Grant #1

I'm doing a serious amount of job hunting and resumé polishing, but in the middle of all that Mutwale has achieved a major milestone- it's been given its first grant from the Metropolitan Arts Council. This means I need to continue the tight paper trail and change a few legal terms on my pages. It also means I should get back to work on the film itself, which I plan to do as soon as I get on my feet. Earning is getting in the way of this project at every turn, but it's necessary to survive. If only I could just raise this budget properly and put this paycheck nonsense aside... This would all be so much faster. Cest la vie.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Boarding Process is Complete

No posts ≠ A lull.  Quite the opposite.  I've been meaning to finally announce it but haven't had the time:  Storyboards are finished, and the animatic along with them.  The film grew quite a bit, and when people hear the final running time they seem surprised.  Maybe even a bit wary.  I assure you, it moves very quickly and the run time doesn't feel long.  Trust me, I loathe nothing more than a short that overstays its welcome.  I sincerely appreciate, probably more than most, a short that holds itself to under or around ten minutes.  But gods, this thing got epic.  The story is almost worth blowing up into a feature.  With much effort, I've paced it out quite deliberately so that the run time doesn't feel long at all.

A quick statsheet before all-out breakdowns and budget revision begins:

 

Paperwork

• 527 shots.

• 29 minutes and 37 seconds give or take a few credits and thanks.

• 5 paint-on-glass sequences interspersed with the traditional 2D.

• Opening sequence covers social change over many centuries of history in 1:48 seconds.

Backstory: History as Truth and Symbol

• Main character first appears at shot 22, almost 2 full minutes into the film- and isn't seen in full, in daylight until shot 58, the first few seconds of minute 4.

• First elephant fight sequence from 7:18 to 8:40.

• Only ONE dissolve to relocate/pass time, and it's a match move.  There are 3 more dissolve transitions in place, but they are to denote when 2d gives way to paint-on-glass in the animatic.  All other necessary transitions are done through an original visual or audio cue.
  

• 10 Distinct, remarkable *NOMS*  ...For some reason, food became a motif all its own.

 NOM #3

  

So I'd love to say that I'm starting animation yesterday, but as it turns out there have been several welcome contract jobs of late.  So, I've been slammed with other people's projects.  My next post will be covering my second attempt at a paint-on-glass rig, a pile of gear I arranged for recent work in NYC on a MAC cosmetics corporate and online promo for their Spring 2010 line.  Unfortunately, they cut most of my paint animation- it turned into more of a photography job.  But that doesn't mean I didn't abscond with photos of the rig and the few animation tests that I'll post here soon.

Battered Diplomats

My most recent gig is finishing editor for a local SC feature by Skellenger Films, "More Than Diamonds."  At the moment I'm working through several difficulties to migrate all the footage to my edit bay- the largest of which seems to be the strange tendency of the SONY EX1 to shoot .MP4 extension files that feature the MPEG-2 video codec shell called MPGV.  It seems Apple and Quicktime don't like this new devilry.  Oh, tech.  How often I loathe thee.

Until the next.

Modest Milestone IV: The 400 Blows

Passed shot 400 in the boards yesterday. I'd be further (farther?) along but I picked up a nasty bug last week, it took me down for a few days.  Either that or I've been harboring the same sinus infection since March and it finally caught up with me.  In my mind this is entirely probable.  

This film keeps getting bigger.  Paperwork now fills some of my time instead of a little. Storyboards/Animatic completion imminent.  Then breakdowns and style frames.  Perhaps a color test or two.  Then animation and onward to victory.

In many ways, my own story begins to parallel that of my protagonist. Perhaps such things are bound to occur when you dive into something so deeply.  Or perhaps I'm meant to be tested and tried at every turn.  I know, I know.  Don't tempt the gods, right?  Could always be worse...

"Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh."  -  Al Swearengen

Power through.

Persistence is all.

Modest Milestone III: Not-so-modest

Today brought shot 300. This thing is quite a beast- thankfully it should still clock in at under 20 minutes, which would be nice for the workload. For now, though, it'll be as long as it needs to be. Can always trim things down after the whole story is in place. Or not.

It's excruciating to hit road blocks/ little snags in the story that I hadn't anticipated. But it's wonderful to get past them. Now to get these boards finished... Looks like October may actually bring the animation. Fingers crossed.

I'm not one for pride but this is going to be quite a film! More soon. Next post will be a recap of everything to date, and hopefully the post after that, well- it should be a good one.

Small Marmot Carrying Baby Marmot :3

Intentional? Maybe. Adorbable? Yes.

Antagonism: Quadruped Enmity

A convincing naturalistic fight scene that combines traditional cinematic conflict with the unpredictable and unbridled order of Nature. The outcome is set. I will not reveal it here.

Off to day three of week 4- the most productive week yet!

Borystoards: Modest Milestone

I am tired.

Passed shot 100 this evening, and this has put me just past the 7:00 mark.



Have I mentioned how mazing it will to be to finish boards and have a full animatic that has been completed simultaneously?



The days are just packed.

Music (aforementioned)

It's been requested that I post that music track I've recorded- I don't really know html so I'm uncertain the best way to embed an MP3 here in my blog.

In the meantime, enjoy this dancing hamster. Wait. Aha! I found something. Thanks Odeo embeddable player. There's no need for a Hamtaro gif. You're safe. FOR NOW.



Play it loud. Comments of course welcome- I'm not entirely set on the chord progression but I'm pretty happy with the voice/oscillators. (I think 2 voices @ 2 oscillators = 4 oscillators.) There's a pop or two when the higher-velocity base notes hit, I'm going to clean those up later.

