purdy!

 Whoa dang! Those Dogwoods are purdy!

Same with them fresh Maple leaves!

To The Water

My route to the water - straight down from my deck.

I try to get into the ocean all year 'round. Usually there's a three-month period (Jan to March) where the weather is so lousy that I start to slack off, and usually only jump in for a quick splash a few times per month. But this time of year, - April and May - are probably the most exciting for me. Every day the water gets a little warmer, and every day I can stay out for longer. Yesterday I pushed it for a little too long and had to spend the rest of the evening wearing three layers to warm back up.

...

When I first moved to this place, I was a little disappointed that the nearest water was through other peoples' property. I didn't like the idea of sneaking around to get to the water - carefully picking my way along the no-man's land between the properties that lie between myself and the ocean.

As time goes on, however, I'm taking great delight in my trip to the water. Especially as the weather starts to get warm, I know that the properties (which have been mostly vacant all winter long) will soon be occupied, especially on weekends. So I can't just let my mind wander as I stroll to the ocean. I have to always be aware of the spots where I could be visible from a house, and I have to listen for people. On the parts where there's a trail, I'm always watching for people tracks (so far, only deer), and I'm very careful not to leave any tracks myself. I step carefully on rocks and roots, or walk softly by rolling my feet.

The walk has become wonderfully meditative. In stopping to listen for people, I catch the sounds of ravens, eagles and songbirds. In watching the trail for tracks, I see the passage of deer. Picking down a dry ravine under the twisting boughs of giant cedars, up onto a grassy meadow dwarfed by a huge Douglas Fir, down over a cascade of moss-covered rocks, taking shelter under an Arbutus for one final careful look at the most exposed part of my trip, where I climb down a big rock to a sheltered nook at the water.

My favorite time to swim is sunset, which is perfect because the fading light is easy to hide in and people start heading inside. I suppose that's one reason why the animals are so active at sunset as well - there's still light to see, but it's easier to hide from predators. I always see a lot more wildlife at sunset.

It will be interesting when the water is warm enough for me to swim way out in the cove. People will be able to see me swimming from their houses, so I'll have to be tricky like an otter when I come back in, so they can't tell where my beaching-spot is.

Intentions

Here's the geometry (sculpt) of one of the characters in the film. I'm calling him Dragon Bug. He moves through the branches like a squirrel, jumping fearlessly from branch to branch. It's going to be interesting (impossible?) getting good movement out of him with his short legs, but that's a challenge I'm looking forward to.

Now I need to texture him, which means giving him colour and deciding how he'll actually look in the scene. Which leads to a big question - what's this film going to look like?

From my last short, "The Perfect Detonator"

My past four shorts were flat-shaded, meaning that the characters looked more like drawings or paintings. I don't want to do that this time. If I'm going to flat-shade a character, I'll animate him classically. This time around, I want to make better use of the strengths of 3D animation than I have in the past.

A huge difference between 3D computer animation and other forms of animation is that you can play with light - you can move lights around just like you would in a movie set. Characters and sets can be lit in all kinds of gorgeous and complex ways that aren't even possible in reality. And I'm finally realizing what I've heard one hundred times before - that, when it comes to visuals, light is everything. It's how information is transmitted to our eyes. If you're creating work that people will be looking at, you'd better be thinking about light!

All the paintings I've been doing for the past year have been exploring light in some way, and I want to continue to do that.

Intention 1: "Paint with light" in every shot to create mood. This includes character lighting, set, and background paintings. I would like to have some really abstract backgrounds like the one above in some shots.


I want the film to feel loose, both in the process of creation and in the final product, so I don't want to restrict myself to one level of detail. Also, I tend to get bored pretty quickly with some parts of animating. I think this is because of the traditional way films are made: Design and storyboard first. Then animate every shot. Then edit it together. 


I far prefer the painting process because I'm designing and laying out big ideas at the same time as refining and editing. My mind can jump around all these things at once. Can I do that with a film?


Intention 2: The process of making this film should be a constant discovery. I should always feel actively engaged and challenged by the work. 

