A cyclist on a trip from his home in Montreal Quebec to his former hometown of Boston Massachusetts is haunted by memories of the time he spent there with his best friend 25 years previously.
This is a remake of sorts of an earlier version of this animation made in Cinema 4D. I use Blender now and thought I might do better as it was a very personal project for me. I actually planned this trip for real but was never able to do it for various reasons recurring kidney problems on my part, family issues and the pandemic happening. This is a functional film for sure but many of the events are from life and experience from that time with my friend, Jay.
Below is the original film, should anyone want to see it for comparison. I kept some of the original animation as I really liked them. Most of my problems visually were with the characters and how they and some of the renders looked. The basic structure is the same with some cleaning up of shots and scenes to hopefully work better and I also added a subtle effect for when things are in the past to make that clearer.
I spent 3 days working on remaking the set for the SW Corridor shot. Most of it is made from still and video cutouts. The buildings in the rear I drew in Affinity vetcor. The animation on this was very simple so it didn't take long to do after everything was set up. There is a right wing to this set where we see the friends walking as a butterfly flies past them, which is challenging character animation and the sick friend is walking with a walker.
The original shot is below. I am not reinventing the animation so it's very similar but more natural looking, I hope. I noticed there are vantage points on the corridor where more Boston landmarks are visible so I think it has more a sense of place now.
More progress than I expected in the last 2 days. This is an interior room in Boston's South End. Several shots happen here and I hope it's a nice scene with the 2 characters.
I have made more progress on this improved version. I am keeping several shots from the older version; they look good, and recreating them to look the same is a waste of time and effort. The indoor lighting, I think, shows a huge improvement in the characters from the original, and I can get much more emotion on the faces.
Moving along with this project. I took the bike model and made it work for animation, meaning the wheels turn, the handlebars turn and the pedals turn and the whole thing can be moved as one object. Then I put the main character on it and, after a couple days of work, managed to attach his feet to the pedals so if they move his legs move and look like he is pedalling the bike. I cheated on the wheels and pedals turning in a way. There is a technique for making them turn when the bike moves forward but it involved math so I just couldn't handle it. Instead, I animated them by hand for 10 seconds, long enough for any scene this will be in and can drop it in and it will look fine. There are no close-ups of him on the bike, just medium long and long shots.
Original: 25 Years Later (2020) 4 minutes 19 seconds
The story of a man taking a bike journey from Montreal to Boston, where 25 years earlier, he had taken care of a sick friend and the memories invoked along the way. Made in Cinema 4D.
New version.... about the same length of time I'm thinking. More or less. I cut a couple shots while making my shot list for this new version but I think some of the other shots will get lengthened as I try and improve on them. This will be made in Blender. The characters a re made the same as the first version but since switching to Blender I have a much better handle on how to make them more realistic. I am going to have much more cinematic lighting, I hope, and more atmosphere to each shot plus better movement and emotions on the two characters.
Above is the cyclist character in all the versions I will need throughout the film. The second character changes more dramatically and will be more of a challenge.
A big challenge will be remaking all the sets. There was A LOT and I don't plan on cutting any out. Interiors and many exterior shots of cycling from Montreal to Boston. As this is a deeply personal film for me, I want it to be special, though I doubt even as many people who saw the first version will watch this updated one.
This took a while and a lot out of me. Lots of sad memories and a few happy ones thrown in for good measure. Thanks again to Mike Luce for his wicked laugh, and he didn't even ask what it was for!
This is sort of more "epic" as well as personal for me in animation. 15 locations that all had to be designed and made and then populated with two real-ish looking humans.
This is not a documentary. I wish I was still in shape like the cyclist in the animation is 25 years later after taking care of my friend but many of the events did happen. I won't bike to Boston as I planned but I will go there this spring/summer. A bike tour would take almost a week and I don't have the funds for a week in hotels, then time in Boston and then find a way to get back home with my bike. In a way this is my attempt to come to terms with the events all those years back, it was a very tough time and I though I helped out one friend for six years, there were others for shorter periods and some of that is reflected in this as well.
