Loosely based on the 1904 story "Oh Whistle and I'll Come for You My Lad" by M.R James. This film has no spoken dialogue and French translations of some written text. A woman living alone is joined by a surprise addition to her isolated beach location where a hidden horror is revealed.
This was a much delayed project for many reasons. The pandemic made it difficult to create oddly because I didn't have enough isolation and family issues became a higher priority. It was also started, sets designed and a computer glitch made all the set files corrupted and they had to be redone. This made them much better in the end, I think. There is no spoken dialogue and the 2 instances to written text have French translations underneath for my local viewers.
I use some traditional Aztec instrument sounds for some of the effects and composed the music myself, if you can call that composing... I hope it works. I made the character with an app called "Make Human" which has is limitations and needed modifications but saved time and aggravation getting this thing finally off the ground. All of the visual compositing was done in Apple Motion, my choice for animation these days. I had a plugin that allowed me to do change the focus in post, but it was updated and that feature was deleted! I was able to get my money back but the old version wouldn't work with the current Mac OS so I had to improvise and while not perfect, I found a way to do essentially the same thing. I did make the lighting with After Effects. I could have done it in Motion but AE has a preset that makes it super easy and I felt super lazy about it.
Librement basé sur l'histoire de 1904 "Oh Whistle and I'll Come for You My Lad" de M.R James. Ce film n'a pas de dialogue parlé et des traductions françaises de certains textes écrits. Une femme vivant seule est rejointe par un ajout surprise à sa plage isolée où une horreur cachée est révélée.
Ce fut un projet très retardé pour de nombreuses raisons. La pandémie a rendu difficile la création bizarrement, car je n'avais pas assez d'isolement et les problèmes familiaux sont devenus une priorité plus élevée. Il a également été lancé, les décors ont été conçus et un problème informatique a corrompu tous les fichiers du décor et ils ont dû être refaits. Cela les a rendus beaucoup mieux à la fin, je pense. Il n'y a pas de dialogue parlé et les deux instances du texte écrit ont des traductions françaises en dessous pour mes téléspectateurs locaux.
J'utilise des sons d'instruments aztèques traditionnels pour certains des effets et j'ai composé la musique moi-même, si on peut appeler ça composer... J'espère que ça marche. J'ai créé le personnage avec une application appelée "Make Human" qui a des limites et des modifications nécessaires, mais qui a permis d'économiser du temps et de l'aggravation pour que cette chose décolle enfin. Toute la composition visuelle a été réalisée dans Apple Motion, mon choix pour l'animation ces jours-ci. J'avais un plugin qui me permettait de changer le focus dans le post, mais il a été mis à jour et cette fonctionnalité a été supprimée ! J'ai pu récupérer mon argent, mais l'ancienne version ne fonctionnait pas avec le Mac OS actuel, j'ai donc dû improviser et, même si ce n'était pas parfait, j'ai trouvé un moyen de faire essentiellement la même chose. J'ai fait l'éclairage avec After Effects. J'aurais pu le faire dans Motion mais AE a un préréglage qui le rend super facile et je me sentais super paresseux à ce sujet.
The festival is the 24th-29th of September 2020 and films will be streamed to a registered Zoom audience. I may also be there in a window for a post screening Q&A live in ZOOM. The link about will have all the pertinent information if I miss posting anything here.
After about two years of preparation and animation my animated "The Cask of Amontillado" is finished. Mike Luce is the voice of Montresor and Michael Z. Keamy is Fortunato. I tried to be the voice of Montresor at first but I was beyond terrible and Mike Luce kindly redid that audio for me. I went with human like animal characters this time instead of cartoon humans. I thought it might work better and give me more options with the animation plus added some symbolism.
I used Cinema 4D as I am not ready for something like this in Blender yet. It was edited in Final Cut X and I did not use After effects for the compositing but used Apple's underrated and often ignored Motion software instead and it worked out great. The animation still has some issues I am having trouble with, such as decent walk cycles and some of the movements were not as smooth as I would have liked but overallI am very happy with the results. Nothing is ever perfect, is it? The settings were a long haul to make as the upper and lower catacombs are huge and cavernous and lit by torches. The sound was a little more complex as I had to record a bunch of foley and sound effects to flesh out the sound and add more atmosphere and detail to the short.