This is a 30-minute acrylic painting I did a couple nights ago - just a sketch, trying to think about how the world is going to look when the background is more realistic. I don't know yet. Maybe too literal? Maybe I need to apply that painting onto 3D objects as textures (like decals), then light the object, to get nice rimlights and shadows?

I feel like this is already getting too tight. Maybe the foreground tree is okay, but I should try a far more abstract background that just gives the impression of light filtering through trees. Actually, I like that idea a lot.

I'd also like to have a bit of this jumpy randomness that you see in stop-motion films. This is going to come down to a different way of animating in 3D. I talked about this a few posts back:

Intention 3: - In the final product, we should be able to feel the spontaneity of the creative process. 

But at the same time...

A test shot I just found from about twelve years ago, for a film I never did.

Intention 4: I also want to use stylized motion. 

This is another place where animation excels. It's a delight to watch characters move a little differently than they do in real life. I haven't done this kind of animation in way too long. I always loved it when I first learned animation fifteen years ago, but got into a job where the motion had to be more realistic, and every job afterwards was the same. I followed the pattern and used the same semi-realistic animation in my past four films. Time to get back to the craziness! 

Intention 5: The film will be as much about sound and music as it will visual.

I strongly believe that sound is the most important thing about an animated short film. Music and animation is like music and dance - I think the two are very closely linked. Look at all the greatest short films since the medium was first born, and almost every one has a huge element of sound or music to it. 

This time around, I'm working with an original piano composition which is being written as the animation progresses. I listen to the rough chunks of it as I jam out wild storyboard ideas in the morning.

Intention 6: I need a fucking story!

Most important! The story is everything. If you don't have a story, there's no point in making a film. Where's the fucking story? I have one fleshed out, but I'm not sure about it yet. I think it's just going to appear as I keep making stuff, so maybe I shouldn't worry about that. I would like the look of the film to reflect the story, though - everything should serve the story. So maybe I need to step back a bit and do a little more writing.

Translucent Maggots / Put a Skirt On It

The guys on the bottom left are auditioning to be in my latest short film. They're like semi-translucent maggots, mostly with facial hair, who live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Their eyes can protrude like snail / slug eyes. They've been persistently appearing on my sketchbook pages, which means they're likely to get the part.

The lady on the bottom-right was ordering coffee and a muffin at the local cafe yesterday. She was wearing a heavy winter coat and a huge scarf, short boots, and those tight pantyhose-type pants that make you think the girl should be wearing a skirt but she's not and you can totally see every detail of her butt. I don't know why this is still a popular look. Is it really comfortable?

I don't think it's sexy, personally. For all of mankind's civilized history, there has been something covering our genital areas. It's what we're used to. I would rather leave things to the imagination.

I don't think it's aesthetically pleasing from a design sense either. Clothing has always flowed down the body, over the waist, and maybe been cut off around the thigh for a bit. But all of a sudden there's this drastic change of shape where the clothing cuts off at the belly-button, and the whole lower body is exposed. It just looks unbalanced to me. Like, if you're going to expose your whole lower half, your entire body should be exposed, so the lines of your body flow all the way up. I wonder if we're just seeing a transition to some kind of tight-body-suit fashion, Buck Rogers style:

Which means women will be even more body-conscious and blah blah blah cosmetic surgery stupid fad diets blah blah, I have to stop thinking about this because it bothers me.

If women's fashion does go this way, I wonder if men's fashion will do the same:

"Hi. I'd like to order a double espresso, please. And could I have one of those blueberry muffins?"

Bottom line - stop wearing those stupid pants, unless you just got out of a dance class! Put a skirt on it! Or get your look together and wear a futuristic body suit!

Deer, Dogwood, Diligence

Deer in the backyard. The fawns are getting big!

I think the tree blooming outside my studio window is a Dogwood! If that's the case, things are going to get real purdy around here.

The cockpit of the studio. 

The last week has been as creatively rewarding and productive as any time I can remember. I love all the work I'm doing. I feel focused and there is no feeling of stress, only contentment. 

There are a few changes I made a week ago that made all the difference, I think:

1) I got off Facebook. It makes a huge difference not to be instinctively clicking on that site, then clicking on a link, and wasting five to ten minutes at a time - not to mention killing the momentum of whatever I was working on.

