AND later I found out thats not what the pivot object is for ^ ^ but yeh... Renders are still really far behind... I've probably animated about 50 shots now but only 3 shots have finished rendering so far... I'm going out of the country for Christmas/New Years for 3 weeks so I'll leave the renders on then and hopefully they will catch up cause I keep stacking them shots! Oh yeh Ricky about FK on the arms... I chose FK because when using IK its really hard to control the position of the elbow... you have to also animate the arms solver to get things right and it just makes a mess and still never

So it seems I need like ILM's render farm

Your pal M dot animates shots faster than his computers can render them... Its only day 3 of production but I decided to like get macho and work like crazy for 9 hours... I'll eventually get up to 12.... but in 9 hours I animated 20 shots... and DONT WORRY THEY ARE AMAZING ^ ^ So now there's like 41 shots waiting to render with shot 0001 at %95 haha... Whatever..its a good problem to have... Thoughts on doing full 3d character animation in C4D so far... I don't have any complaints... I'm able to work really fast... I created an "animating" layout and a "render prep" layout... that I switch back and forth from when working... Cinema 4d's timeline has some quirks... but I only said "GAWD DAMNIT FUCK YOU" like twice in 9 hours...thats a good ratio... I find myself animating straight ahead instead of pose to pose... guess its the ghetto stopmo animator in me.. ALSO I HATE IK on arms... So I'm using FK for all the shots... Since all the

Mdot: 22 Computers: 0

So it seems as of right now I can only do 8 hours of straight animation work before I go braindead and start to lose focus and makes mistakes... that's when you know when to call it a day or night... So I've done 2 days work so far... animated 22 shots... but none of them are finished rendering yet 0_0 This set is kinda crazy though... I'm making the film in order so this first seem has to impress you all ^ ^ Mistake I made... I forgot that when doing multipass renders with NET you have to manually set the multipass save path after doing the "save project" command to the render server... had to fix that... also forgot to add a compositing tag on all the characters so they are not affected by Ambient Occlusion... AND I forgot to add IK/FK switches on some of the characters so I had to fix that too... TO finish the film in one year I have to do 6 shots a day... every day... I'll have an idea how feasible this is by Dec 1st... First month of production is going t

Final tech details before production and thankS

As I go into production I thought I'd share some of the final tech details... and thank some people... I will NOT be compositing shots as I go along like I did with WATS... Its not very efficient as you end up wanting to change shots which means re-rendering 3d AND re-rendering the comp... also I dont want to rush the matte paintings and particle fx work for each shot... So I will go through and animate and render all the 3d... then when the whole film is done... start comping the finals... I was able to sort out my Exr problems.. the problem was with After Effects interpretation not C4d... so to get Exr working properly with Cs4 right now... You need to check "preserve RGB" in the interpretation options in Cs4... change the project to 32bit of course... add the "hdr compander" effect to the footage with an expansion gamma of .4545... Once I get to comping which will like be a year from now I will render out the finals to the SheerVideo 10bit codec... mega thank

Notes of the ODD

After the 24th revision of the HSM script... it has some weird parallels with WATS, subtextually of course ^ ^ AS I would never give you the same thang twice... BUT one of the characters from WATS plays a different character in HSM... well actually two ^ ^ Which two characters do you think are in HSM? Rain? Ori? Blue? Him? Emmm? I must say... archetypes are archetypes... and there are certain ones I like to use...this is relevant to my interests(from wikipedia) Jung outlined five main archetypes; The Sel f, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation The Shadow , the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless The Anima , the feminine image in a man's psyche; or: The Animus , the masculine image in a woman's psyche The Persona , how we present to the world, usually protects the Ego from negative images (acts like a mask) I wrote a little about how I was tying abstraction layer theor

The value of replaYabilitY

As I r making this film and thinking about the future... I think that to be successful and survive as an artist you need to create things that people will want to watch more then once... Putting the film in its entirety up for free on Youtube will always be part of my plan... NOW if I only had income from that I would be deD... I had to sell DVD's to survive to make another film... So besides the 2 people who bought my DVD cause they pitY poor lil weirdo meh... I figure there was something about WATS that made people want to watch it more then once... Was it all the audio visual madness packed into it? Was it the several soundtracks? Was it for the bonus features? I da know... but thats what I'm trying to figure out... What is it about a movie that makes you want to watch it again? What is it about a movie that makes you not just want to watch it for free but buy it to watch again? NOW... I think it has a lot to do with the narrative and how solid or open it is... there are ple

Passes..layers... revisions...

