Illustration: Fred pour John & Jesus

 

A pet portrait for my friends John and Jesus of their new super adorable kitten. 

New Lovecraft Animation: The Hound (le chien) 2024 directed by: Vincent-louis Apruzzese

(Texte français ci-dessous :)

 Story: As I usually do, the original story had to be stripped down to its most simple and basic form. Lovecraft had the characters traveling internationally for their adventures and the hound chases them intercontinentally. As a one man band making animation, having too many elements, locations and characters will make doing the animation impossible accomplish practically. I felt the 2 characters were not likeable and Mike and I tried to get that across. The narrator is a bit pompous despite his degrading mental state as events unfold.

Production: My animation style is usually very stop motion inspired, this is as well but not as much previous efforts. 

This was a challenge, more so than my other short films because my older version of C4D stopped working in my OS and I HAD to learn Blender or not make any more animations. I have been trying to learn it for a decade without any real success. Recently the software has been advancing in leaps and bounds, not just technically but also changing it’s interface to a much more artist friendly one that is closer to industry standards. My work has dropped to almost nothing so while that is certainly panic inducing and financially disastrous, I was able to put a full time effort into learning and since Blender is free it didn’t add to my money woes. 

After 3 months I was ready to try and start production and gathered my research, worked on the script and started to make the sets and characters. I made a couple of plugin purchases ( OK more than a couple) to help me get the look I wanted which included a human character generator that works within Blender and also does the rigging automatically which saved me months of time. It is limited in that clothing options are all modern and no third party additions so far so I have to modify to give a pseudo 30s look to the costumes. I spent a HUGE amount of effort reformatting 100s of models from Cinema 4D to Bender friendly files but it was worth the effort. I was also able to easily ad fog, a gothic horror must that did not take hours to render each frame and I was very happy with the result. 

I restricted myself with some technical choices to avoid getting overwhelmed on my first project so I didn’t learn how to export separate passes of elements that would normally let me do post motion blur and give me  more control over the final images. I also rendered in the faster real time engine EVEE that Blender has developed and it was more than good enough for this. The full force render engine is really great but I would be rendering until next year if I used it, partly because I have to learn how to optimize it for my needs. 

Conclusion: I love Blender! Now I finally have a beginner’s handle on it I think I go upwards from here. It is up to you if this is a step up or down from my previous work but it seems a step up to me! 

Voici une version avec des sous-titres français :

Histoire: Comme je le fais d'habitude, l'histoire originale a dû être dépouillée dans sa forme la plus simple et la plus basique. Lovecraft a fait voyager les personnages à l'étranger pour leurs aventures et le chien les poursuit de manière intercontinentale. En tant que groupe d'un seul homme faisant de l'animation, avoir trop d'éléments, de lieux et de personnages rendra l'animation impossible à accomplir pratiquement. J'ai senti que les 2 personnages n'étaient pas sympathiques et Mike et moi avons essayé de le faire passer. Le narrateur est un peu pompeux malgré son état mental dégradant au fur et à mesure que les événements se déroulent. 

Production : Mon style d'animation est généralement très inspiré du stop motion, c'est aussi bien, mais pas autant d'efforts précédents. C'était un défi, plus que mes autres courts métrages parce que mon ancienne version de C4D a cessé de fonctionner dans mon système d'exploitation et que je devais apprendre Blender ou ne plus faire d'animations. J'essaie de l'apprendre depuis une décennie sans aucun succès réel. Récemment, le logiciel a progressé à pas de géant, non seulement techniquement, mais aussi en changeant son interface pour une interface beaucoup plus conviviale pour les artistes et qui est plus proche des normes de l'industrie. Mon travail est tombé à presque rien, donc bien que cela soit certainement induisant la panique et financièrement désastreux, j'ai pu mettre un effort à temps plein dans l'apprentissage et comme Blender est gratuit, cela n'a pas ajouté à mes problèmes d'argent. Après 3 mois, j'étais prêt à essayer de commencer la production et j'ai rassemblé mes recherches, j'ai travaillé sur le scénario et j'ai commencé à faire les décors et les personnages. J'ai fait quelques achats de plugins (OK plus que quelques-uns) pour m'aider à obtenir le look que je voulais, qui comprenait un générateur de caractères humains qui fonctionne dans Blender et qui fait également le gréement automatiquement, ce qui m'a fait gagner des mois de temps. C'est limité en ce sens que les options de vêtements sont toutes modernes et qu'il n'y a pas d'ajouts de tiers jusqu'à présent, je dois donc les modifier pour donner un look pseudo des années 30 aux costumes. J'ai dépensé énormément d'efforts pour reformater des centaines de modèles de Cinema 4D à des fichiers conviviaux de Bender, mais cela en valait la peine. J'ai également pu facilement ajouter du brouillard, une horreur gothique qui n'a pas pris des heures pour rendre chaque image et j'ai été très satisfait du résultat. Je me suis limité à certains choix techniques pour éviter d'être submergé sur mon premier projet, donc je n'ai pas appris à exporter des passes séparées d'éléments qui me permettraient normalement de faire du flou post motion et me donneraient plus de contrôle sur les images finales. J'ai également rendu dans le moteur en temps réel plus rapide EVEE que Blender a développé et c'était plus que suffisant pour cela. Le moteur de rendu pleine force est vraiment génial, mais je le rendrais jusqu'à l'année prochaine si je l'utilisais, en partie parce que je dois apprendre à l'optimiser pour mes besoins.  