In other news, my brand new Sakura Electric SE-2000 Portable Cordless Handheld Eraser arrived in the mail today! w00t. The first in a line of materials shipments. Things are happening. I am giddy.

I lied. You've been exposed to a Ham-Ham.

Storyboards Continued, Some Light Music

Research has its merits but in this instance it was a real pain. I started thumbs back in October of 2008 so there's a sequence or two that I discovered simply wouldn't work. Logistically, there would've been no elder elephant population in Akagera when my group of younglings arrived, so I had to rework some things. It's for the best because Mutwale gets more development this way- but deviating from the thumbs put me in a tight spot- momentarily. It's hard to mess with a timeline about an elephant Family's development so I ended up cutting a big chunk and replacing it. Slight detour.


In other news my synth-tastic synthesizer, an Ensoniq FiZmO and I had a session concerning this very film. I've had some ideas for music but I'd really not laid anything down. Until today! Simple chord progression with pretty advanced waveforms and some intensive EQ'ing yielded a little gem. I don't think it's fit for final but it's a good start and at the very least a solid reference.

Storyboards Continue

Pushing on ahead with the boards. Everything is going well now that my system is back up, and I discovered a nifty little OSX clone tool that happens to be free/donation-ware. (Support it if it works.) I've been doing root user backups but I've really been dying to find something incremental. I've got a redundant clone going now so hopefully everything should be kept ship-shape if the worst strikes again. *knocks wood*

I'm currently on shot 57, which puts the film at 00:03:57:12 and it's looking to roll over into minute 4 any panel now. I'm still jumping between books 1 and 2 of the thumbnails- eager to hit that stride where everything progresses in an orderly fashion. If any part of production can indeed be described so.



And now I'm off to find myself in the strange position of scanning/taking macro photos of sugarcane stalks. Textures needed.

Sketchbook: Style Frames I and II

I'm working with style frames instead of an overall style guide as things progress, there's no reason to spend weeks putting together a briefing packet if you're flying solo for most of the production. When I do bring in additional hands it will be colorists and background artists who can work from color guides and rough layouts. The exception, though, is the sound designer. In that case I'll be doing a full cue sheet for sound to work from, something I've neglected to do with my films outside of schooling- and I've seen how the work can suffer from this oversight. Anyways. This post isn't about sound.



A style frame every so often throughout the boards should keep the palette/styles unified. There will be multiple techniques used throughout the piece so when I sit down to a scene I need to know at a glance how it will look and how it will move. Sometimes things get jumbled up in the old noggin' and the references can be invaluable. Of course animators/filmmakers know this already, I thought I'd mention it because... I wanted to.



So here's style frames I and II- these both come from the first 30 seconds of the film. There's earlier posts covering this sequence and hopefully these frames illustrate the stylistic choices I've been discussing. There'll be some animation tests soon but until then it's back to storyboards.

Thumbnails Complete, Onward to Boards

Thumbnails are complete and full-on storyboards are under way.

5 notebooks of approximately 1096 little frames and the basic story is locked in. I'll have full breakdowns only after the storyboards and animatic are complete but so far I'm happy with the outcome of the preliminaries.

Announcement: Mutwale Site Live!

If you scope its recently created website you'll see that Mutwale is quickly approaching full on production. I'd like to take this time to mention that technically the spelling of the Kinyarwanda word for "chief" is "Mutware." However, due to an R/L substitution it is pronounced "Mutwale." Having studied enough Japanese to feel strongly that Romanization is a load of crap however you cut it, I've decided to spell it closer to the phonetic pronunciation than the colonial-influenced Romanized form.

The film itself! It seems like I've stuck in prepro for ages but if one cuts corners in this phase one will to pay for it later with mistakes in everything from blocking to prop continuity. Animation isn't immune to the problems that show up in Live Action- though most animators treat the medium like a sandbox with very few constraints. This makes sense- it's one of the strengths of animation- but often the story falls back behind the craft. I will likely rant on this later.

This is not how I roll. I just hit my 5th thumbnail book and the end is in sight. The story is cohesive, engaging, endearing, and best of all, it pulls no bloody punches. Don't get me wrong- I love things by, say, Disney, but you have to admit the worldview of the Magic Kingdom's films is pretty naïve.



I've been working on thumbs for this story since Oct2008. Not every day. Not even every week (gotsta get paid, son!) but little by little it's been coming together. Usually I race through thumbs and hit quickly-drawn boards in order to get an animatic going as soon as possible. Here though, I never wrote a script and therefore thumbs have become crucially important to breaking the production down into a proper workflow. Not only this, I'm trying something new by doing all the boards digitally with Toon Boom Storyboard Pro. I don't go for vector-based software very often but this is a nice little suite that offers layer-based single frames, script importing and dialogue/script note per-frame options, realtime playback, multiple timeline schematics, sound import, simple camera move playback, etc etc on and on. My favorite thing about this software, and the only reason I switched over from tradish storyboards, is that once you're finished boarding you've practically got a finished animatic. From there you can time and pace everything out and get an accurate running time for each shot. No scanning, no composites, no renders, no extra files and folders. My one complaint is that the frame cache is limited to 25 and the performance of the software is a bit slow for running on the desktop I've got. Lots of colored-pinwheel beachball spinning between frames.

In any case, the story is nearly locked- and it's looking good. Real good. My largest concern at this point is the length of the thing. I'm aiming (hoping, praying) for under 12 minutes. Thus far I think it's... Not under 12 minutes.