My third animation remake, Music of Erich Zann, was my first full-scale attempt to make a short animation. I had made "Dust Bunnies" a few years before, but this was more complicated with human characters and several sets. The first version took me 5 years to make. I had to learn basic modelling, rigging, lighting... the whole works. It was done in Cinema 4D and the opening POV shot walking up the street took 25 hours to render.
Like the previous 2 remakes, I like the original version, but it lacks, mostly because of the skill and technical deficits I had at the time, the look and feel I wanted to achieve. My goal is to have online the best versions of my films on display and use the remakes to get better with Blender and animation in general for future projects now that I am retired and have (in theory) more time to work on personal projects.
Old version of the street. Not the reason this needed to be redone, I was satisfied with the look.
Old and new version of Zann. New is more realistic and will have more emotional range. Same with the narrator.
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.
I worked hard on these for a client for use as a book cover and they were rejected so I decided they could stand on their own as art for art's sake. Made mostly in Blender with compositing done in Affinity Studio.
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.
I was happy enough with my first image but since I finished it I have tried to reopen the file and becuase. I changed computers and Blender versions it was missing textures and I decided to fix that. In the time between finishing it and seeing the problem I also learned a lot more and thought this could be very much improved and I think I had been . he skeleton is much more real looking and I used cycles to render it, which is much more accurate the EEVEE. Above is the new and below is the old so you cna see the difference. It took 90 minutes to render. I could have optimized it more but it is also poster sizedin case I decide to print it.
This is a remake of a 2020 version I made in Cinema 4D and had a lot of technical restrictions that never sat well with me. There was no way the software and my computer could but 29 characters in a shot and even just moving them around, which worked as no one was going to count the men, was even more limited, since they could really move much or the app would crash. I do think it worked but lacked the look I wanted.
This version made with Blender, I hope, is much more realized with more movement and a better, more detailed setting. Michael Z. Keamy and I were originally going to film this with live actors in Provincetown but getting 28 young men to cavort naked on a beach, even in P-town isn't as easy to put together as it sounds. So I went with animation and his great narration. The soundscape is simple. I added some seagull noises to round it out but otherwise it's unchanged. The structure is basically the same as well. I like the way I set up the shots but now everything looks better and has more going on in each shot. I gave the young men and the woman more character I hope.
Six years ago, I made an animated short with my writer pal Michael Z Keamy. He narrated. We had planned to do the poem live action at a secluded part of the beach in Provincetown but getting 28 young guys to splash around naked on the beach in Provincetown is harder than one might think. I decided to animate it instead.
The original version was OK. Extremely limited by my version of Cinema 4D and my computing power at the time. Turns out having 28 young animated men isn't all that easier to get on video.
Now using Blender and my older but still powerful 10 i9 processor imac, it was possible to improve on it. The structure is the same but the sets are better made and there are actually 28 men and the woman in the poem in the animation now. The people look less cartoon-y and all the characters move, something I could not accomplish before without crashing the computer.
It's coming along and I feel I am doing more justice to the poem and Keamy's narration.
Another in this maybe series. Made in Blender this one I had a very strong idea for based on an engraving my friend Jeannette showed me decades ago. Well, sort of... it turns out the engraving "Death as a friend." Looks nothing like this and then I thought it might be from another old illustration, "Death as a friend to the poor" which was a little closer to what was in my head. Could be I saw something and just associated it with a title I like better.
In any case, this is an old woman holding hands with death in a lonely room that doesn't look like it's had many visitors recently. I tried two versions: colour and black and white. They both have strengths and weaknesses. Did post-processing in Sffinity Studio and discovered that the NIK plugins now work in them, as they did in the older Affinity suite!
I have had an idea of doing something like this since the '8-s and have never found a way to get what I wanted. I t was going to be a photo then an ink drawing and then back and forth between those until recently I decided learning more Blender was a way to get an image out of my head. Of course now I might do a small series.