2) I installed a plugin on my browser that limits my total viewing of my other 'instinctual-click websites' to twenty minutes a day. These are websites about complicated historical conflict-simulation boardgames ("wargames"), which I absolutely love playing and reading about. 

On day one, the plugin cut me off by 11:00 am. Wow! 11:00 am and I already spent twenty minutes on those sites! How much time was I spending on those websites every day? Now I don't even reach the twenty minutes by the time I go to bed. 

3) Every morning, I write out the things I'd like to accomplish in the day. Then I look through them all and visualize doing them in a focussed, relaxed, way. I visualize being completely present with the task and enjoying it, whether it's paying bills, washing dishes, painting, or animating. I also imagine doing the task without thinking about an end goal - like, I don't HAVE to finish any of the tasks, I just do them and enjoy the process / practice of it. 

Once I finished reading all the tasks, I don't look at the list for the rest of the day. I just start doing stuff.  

The funny thing is that when I look the previous day's list the next morning, I have completed almost every task I wrote down. This is absolutely crazy for me! I never get everything done like that! I think it's because I used to put all kinds of pressures and expectations on the work, so I would spend a lot of time procrastinating. Also, I would spend a lot of time running in circles being overwhelmed with everything I had to do. 

I don't expect that every week will be as fulfilling as the previous one was, but it's nice to feel like I'm still finding ways to improve my state-of-being.

First Steps of Short Film Number Five

Here's the critter I'm building right now to animate in 3D. There's some unrelated panels in there as well.

I only have a rough idea of the story so far, but I'm moving forward with the parts that interest me and trusting that it will all come together. That's the way I've done most of my films. I start with a little seed and work on it until it grows into a bigger thing. This seed is definitely growing.

(This is a bit of an animator-specific post, so apologies if some things don't make sense to everyone. I tried to write it out by explaining everything, but it was going to turn into a very very long post.)

My plan is to animate the characters in this film with straight-ahead motion, frame-by-frame, as though I was moving and animating a stop-motion character. I like the rough and fresh look that stop motion and hand-drawn animation gives. 3D computer animation can be endlessly refined and tweaked, so you end up with very nice animation, but there's no feeling of the process in the final animation, if you know what I mean.

An analogy would be painting a photorealistic image with a tiny brush - the final image is amazing, but you don't get any of the feeling that it's a painting. There is no liveliness of the brushstroke, or of areas that are rendered differently than in other areas, or that the painting is a recording of some kind of exploration.

Stop-motion animation (like Wallace and Gromit, sand-animation from Sesame Street and stuff like that) feels like a constant miracle when you're watching it. The animator knew what was supposed to happen, but he wouldn't see the whole shot until it was completely finished. Like developing film, a lot more of the art is in the moment of creation. You press the button to take the photo, whether its a single image or one-twelfth of a second of a film, and there's no going back. When I see that creation and re-creation, twelve times a second, in a stop-motion film, it completely captivates me.

So I'm building this character with those sorts of things in mind. I'm trying to get out of my head the standard workflow for 3D computer animation, and trying to suit the process more towards my own style and way-of-thinking. Maybe he won't have a smooth surface - maybe I'll leave him polygonal and jagged-looking. I would like to play with frame-by-frame shape animation as well. Instead of relying on the underlying skeleton for all of my movements, I want to experiment with moulding the surface like clay on a frame-by-frame basis.

The biggest challenge, and a restriction that I'm looking forward to imposing on myself, is to animate straight-ahead without going back and fixing frames indefinitely. If I decide that frame 17 out of 50 doesn't look right, I'm either going to leave it or redo the whole shot, like you would in stop-motion. I think this is going to make the process very intensive, and force me to be totally present when animating each frame. (I feel like I can get lazy with 'traditional' 3D animation and just muck around until it feels right.)

I guess that means a lot of detailed storyboarding, pose-sketching, and timing sheets. So be it.

I'm scared! Which is a good sign, I think.

no news is good news

Leaves bursting outside the studio window.

Fresh warm air these days. It sure feels nice. The woodstove still eats one or two logs a day when it's cloudy, though.

That's all for today!