BGRG Featured on Channel Frederator

Blue Guy vs Red Guy is being featured on this week's episode of Channel Frederator. Apart from its website, Frederator is one the most popular podcasts on iTunes. Thanks to people at Frederator for including me!

Beowulf... Why?

Robert Zemeckis, a very talented filmmaker, is back this season exploring the highly unpromising vein he started mining with The Polar Express. Beowulf is a loose retelling of the Old English epic poem. Like Final Fantasy, these Zemeckis films are photoreal depictions of human characters. The innovation that Zemeckis has clamped onto is procedural; rather than animating from scratch, he records actors’ performances, this go-around with a new motion capture technique that photographs them from multiple angles. I saw the rig he uses for this at the SIGGRAPH convention this summer; it looks like a geodesic dome fitted with dozens of lights and cameras.

Despite my misgivings about motion capture, I came to the film wanting it to succeed. I saw it on the first weekend, and in IMAX 3D. Unfortunately, I have to report that the film was an almost complete failure. Only two scenes really worked: Angelina Jolie’s seduction of the hero, and the final action set piece. For the most part it was a flat, frigid bore.

The question I was left with was… why? If this film had been made in live action with CGI assistance, it still would not have been a good film, but it would have been a better film. I know what Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich can give a story. What motion capture got out of them was barely 10% of what they can do even when they’re having a bad day.

What went wrong? First, the motion capture doesn’t look that bad. When it’s bad, motion capture looks… dirty. There’s more detail there than needs to be there. Zemeckis has obviously had animators edit the motion extensively. The trouble is not the usual one of too much extraneous detail, but not enough. There’s no intimacy to the performances.

When humans look photo-real we expect photo-real expression. The human face is a highly complex interweaving of dozens of muscles. Moreover, we are extraordinarily adept at reading it; our species has evolved into master interpreters of our own faces. Small subtleties carry enormous meaning. The fault might not be with the motion capture alone, but the character rigs too. 3D technology has advanced enormously, but it still cannot quite simulate all the details of facial movement, at least not when the benchmark is human complexity.

Perhaps it is also the circumstances in which the motion was captured. An actor is far likelier to create a compelling performance on a set, with the actors he’s playing against right there in front of him. A geodesic dome is not quite the same spark to the imagination.

Finally, there is the issue of what 3D folk call the “Uncanny Valley”. This term was coined by MIT researchers on robotics. They were trying to come up with a robot design that would provoke emotional attachment. They found that the more like humans the robots got, the more warmly people responded to them. This perhaps was not surprising. What was more surprising was that there came a point when this effect started diminishing and reversing. People started getting a little freaked out by the human likeness. When the design started becoming completely convincing – like say, Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner – identification and attachment returned. This effect was dubbed the uncanny valley. People in 3D argue about whether it really exists. As one who has fallen in myself (in a mixed media project,) I can testify that it does exist. Does Beowulf fall into the uncanny valley? Well, it’s clawing up the far side, but it’s there.

I go back to the most pertinent question: why? Why bother recreating reality in mathematically defined polygons, when real reality is right here with us? I know the answer in my bones because I’ve made films both in 3D and live action. A live action shoot is terribly frustrating for control freaks like me… and presumably, Zemeckis. A plane flying overhead ruins your best take. The damn cameraman muffles the follow on another good take. The actor scratches his nose for no apparent reason, ruining yet another one. And if you say you’re satisfied with the shot, at 1AM in the morning, when you’ve been up and working your ass off since 6AM, then you will have to live with that for the rest of your life. You rarely get retake days. The 3D world, on the other hand, is infinitely malleable. You can tweak the camera angle or the hue of the hero’s plaid jacket till the cows come home. Yes, there are time constraints because budgets are never infinite but things can be… adjusted. Always adjusted.

The truth, however, is that this kind of stuff doesn’t really matter all that much. Filmmakers can obsess about things intricate like camera movements or subtle pictorial elements, but that’s just the icing on the cake. What matters is story and performances. To sacrifice performance for the flexibility to execute the filmmaking flourishes is terribly, terribly wrong-headed. And I just can’t imagine what other upside there is in a technique such as this.

I believe 3D animation does not need to be confined to family audiences. It can appeal to older, narrower audiences. But I also think animation needs to be allowed to be animation. Let it do what it does best: provide an imaginative restyling of life movement and life imagery.

Blue Guy vs. Red Guy

And since I'm sharing other people's video, I might as well share my own. Here's Blue Guy vs. Red Guy, a little 3D short I spent my free time on this summer. Once the short starts rolling you'll see an expand-to-full-screen button on the bottom; click it to see the film properly.

Enjoy! (And if you enjoy, share with others!)

I Got You, Mr. President

Here's something a friend of mine, John Schnall, whipped up.

Work Update

Here's a link to a project I just completed called Day Zero. It's an animated version of the TV show 24... a prequel showing the day before Season One. I joke that Jack Bauer tortures Spongebob in it, but of course, this ain't a parody... it's the real thing.

The series is done in a limited animation, graphic novel style. Xeth Feinberg did a great job of directing; I contributed with editing and compositing.

Enjoy!

Bush in Latin America

Please, Mr. President! No good will tours.

La Seduzione - Storyboards and Animatic

I've finished a roughly drawn storyboard of La Seduzione, which given my limited drawing skills is about the best I can do. I've also finished an early version of the animatic. (You can read other posts about the making of this animated short here.)