I finished test rendering all the sets... and I finished testing all the chaRacters by animating them doing the thang they gotta do most in the movie... most everything worked ok... had to redesign some things simply because after looking at them with fresh eyes I thought they sucked so I redesign them OR the designs weren't functional so I redesigned thems as well... Didn't have to redesign too much... Only minor probs with the renders of the sets... a flickering texture I had to change from Alias to MIP... and some shadow map and AA issues that cranking them up a little fixes... but yeh I was actually surprised there wasn't anything too major... For WATS I didn't test anything haha... just got to animating shots and going OH shit this doesn't work PANIC PANIC PANIC ^ ^ So what you will see with HSM is M dot Strange refined... every aspect of the film is mega refined... from the script to the characters to the setS to the character animation... and it all has to do

I'm pretty sure "WE" are winning ^ ^

I recently subscribed to Cinefx because i cannot read enough and I had enjoyed it in the past when a friend who worked in the visual fx industry gave me a stack of old ones... ANYWAY I was reading the latest one and looking at fx/animation stills from Transformers 2, GI JOE, the new Harry Potter movies and more furry animal bullshit..... AND THE VISUAL FX/COMPOSITING SUCKED! I couldn't believe it?!?! I don't watch these kids of films but the work was not only derivative and cliche...it was HORRIBLE! Technically it wasn't even well done... I mean as much as I hate Hollywood films they always had a technical edge but after looking at these stills I think they technical edge is gone now because I see much higher quality stuff online done by regular peoples... done by "amateurs"... maybe my eye just has gotten that much better but I was shocked at the crappy quality of the work... The work I was looking at in Cinefex was so derivative the stills from Transformers 2 we

THIS is how you make an AWESOME movie ^ ^ Dororo

I don't know how I had not seen the film Dororo (2007) until now?!??! I just watched it and it was the BEST film I have seen in a LONG TIME... It was so great... had all the things I love in a film... so you should go watch it now! I can see people saying some of the fx were low budget and cheesy but I dont give a fawK cause the story and everything else was pure WIN... I grew up watching Godzilla, Ultraman etc so I like the guy in a suit stuff... The story and its nuances/themes and how it call came together was pure genius... clearly the work of a master and it was...as its based on the Manga by Osamu Tezuka... I've read a lot of Tezuka's stuff and watched a lot of the Anime based on his works like Black Jack which is one of my fav's... yeh if you want to learn how to build suspense and tell great exciting, heart wrenching stories study his stuff as he was a master.... Apparently they are now making Dororo 2 and 3... and looking at it as a "Japanese lord of the r

Still tweakinG on...

Still tweaking on EVERYTHING haha... revised the script and animatic three times in the past two days... it came in late but my umm STRANGE sense of humor made its way into HSM after all... it was looking like it was pretty serious until now ^ ^ So besides that... I'm still doing the final checks/tests of the characters... found myself adding FK switches on all of them for they arms... wielding weapons to animate is much easier to do with FK than IK... So cactus dans plugs already have a switch BUT its on the arm joint nested in the Hierarchy since I'm all fancy now I wire my own controls via Xpresso onto the Characters main controller... so yeh doing that stuff... test animations... adjusting joint limits controlled by hand, foot and finger tags.... pretty much just like optimizing everything... Still doing test renders of the sets... so far no major problems... some flickering textures from AA being set too low.... ALSO since thinking about all 2000 shots and 45 sequences at

Everything old is new again?!

Ya know there's this saying in pop culture.... where they bring shit back from like 20 years before and say "Everything old is new again" So like... So if all the "new" is really old.... then there is nothing new? COUGH Hmmmm is this a natural phenomenon? OR is it just because once a company originally develops or purchases the rights to some intellectual property they want to keep reusing it over and over because its cheaper and easier? Me thinks this is so... So don't buy into they "there are no new ideas" bullshit... there are plenty of new idea but since they dont own a license on them they dont want you to use them haha... OR you can develop them on your own then you sell it to them and all of a sudden something new emerges to be recycled for 20 years COUGH *Tim Burton* COUGH Yeh its "easier" to do the same thing over and over and to recycle the same shit forever BUT be warned! Emerging audiences will not stand for such craP... So I

Working out the buGS

So what I'm doing now.. is doing test animations of all the characters while practicing animating ya know and rendering out flythroughs of the sets... I'm looking for problems in the characters and the sets... Like I learned that c4d hair freaks out sometimes with moving lights...so I converted it the hair to polys...bug deD... then I learned that NO 32bit formats rendered out of c4d create a proper alpha channel when using volumetric or visible lights so BACK TO 16 bit TIFFS for me.... Exr seemed too good to be true as it was 32bit and half the size of 16 bit tiffs but yeh...I had to abandon it... ALSO had some gamma issues and undervoltage probs on one of the render slaves... fixed that up... oh yeh so my render slaves are all Q9300's but I OC'd them to 3.33ghz... they run c00 like that... So yeh as I'm trying to be creative and have fun doing the first animations with the characters I have to squash bugs along the way and work around tech proBlems... BUT its look

We are the creators AND producers of the future.

As you know I don't want to have anything to do with the "Hollywood System" at all... well yeh I don't... but I'm writing this to warn of about a certain type of person... there are people in the "indie" film scene NOT because they are making films that don't fit in the Hollywood system i.e. something different... BUT because they don't even have what it takes to be in the "Hollywood System" i.e. desperate for ideas.... So these people will wear they plastic shiny badge of "indie" to get close to people like me or you... why do they want to get close to us? Well you probably guessed it... to glean some of our originality and creativity to use as they own... because we don't have money BUT we have ideas.....since they don't have any ideas they try to pluck them from you... Know any of those people? Maybe you can't spot them yet... About 8 years ago when I was young and gullible... one of these people suckered me in