In this version, I made Zann's room smaller and less maintained, looking to show his station in life is not much more elevated than the narrator's. It is a bit better but they are, after all, in the same dilapidated rooming house. This set includes a hallway with a door leading into the room so I can show it from the opposite direction as well. That can be switched on and off so I can film inside easier.
I can move on with the animation until we get time to redo the narration now and all that is left if to model and rig the monster. My goal is to finish this before the end of December but no one will die if that doesn't happen! I get anxious because I have other films to remake and a new project I would love to start. This one is coming out really nicely, I think.
I got some work done on the project the last couple of days. The top image is the finished look and the one below this is the same set but before I "aged" it. Then there is an earlier version before any set dressing was added.
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.
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.
I often look to folklore and legends for inspiration. I listen to several podcasts about the stuff and recently read or reread some books on the history of vampires. I don't have plans to make a film or write a story involving vampires but they are fascinating and their history is mixed up with other folklore and legend.
Very interesting book talking about the translated cuneiform tablets in the British Museum that detail the earliest ghost stories. Could have a been a dry read but the author has an entertaining style and obviously loves his work.
Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires: The Rules to Determine True and False Cases by Antoine Augustin Calmet
A 1700s discussion of all manner of supernatural phenomenon. How could I resist that title? Well, I wish I had to be honest. The chapters are usually short and have notes at the end of each but the author wraps everything in a Christian/Catholic blanket that smothers any hope of learning much about the legends of the past except the God must have approved of them or they were hallucinations or whatever. It gets very close to the real reasons people might have believed in such things but then vers off in to it's on religious mythology. It does mention some stories mentioned in the first book on this list which means those tales were still circulating 1000s of years later.
A new book less focused on individual folklore but on the history of the concept of the vampire and how in before relatively recent times it was common to think of ghosts, werwolves and vampires as the same thing. Very well researched and makes it points with some humour and interesting asides.
And finally.... Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber
A book I reread or use as reference all the time, it's my favourite source for bloodsucking lore.
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.
I have started preproduction for "Masque of the Red Death" based on the story by Edgar Allen Poe. This has some new challenges for me such as there needs to be many more characters in some shots than usual. I keep it to three as a rule to not overtax my computer but since switching to Blender and having my MAC in 10 processor i9 with a good graphics card I feel I can push farther. For the crowd scenes I might use 2D characters for the background and have several 3D ones who can have more movement. I was hoping I could find some free or cheap medieval costumes but not much much so far. I will have to wing it.
This image is the opening shot after the title sequence and when the narration will begin. It took a few weeks to design and put together despite using some great plugins to lessen the work load. HunGen for the bodies, Fire_fx for the bonfire, Auto building for the houses and castle, Alt tab easy fog 2 for the atmosphere, and Fauna sketcher to ad crows in the sky and flies (not visible in this shot, for the bodies. The fog rolls forward and the trees have a slight breeze blowing them. Depending on how the narration works out this could be several shots or one longer tracking shot. This is straight from Blender so there will be some colour grading etc in post eventually.
One big challenge, other than my dumb debutant Blender mistakes, was placing the flickering light for the bonfire. making was easy enough but when I placed it in the bonfire it wasn't visible and the render time went up 4 times! I am using Eeevee to render as I did with my first Blender short "the Hound" as its pretty good now and getting better but also fast. This shot takes 30 seconds to render (with the light issue 20 minutes!)
Next step is the model the interior castle rooms where the story takes place. it's 7 rooms, identical save the last one but in different colours. I will need to learn to making some blood effects for this one and continue to work on getting better performances from my characters. Hopefully I can get together with the voice actor for the narration sooner than later as not having it slows down production.
This was a suggestion from some people and I assumed the story was beyond my skills for years but I think I might succeed now and upon writing the script I realized it was not as long as I thought and got some good ideas on how to economize the plot to fit a short animated film.
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 :
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!
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.
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.
Further along. The interior structure I thought would be a breeze. I would simply use the manor model and delete everything I didn't need. Turned out to be a nightmare and I wasted a couple days. Instead I made a trace of the floor plan in an EPS file and converted it to a mesh and just extruded upwards to make the walls. Lesson learned.