A storyboard is like what you see below... a visual interpretation of each scene in the movie. (Just to be really confusing, in animation we call shots scenes.) It's usually accompanied by a text description of what is going on. Click to enlarge:

Once the storyboard is finished, an animatic is made. This is essentially a filmed storyboard. The image of each scene is kept on screen for as long as it would appear in the final product. Scratch (by which we mean temporary) music, dialogue if any, and some sound effects accompany the images.

An animatic allows a filmmaker to preview the timing and story flow of the film before a big investment is made in animation. I know I will probably putter around with my animatic for weeks before I feel comfortable enough to start animating scenes.

Homebaked Films is Live!

My company website is finally up!

La Seduzione - Characters

(This is part of an ongoing description of the making of an 3D animated short.)

Here is a rough sketch I did in Photoshop of what Sophia and Marcello might look like. Certainly they will be tweaked a lot beyond this. I'm not sure about Marcello's facial hair, and I don't think their mouths will be perfect spheres: Sophia's will be a little wider than round (since she is a 'broad') and Marcello's a little taller than perfectly round.

This last week I made some models of the characters in Model Magic. This is a material that Scott Dodson introduced me to when we were making It's About My Brother; on that project, we used it just for the hair. For this film, I made the mouths and eyebrows out of it. Ping pong balls filled in nicely for eyeballs, and I wrapped Model Magic around them to make the eyelids. I cut out the flat face shapes behind the mouths from foam core. Then, with either marker or paint, I gave everything a rough color.

I'm actually pretty bad at making things with my hands, but this was a great exercise. The experience of molding the characters with my hands -- instead of teasing electrons trapped in a box -- led me to think about what the characters should look like and gain some new insights. But most importantly, now that I'm working on the storyboards I have something to play with when I'm trying to come up with new pieces of business. And the business -- how the facial elements rearrange themselves so the characters can express themselves -- will be what this little short will stand or fall on.

La Seduzione - Music

It will be a long time before I work with a composer on the soundtrack for La Seduzione, but when I make a film I find that I start referencing music very early. Usually I'll discover a song that captures the mood of the piece, particularly the feeling at the end of the story -- the feeling I want to leave the audience with. Then I'll play that song over and over again while I match it with the images in my head. When I made my student film at NYU it was Frank Sinatra singing That's Life. With It's About My Brother it was Buddy Holly crooning True Love Ways.

I'm not sure what "The Song" will be for La Seduzione but I've been listening to a lot of stuff from the sixties and seventies: Perez Prado, Tom Jones, Brigitte Bardot, Tijuana Brass, Les Baxter. It's stuff that feels deliciously dated but at the same time is genuinely witty and playful and fun to listen to. I've become particularly fond of some Italian soundtracks from the sixties, especially a composer called Roberto Pregadio. He wrote music for the so-called giallo, the Italian exploitation pics of the era.

Here's one piece of his called Iena Sequence. And this other one's called Eva, La Venere Selvaggia, which I think means "Eva, the noble savage". (Doesn't that make you want to see the movie?)

If you want to hear more of this kind of music I would suggest Beat at Cinecitta, a sampler of soundtracks from Italian movies of the era.

La Seduzione - The Story

The story of La Seduzione is very simple: A guy walks into a cafe, sees a girl and immediately decides he's going to pick her up. She's a bit put off at first by how strong he comes on, but he manages to recover and smooths things over. They leave the cafe together.

Well, it's not quite that simple. These aren't really human forms... they're disembodied eyeballs, eyebrows and mouths that are hovering around in front of geometric shapes: an oval for the girl's face and a triangle for the guy's. And they don't talk -- at all. They express their ideas, intentions and moods by rearranging their face elements into new configurations.

Of course, as the title suggests, the movie is set in Italy. The go-go Rome of the sixties, to be precise. I'm thinking of my characters as Marcello and Sophia, in honor of my two favorite Italian actors (not that they ever get a chance to use each other's name.)

Why Make an Animated Short?

One of the things I'd like to do on this blog is chart the progress of the animated short I'm working on, La Seduzione. Perhaps the first question to tackle is why I am making it to begin with.

In the romantic imagination an artist isn't motivated... he is possessed. Inner demons (or angels) compel him to create, and nothing -- not hunger or sickness or the cold indifference of the world -- can prevent him from doing so. Right. (My first instinct is to insert that bit of sarcasm, but there are people like that -- and I do sort of envy them.) The more jaundiced view is how Samuel Johnson saw his craft: "No man but a blockhead wrote except for money." Good for you, Mr. Johnson. Personally, I've long since stopped judging my motivations, or other people's. There is no bad reason to create: money, fame, food, sex, the exaltation of God, or just plain fun... if it works it works.

The most honest answer to why I'm making La Seduzione is because I'm happiest when I'm working on a project which I conceive myself and where I have final say on all creative decisions. However, there are other rationales (or maybe rationalizations) that I need to uphold before I can commit the enormous amount of time necessary to complete a project like this. They are these: it will improve my skills in 3D animation; and it will hopefully be a good portfolio piece, exhibiting and promoting those abilities. There. With the pragmatist in me satisfied that I'm not doing something too stupid, I can go ahead and play for a few months.