During the final edit, I noticed a bunch of things I had somehow missed, one was the wrong source files were used for a sequence which made the image looked pixelated and another was a terrible clicking noise during a dialog scene I can't believe I had not heard during the editing process. My excuse is that the noise here is non stop between the construction and the fact I am not in glorious isolation but home with my spouse which does not give me the solitude I need to work efficiently. Constant distraction is death to a project like this so I am glad I was able to get it done and be happy with the end result.
I have two posters ready in case I decide to enter it in some festivals. I have had the luck to be in one or another over the last 6 years so having promotional stuff ready is a fun way to tie up a project in a nice bow.
If you like the animation, tell me! Like it on Youtube and pass it around so maybe it can get some attention and love!
My nephew is home from university, like the ret of the world and asked me to do this 30 second animation for him so, of course, I did. Lighting was a challenge for some reason, I need to think more about making lightbulbs look like they should. I added little details like the fans move at different speeds and dust particles in the air but tried to keep it simple. There is a slight camera shake to keep it looking less mechanical.
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.
Another animation done, this time a much lighter one. I am fairly happy with it, it has a bunch of effects and is going in a direction I think could be fun for the future. I have another one of these planned and the voices recorded, so I hope to expand on this.
Based on the poem by Edgar Allen Poe, this was my longest single animation to date at 9 minutes. Michael Z. Keamy did the narration and it was a solid 5 months of full time work to get it done.
This time out with the addition of simple sub-titling tools added to Final Cut X, I was able to add French and English captioning so more people can watch and understand it. I tried for a sombre but realistic tone to present to poem. I have seen a few animations that go wild with abstract shots and ideas but I wanted this to keep grounded. It was a challenge to make something that is basically some depressed dude yelling at a bird in one room for nine minutes until he passes out! I started with longer, lingering shots and then made them shorter and shorter as it progressed to give it a faster pace while keeping the ideas of grief and depression to the forefront.
This time out, Charles Webster Billingsworth the 3rd warns about the side effects of acne medications in his own dramatic style, of course.
Mike Luce again provides the voice and we pushed the performance farther this time. It's a third longer than other shorts with him as well. I originally had all the side effects of isotretinoin in the script and read out but seriously... the short would have been twice as long! I also took out things like suicide which while I could have made a joke from it, I decided against it and cut out some repetitious symptoms as well for time. It's not a real PSA afterall and I don't think Charles screaming every single symptom was really necessary to get the point across!
This guy came together pretty quickly. He comes with a spaceship as well and will be featured in a feature project I am currently scripting out. If all goes well it will be another little series called "Dog & Weasel", both of whom I've recently made and shown here on the blog. This robot has some squash and stretch built in as does the spaceship so I am hoping for a more fluid style along than the "Filthy Sheep" shorts. The Robot has a ray gun coming out of his chest and his antenna is dynamic so it's fairly humorous moving about.
I have a couple projects I come back to every now and then to see if I can do better or how much faster my new software/computer is using the projects as a way to compare render times etc.
This one I did originally to encourage a friend to write a story he wanted to write and I liked it enough to keep reworking it.
The big difference this time was cutting the render time dramatically by using textures to detail the model instead of polygons so the model is really simple overall. I was also able to add many more details which I think make the station look much larger.
Below: the 2015 image is on top and the new on below.
This time famous actor at large, Charles Webster Billingsworth the third takes on a dramatic scene from the film classic, Jaws 2.
Voice work once again by Mike Luce.
I have finished a new animation project with the always helpful voice work of Mike Luce. Basically, it's a filmed theatre piece of a great (platypus) thespian (over)acting Hamlet's most famous speech in front of an adoring audience.
The purpose of doing this (other than getting it out of my head like all my other projects) was to expand my possibilities with cartoon-like characters. Making them and rigging them has always been difficult for me but I seem to have broken through a wall and made it to another place this time out.
I normally rig my characters using Cactus Dan's tools for C4D, but sadly, he has passed and I realized if I ever upgraded C4D above version 16, I will lose access to those tools and needed to try the character object autorig. Very luckily, Everfresh (from the C4D cafe) has made a cartoon rig template for the character object and provided it for free and it is a glorious thing. His tutorials on how to use it also clearly explained some things about the auto rigging that had prevented me form using it before so I expect for now on, I'll be going that route. My cousin Sheila helped a bit by reviewing the look of Charles and critiquing some early animations, especially his theatrical strut.