I have a good amount of resources with Blender now to accomplish something close to what's in my head. I thought I would learn some techniques like depth passes and isolating parts of a scene with other passes but as I worked on this, none of those things would have been useful.
The large cryptlike building behind the figures is based fairly closely on a structure in a huge cemetery in Budapest. The mourning figure is based on a mourning angel statue, I really liked the pose. The skeleton already had wings so he didn't get any.
I had some buggy issues with Blender that were pretty annoying. I use a Make Human plugin integrated into Blender and Humgen to make more realistic humans but Make Human was missing some features somehow and Humgen wasn't working for the cross-legged pose. I settled on Make Human and it worked out but I need to figure out what went wrong. The skeleton and wings were models from my C4D days. I did post processing in Affinity Studio.
This project was suggested to me at a showing of one of my earlier animations. I did not think I could pull it off, the story has over 1000 people and a setting involving 7 rooms of various colours among other technically challenging aspects. After reading the story a few times more I decided it could be pulled back with less people and less room and still keep the tone and message of the story intact.
Even so, it would mean animating more characters in several shots than I ever had before and involve some animal simulations I wasn’t sure how to pull off. Poe’s wordiness and descriptions were also pulled back partly to reflect the simpler setting but mostly to reflect how bad a narrator I am. I did enhance my voice a little to make it sound better.
I used Make Human and Human Gen to create the characters. This made it feasible to make so many and also Human Gen can add clothes you make or buy in an easy way which I really needed for this project. One thing that Blender has in abundance is reasonably priced fantastic addons so my one man show looks better, I hope, than it would have totally on my own.
It was rendered in EEVEE and compositing and colour work was done in Apple Motion while editing was done in Final Cut Pro.
I did have issues with Human Gen here and there. A few characters suddenly had finger rigging issues and I wish that plugin had more secondary facial controls like Make Human. It has much better skin and hair so it’s a question of which I could get the most out of. The robed figure was simply rigged withAuto Rig pro. Something I plan to use more in future.
Not what is next except to get familiar with compositing in Blender. I would like to use depth maps and maybe motion maps in Apple Motion like I used to and separate elements for better colour corrections. I will try and redo some older animations I think will be greatly improved over the Cinema 4D versions and decide on a new project as I go go through all of that.
Been animating a lot lately. The credits are sort of inspired by Roger Corman horror films in the 60s. As usual I am learning more about Blender with this project and just animated 6 characters in the same shot which is a record for me. My version of C4D had issues after 3 characters and this went mostly smoothly. Composing music is not my thing but I am happy with how this worked out.
This was a bear to do, The coat is not from the plugin I used to make the characters I spent 30 hours trying to attach it so it would animate with the figure. In the end... there is a way to do in the plugin itself which takes 1 minute. God damn it! At least I know about this feature and use it in future. It needed mnor tweaks after it was done but that is often the case.
The robed figure. Already rigged for movement, though the eyes will need better control. I haven't gone much further with this lately. I haven't had the energy to figure out what needs to come next.
About 36 hours into this but it's very close to being done and could actually be used now if I had to. I saved some of the characters I made as just geometry I could import into Blender so I could reuse them, hopefully. I figured it might get me faster to the point I was at in Cinema 4D skill wise with Blender. Charles is someone I want to use again, I had a lot of fun with Mike Luce making his series. He was very fluid and stretchy and I think I can get working again.
The eyelids have been the biggest challenge, I had a plugin in the old software that set up eyes and lids and a control panel for them with a click. This time I have to use geometry nodes and set it all up manually. I have that all work except the control panel. There were issues separating the top and bottom beak as well. I would like to ad short fur but not sure how to go about that yet and finally, I use saved poses like for fists, eye blinks and facial expressions so they don't need to be done from scratch each time and I hope to start that today.
The rigging plugin I got for Blender (Auto-rig Pro) is pretty sweet and saves me so much time, the learning it has not been terrible even for a bear of little brain like me. It has some features that were a pain to do before even on character like this which is basically a human like bode with a giant beak!
I have a few more old characters to revive and that should teach me a lot.