I am now adding the furniture and textures. There will a lot of books and weird paraphernalia like full animal and human bones on display. The characters live in a secluded manor so no one gets wind of their "collection".
The animation will be in black and white but I thought the colour rendering might be interesting to show as well.
I based this crypt on one I LOVE from the North Dorchester burying ground in Boston. I had to learn sweep nurbs in blender which involves making a profile and "sweeping" it along another shape, in this case a rectangle then adding details on top. I used a plugin that damaged things and another to add a grunge texture to complete the worn/aging effect. This will be the main focus in a couple important shots so it has a lot more detail than anything else in the cemetery will have.
Getting there. The textures are greatly improved and the rendering time is still reasonable for animation. So far. I have to make the garden area on the side of the house for a scene later in the film and find a better solution for the walkway to the house and the ground around the house that you can't see in this render. Balancing the street light and fog was not easy, it had to be think enough for something emerge from it and not too think to hide the lights completely.
One element in a much larger setup. The mansion will be behind walls and a gate and we will be looking down a foggy street lit by lamplight. My goal is to model the street and set up the shot and lighting then make the characters to be animated. I will need a cemetery set, an indoor set and this mansion will have a garden somewhere. So not many locations. It has to be as simple as possible so I can learn enough to make it look OK and live long enough to finish it. The mansion is an older model repurposed and redecorated.
I wrote and illustrated a short story before deciding to make this animation and got some feedback on that which helped this be a much better story in the end. The last 2 years have been a horror of dealing with dementia in several close family members and how this terrible disease is very much a monster that takes those we love away in one of the most heart breaking and sorrowful ways.
Originally this seemed like a good project to do in Blender and start my transition away from Cinema 4D before my old version of that software stops working but I have not been able to get to a point where I can understand Blender well enough to do that and getting this done seemed more important than learning something new(ish).
I decided early on that black and white would be best and I don't regret it. I am an avid photographer who especially loves black and white images and tried to give this a sort of silent film/vintage photography look. I worked for months on the cliff set and small town to get the look I wanted and tried not to overdo it on the details that would never be seen or used. The shot of the walk from the town to the cliffs was the most daunting and took 46 hours to render. I wanted the pace to be slow but I think it doesn't drag on and it has kept the attention the few people who have seen it so far.
Editing in Final Cut Pro and composting was done with Apple's long neglected but sometimes still updated Motion software which I like working in and doesn't cost me money every month like After Effects would.
Music and sound effects are by me and I am not expert in either but I hope they work well enough. I am planning to try and get this in some festivals. The "Another Hole in the Head" in San Francisco has been very good to me over the years and I hope other festivals will pick it up as long as I can find the money to enter a few!
Personal note:
This is the first gothic animation I have made based on a short story I wrote myself. It is the first animation I have done in over 2 years and is the direct result of why I hadn't produced anything else in all that time.
As I often state with my projects, Mike Luce was kind enough with all the other things he is doing to make the time to do the voice work and give me feedback. Core4d.com where I have been an active member for many, many years also deserves credit for the encouragement of the gang in the forums there.
As usual, as I started this project I was hating how it was coming out but in the end I am pretty happy with the look of these drawings. I wanted a sort of wood carving look like I see in some old books from over 100 years ago. Simple and heavily relying on a white ink on black paper style. I placed them in the document and I think they look appropriate for the story and I will likely do another similar project at some point. The next step is to make "Pulled Towards the Sea" into a 3 animation that won't be to influenced by these drawings, I would like ti to be it's own thing.
Drawing in both Procreate and Affinity photo. I actually did some experimenting with AI art and was not surprised how disappointing it was, even for inspiration. I get that it can be fun t tell the computer to make a picture of something using a few words and then seeing what it does but despite what we see online, in reality the AI art is pretty bad. Photoshop has a different way of using it now it seems, where you can iterate sections of an image and keep fine tuning it, even using your own photos as reference so maybe that could be useful. Much more fun and satisfying to do it yourself!