Mike Luce was an amazing help getting this done and always encouraging. In fact he has already voiced a second one of these to be done... soon-ish.
I hope people like this, it takes a lot out me mentally and even physically to incarnate this sort of character and bring it to life. To Be or Not to Be in sort of proof of concept project - meaning I made it more difficult than it needed to be to see if I could pull it off.
I am as far as I can go with my next animation project until I have the voice work done, so I decided to make a simple character, something I've been thinking about a long time, for practice and to prepare and to keep in good form for the coming projects.
So this is a breakdown of the model, wireframe, textured and finally hair added. It's a kiwi bird if you didn't know already. I looked at lots of photos, skeletons, cartoon drawings and other animations to get inspired... but oddly I totally forgot what got me interested in the kiwi to begin with... this short animation which I think s brilliant!
I saw it years ago and honestly if I had remembered it, my version would have come out very different. Still I'm happy enough with mine for now.
I used the Character object in C4D for the rigging, they have bird template That was pretty simple to use as it's just a body with a hard and legs... no wings or arms or hands or anything complicated.
When done I made a little walk sequence.
Then took it little further and decided he should take a stroll in my kitchen.
As the price of Cinema 4D has jumped astronomically over the years with less and less improvements and new features to pay for that extra cost, it has become apparent that unless I get a hell of lot more work that pays a hell of a lot more money, eventually my current version will run out of steam and be unusable. Already, I am trying to adapt to the untimely death of Cactus Dan whose plugins are essential to rigging in C4D (In my opinion) and are no longer being updated.
To start finding alternatives, I decided to learn Blender, a free program that has been used for some amazing animations and has ALL the features and more of C4D and frankly just about any other software out there. Of course being free software it has its pluses and minuses , a big minus being not many places use it professionally.
Just Starting to Learn
Blender is a very deep program to learn. I decided to start very simply as I had tried to learn it unsuccessfully in the past. Despite having used a number of software over the last few decades, I couldn’t even place a cube into the scene or render anything. It was frustrating and I have to say, it still is. The interface is pretty terrible from an end user’s point of view. Like much of the freeware out there made by programmers, it is set up more to a programmer’s set of needs. Blender requires that you learn a huge amount of keyboard shortcuts in conjunction with a 3 button mouse just to navigate in it’s windows. Many of the shortcuts are non standard so it can be like learning a new language just to do the most basic of tasks. It’s a well known issue in the Blender community and there is an ongoing debate from what I read on various forums on what to do, if anything, about that problem. It IS a problem, despite the alleged benefits of typing in values by hand for some people, it simply isn’t how we work these days and limits drastically the reach of this fairly amazing effort. Many of the arguments for keeping as it is are reminiscent of those when computer went from DOS commands to a graphic interface and I would argue that argument was lost a long time ago.
To get over this hurdle, I bought a 600 page book The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics (3rd addition) by John M. Blain. I don’t find the writing style so easy to understand but it covers seemingly everything and should be a great reference source as I go on. Another thing I did was follow tutorials, a few about the basic interface which were somewhat helpful and a few at www.LittleWebHut.com which I am using as my work samples here because of the simplicity of the projects and the instructor never assumes you will remember the complex series of shortcuts and goes over each progression step by step which helps me to slowly memorize and adapt to the interface while creating something interesting. I picked two basic modelling projects, an animation that involved particles the node based cycles render engine and one that creates a robot dog and introduced me to the key frame and timeline system in Blender.
My Impressions So far
Having only scratched the surface, many of my opinions will surely change over time. I plan to keep at this another 3 months intensely, hopefully ending in doing a complete short animation in Blender from start to finish.