Some of you might recognize certain locations... like my office, street, the bridge and several locations in Boston. Nothing is slavishly reproduced but even the biking scenes are based on several trips from Boston to Montreal.
If you see this and have opinions, tell me and watch it on You Tube, give it likes etc. I would like it to be seen and promoted somehow so please refer others to it if you think it's appropriate.
Working out textures, camera move and all those butterflies. It seems to work overall. Some textures, like the street and brick walkway need some tweaking and the position of the butterfly swarms could use some more thought before settling on a final composition. The Goulding on the right is fully made and textured so it can be used in another shot as is the car which will play an important role when one of the characters sees his reflection in the window. This set might be used in 3 to 5 shots in the end. Again it based on the entry to the South West Corridor park on West Newton Street in Boston but it isn't supposed to be a recreation, just have all the basic details so someone who knows the area might pick up on it.
The bushes are 3D objects but the trees are all image cutouts on a plane as is the building in the back, which I drew in Affinity Photo. I have to keep the poly count down so render times can reasonable. With that in mind, I restricted some shading effects like ambient occlusion on the butterflies and bushes. I don't really go for photo real look in my animation shorts... just real enough.
Almost done with the set pieces now, two more left. On top you see the Montreal interior shot which is almost 100% my actual home studio space. Pretty easy to make since for ideas I just had to look up from my desk. Even the bike is in the same place my bike is in right now.
Below is the Montreal exterior which is about 60% my street and home exterior. So much so my spouse immediately asked.. "Hey is that our house?". This shot had a problem of being well over 3 minutes a frame to render, even without the character or any animation in it. I decided to use techniques I normally reserve for inserting animation into a live action video. I render the scene with none of the things that will animated in it as a single his res image and use that on a background object. I delete everything except objects that will need to have shadows or reflections on them, in this case it was just the street and project the same background image onto that. This eliminates all the rendering that needs to be done for 95% of the shot as pretty much only an image is being rendered with a few other items. It's down to 3 seconds an image now. The tree has moving leaves and to save even more render time I might render that out separately and add it in After effects later.
I added another step, something I really wanted to try for a LONG time. I painted in some elements like flowers and a flower pot. Since the shot has no movement this allows even more detail without have to render even more complex objects . I think it works and I'm encouraged to keep doing things in this direction.
I have been working on this project in various forms for quite a few years now. It was going to be a documentary, then a live action fictional film and now - an animation. The idea to do it in animation was not mine but from Michael Z Keamy who has been encouraging me to animate something personal instead of adapting a story or making something funny and cartoonish.
Summary: A man takes on a multi-day ride from Montreal, 25 years after he took care of a sick friend to Boston, where the friend and he lived at the time.
Simple story and I have been able to limit the characters on screen to two making animating it more manageable. The actual script is only a page long but here's the rub... there is something like 15 locations as the cyclist travels to Boston and reminisces about the past. I have made about ½ of those locations so far, but have not started the character design yet. That will be another challenge as they have to age and one needs to get very sick but still be recognizable. Making and rigging characters is my weakest skillset and these need to be better than what I've done before. They won't be life-like depictions, I don't feel that's even a goal when making animations, but they need to feel like real people.
To be honest, this is already one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do in film. The story is based on my personal experiences, mostly with one person but not exclusively as I actually tried to help out a few people who were sick in the 90s when I lived in Boston. So while the 2 characters might be, in effect, much like me and my friend, they are more representatives of people like us mixed with others. This was important for the story to make it flow right but also it's just really emotionally hard to go back to this period and literally recreate it in such detail. Not being "about me" gives it some distance. I had planned to actually do this ride for real 15 yers ago, then 10 years ago but it didn't pan out for various reasons out of my control. Just affording places to stay during the trip is an issue and getting me and the bike back to Montreal is logistically difficult. I am planning to get there this summer, the actual 25th anniversary which gives this short film extra urgency and makes it a bit more distressing to produce. Art is exposing pain sometimes and it should be cathartic. At least I hope it is in the end.
Not sure what I'll do with this animation when it's done, and I wish I had a budget to help me dedicate time exclusively to it.