Conclusion : J'adore Blender ! Maintenant que j'ai enfin une poignée de débutant, je pense que je monte à partir d'ici. C'est à vous de décider s'il s'agit d'un pas en hausse ou en bas par rapport à mon travail précédent, mais cela me semble être un pas en avant !

Cinema presentation of my documentary "The Picnic" at The Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, Cambridge MA!

 

My documentary "The Picnic" is playing July 20, at 3:30 pm at The Brattle cinema in Harvard Square Cambridge! The doc is about the 50 years of the legendary comic book store I used to manage a very long time ago and is still there, very close to the theatre. Some of the interviewees will be in attendance as well! 

This was a long, multi-year project made possible by donations of many people but particularly Denis Leclerc and Spike MacFee (the first employee of the Picnic who sadly passed in 2019.)

If you or anyone you know would be interested and can be there please show up, it would mean a lot to me, the store and those who are in the documentary. 

The Brattle:  40 Brattle St. Cambridge, MA 02138

Saturday, July 20  -  3:30 pm    40 minutes 

Illustration: Yoga - single handstand

 

Drawn with procreate over a couple months. I thought I would have time at the end of the day etc to do this but I never really did and was able to finish it today only because I had a contractor here for hours fixing my bedroom ceiling after a leak from above. It's Montréal Complétment Cirque in a week or so so maybe I will have more acrobat references to work from soon. 

The Hound : animation progress update.

 Getting more done each day. Right now it looks under 4 minutes and there is over a minute to of animation (maybe 2 weeks work) and then make the music and do the finessing it needs to look and sound as professional as I can make it. This is a clip of the grave robbing scene. 

I miss being able to select a group of key frames in the timeline and be able to stretch them all apart or smoosh them together as one group as I did in C4D. This lets me adjust the times much easier. There might be a way in Blender, but I have not found it yet. Next project I will need to learn about exports separate passes for focus, motion blur and objects so I can fiddle. much more with the clips in post. I did not do any of that with this short film because it is already quite a lot to have learned what I have so far! 

Award: Pulled Towards the Sea voted best Horror film in Warped Dimension 5 Festival!

 

Part of the "Another Hole in the Head" San Francisco, "Warped Dimension" is a fun online festival I have been a part of for many years now. It was wonderful be voted for an award! 

If you missed the film, it's on Youtube. Be sure to like and subscribe and all that so more people can see it. 

Animation project: cemetery small update

 The 2 characters are in position but not posed yet. I will need to time their actions to the coming narration. In the meantime, I decided the starry sky was not working, it needed clouds especially since fog is on the ground and a big part of the coming shots after this. So I learned how to do that in a simple way, which still took me all day to figure out. 

Distraction project: Updated space station

 I decided to remake my old space station project in Blender. I haven't tried animation yet I have to learn how to rotate the disks. Some day I will. Below are two older version done in Cinema 4D which I was very happy with at the time but not so much now. The oldest version is really not good, no sense of scale, the details are too large. Below it is much better but the new one above has a tone more detail and I was able to make very quickly. I like the 3D earth better in C4D that was free plugin that looked amazing, the Blender earth I used has texture issues at the poles. There is a Blender add-on for making a few planets in the solar system that includes some NASA hardware like the actual space station but I will need to budget for it. It is not expensive I am just too poor right now. 

Animation project: cemetery

 

I have made more progress lately. The creature I think is done and rigged. Not in the most rational way possible but it works in my tests. The 2 main characters will be at this crypt and slide the top off, revealing what's inside. I 100% put too much detail into this set. Some of that is because I know I will likely need to have an unplanned shot and might need that detail and mostly because I haven't planned it out enough in advance to know what needs detail and what doesn't. I made assets of the tombstone and other objects and I'm sure they will come in handy for future work. 

photography: Village Gai mai 2024

 A break from Blender for the moment this morning. The street has a rainbow path on it this year. Still not competition for the canopy of coloured balls we had for years and brought in tons of tourists. It's something at least.