The modelling tools are interesting and while not intuitive, cover all the bases and have some interesting ideas behind them. You have to accept each change before moving on to to the next - this is pretty annoying and slow. The bones IK/FK system is clunky and something like setting up an IK chain (so far, there are certainly plenty of functions I have not been exposed to yet) is manually accomplished bone by bone while it’s a simple click in C4D and other programs. The particle system is pretty good from what I’ve experienced. Not as good as X-particles (which is an unfair comparison) but I found using them fairly easy. Rendering is a little complicated. The Blender engine is only barely serviceable and might be good as a test render while the Cycles engine is nodes based and manages to give flicker free animations using techniques that take longer and are not as usefully implemented as they could be. You have a lot less control in Blender in the final render from what I see and a lot more control in setting up the textures. The key framing is not great sorry to say. It’s hard to get a handle on and I found myself swearing quite a bit just moving a sphere from on spot to another.
Things I need to Learn for this to be Practical
Compositing is a large part of my work flow, not just 3D into live action video but often separating things like motion blur and depth of field to be adjusted in another program like After Effects or Motion to gain better control and save on rendering time. The capacity is here, I just have to learn how and if I can save different layers (like a shadow, z depth, motion vector or object layer) as separate files on export. Mograph-like clones and animation are the bread and butter of many 3D artists and Blender is lacking in this department but they update with new features regularly so who knows how long it will stay behind in this aspect. Blender has some pretty awesome character rigging tools, if you can learn to use them. I think I will gain some very much needed experience in more advanced rigging techniques as I go along.
Blenders Biggest Advantages
Being free is one, but not the most important as functionality and ease of use trumps free while doing serious work. Time is money and also the less aggravating something is to use, the more you will use it. Blender’s add-ons are nothing short of amazing and super useful. They provide easier and faster ways to do things you would pay tons of cash for on another platform and many are freely included. Some examples are an auto-rigger, a room builder and even a very adaptive character builder, something all high end 3D software should have as making characters is the biggest time killer and often the most discouraging aspect of 3D work fro many animators. I wish there was a clothing generator as well! Those working on this software update it quite often and it’s always improving. They seem very transparent and open to suggestions - something Maxon (C4D) has most definitely not been in recent years. While far to many features are hidden and hard to find, they are there and I was surprised to discover many features I paid for in C4D plugins were just sitting below the surface in Blender. It should be stated that overall, it is fairly stable and doesn’t crash often, but it does crash. It can be a little buggy as well. So like all complicated software, save often!
Conclusion So Far
I can’t say I love Blender or that it will come my main software anytime soon. I can say it’s got the potential to become those things. I also find that learning it has already opened possibilities I had not thought of in C4D in terms of workflow and other things but can be applied to it. I can also see using some of the features in Blender as a way to get around or create things that C4D does not offer or do well and importing them.
I have joined a forum for Blender that seems friendly and helpful, something that really pushed me into C4D was the C4d café forum, one of the best ever. I need to get more competent and comfortable with Blender before I post anything and start to interact. I am sure when I do, I will gain better appreciation for this software.
This went faster, much faster than Music of Erich Zann (which took 5 years to get done) but I think I managed to improve in several areas. The characters talk, there is depth of field in the shots and I think I boiled the story down to its essential elements. My voice is terrible, of course, but what can you do?
Problems still abound. The character modelling is not much more advanced than the last film, the rigging is better but still not where I think it should be. Texturing of the sets is fine but I am looking into a way to hand paint characters and objects with a software outside of Maxon's C4D Bodypaint which I have yet to get to work right.
A demo reel from my first two seasons of the TV show Look Kool. I tried more technical things the second season, like water and smoke simulations and gave my character, Kool Kat a huge upgrade in movement and expressions. If needed, I could even make him talk... but i'm glad he doesn't since that is a nightmare to pull off well! He also got a robotic arm and was rendered as a 2D animation in this season!
So this is the final version. Thanks to Mike Luce who took the time and effort to narrate the film which allowed me to replace the titles cards which were not exactly loved by everyone.
Almost done rigging the second character. Still working on facial expressions and some secondary movement rigging. I want Zann, the musician's tailcoats to move dynamically as he moves for example. I am hoping to get a couple shots actually animated with the younger man before this Friday when I am riding my bike to Vermont and won't be able to touch this for a few days.
Right now there is no lighting on them, so I am hoping they look good in set and with the right moody lighting. There is a still monster to create and rig but it's not in the film very much so getting the scenes with these guys is priority one as I work out the monster stuff in my head.
