let sleeping gods lie
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May 8, 2008
lsgl - babbling
by sven at 11:59 pm
I'm trying to finalize the model for the Elder Things' coliseum... Which I've nick-named "Babel."
Here's a selection of the models I've developed so far:
Activating radiosity in that last pic makes a big difference... It fills in some of the overly-stark shadows -- and adds an interesting texture.
Slow going... Had to write a post just to show myself I'm making some kind of progress!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (7) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
April 26, 2008
100 sven hours = 100 film seconds
by sven at 5:17 pm
Today is day 75 of my 100 day countdown, pushing to finish Let Sleeping Gods Lie.
Putting in 25 hours a week on animating Act 2, I've just today passed the 100 hour mark. I've got approximately 250 hours still to go.
Interesting to note: Right now Act 2 is 1 minute and 40 seconds long. That's 100 seconds... So, thus far, an hour of labor has been invested for each second of film. (And really, I won't be surprised if each second actually winds up costing two hours of labor.)
Animation is insane.
What am I up to lately? Over the past few days, I've been working on rendering two different skies. One for when the Elder Things' civilization is triumphant -- and one for when it's been smashed. (Check out the photos above.)
new developments
Even at this point in the game, the storyboard continues to evolve as new ideas come to me...
I decided that in order to convey the genocide of a species, having just one symbolic Elder lying dead isn't enough... I want mountains of corpses and lakes of blood! Not only will it be a more powerful image -- it also helps support Act 3. Act 3 is all about fast, violent action; there's no time to survey the carnage. By showing lots of dead bodies in Act 2, the consequences of Act 3 are implied and don't need to be shown.
I've also discovered that I need to show more of Carl (one of my actors) in the Dream History sequence. I've done some experimental shots which I think will work out pretty well... The big surprise (for me) is that the new material changes the end of the film.
Yes, five years into this project, I've suddenly got a new ending!
It's obviously not what I originally had in mind... But it's a DOABLE solution. And at this point in the filmmaking process, that's really what matters most.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
April 16, 2008
from story reel to animatic
by sven at 11:40 pm
Only recently have I come to understand that there's a distinction between the terms "story reel" and "animatic."
A story reel takes the pictures from your storyboard and makes them into a slideshow. Sometimes 2D elements will be separated from their background and moved around using a compositing program -- to give the clip more life.
Here's my story reel for Act 2 of Let Sleeping Gods Lie:
An animatic is a mock-up of a shot you're planning that's rendered using 3D CG software. Animatics are commonplace both for live action and animated productions.
For the past two weeks I've been slowly going through my story reel and replacing drawings with CG stand-ins. Today I finally got rid of the last drawing left in my timeline. Yay! A small milestone -- but a milestone nonetheless.
This is the 7th animatic I've rendered out so far. I'm going through a process of iterations... I write down notes each time I output an animatic -- and then I go back and make the next version.
Waiting for shots to render out is a killer... So I've been learning to make ample use of two time-saving tactics. One: render clips at "quickshade" resolution rather than "realistic." Two: render clips at 160x120 pixel resolution rather than 640x480 -- that's 1/16th as many pixels that the computer has compute!
Looking at animatic #7, I see camera moves to fix, timing to adjust, effects that aren't indicated, and areas where I might need to create completely new shots. I'm not convinced that the story "reads" yet. ...But it's getting there.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
April 12, 2008
lsgl - act 2 under way
by sven at 11:45 pm
It took almost 180 pages of writing to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with Act 2 of Let Sleeping Gods Lie... But now I'm finally in the studio again, doing actual animation work every day.
The billion-year history of the Elders and the Shoggoths is going to be told in a symbolic dream sequence. I don't have any shots in the can yet, but here are two photos to give you a bit of flavor.
I've got a serious work plan. I'm doing a 100 day count down from April 1 until July 9. I have to put in at least 15 minutes work every day... 25 hours every week... 100 hours every month.
I'm praying that 300 hours is enough to finish this project. If not... Well, the final deadline for the H.P. Lovecraft Filmfest this year is August 15. So, there's a little wiggle room -- though I don't want to have to dip into it.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
March 17, 2008
lsgl - stopping at 171 pages
by sven at 1:30 pm
I've finally found a way to tell Act II of Let Sleeping Gods Lie that I think I can live with. Basically, I want to make a visual reference to the Tower of Babel and then do two tableaus: "before" and "after." ...But with pterodactyls.
This approach won't require too much time spent fabricating new elements... It's a good, terse bridge between acts I and III... It's visually distinct... I think there's a lot going for this solution.
And boy am I ready to quit doing story development through writing for awhile! So far in 2008, I've written 171.5 pages of brainstorming -- 91,884 words. For comparison: Lovecraft's original novella, At The Mountains Of Madness, is only 41,284 words long. So in trying to adapt his story, I've gone and written a body of text 2.23 times as long as the original. Madness indeed!
Here are my most recent 53.5 pages of exploration:
- March 6 - 12 pages
- March 7 - 5 pages
- March 11 - 10 pages
- March 12 - 15 pages
- March 13 - 7 pages
- March 14 - 4.5 pages
When I get back from my brother's wedding, then I'm on to fabrication!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
March 5, 2008
lsgl - 50 more pages
by sven at 9:49 pm
In February I challenged myself to write 50 pages of story development in one week. Without too much pain, I met the goal.
It was such a valuable exercise, I decided to go through the process again. So, last week I wrote another 50 pages.
This brings me to a total of 118 pages of story development work so far this year. ...All for a sequence that should be less than 2 minutes long on screen!
For the exceptionally curious (hi gl.!), here's what I wrote:
- February 26 - 17 pages
- February 27 - 11.5 pages
- February 28 - 15 pages
- February 29 - 7 pages
My statistics this time around... I wrote: 50.5 pages -- 26,537 words -- in 18:20 hours, over the course of four days. My averages: 2.75 pages per hour, 527 words per page, 1448 words per hour. (A little slower than last time.)
The writing led to an exciting new way to tell my story. So, this week I've switched to doing visual brainstorming in a sketchbook.
...Which has led to the discouraging realization that I don't think I've truly got the story nailed yet. Back to writing again?
posted by sven | permalink | comments (3) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
February 10, 2008
lsgl - story development work
by sven at 7:00 am
Back in September, I promised myself I'd get back to work on Let Sleeping Gods Lie on January 15, 2008. And so I did.
Where I left off in autumn: thrashing around in Act II, trying to figure out how to tell the billion year history of the Elder Things cinematically. On my first day back, I did much the same... Experimenting with different visual looks -- but feeling like I was pretty much just flailing.
So, I've taken a step back. One of my mantras for 2008 is "hammer on the story." Novelists are encouraged to know the world that they're writing about inside-out. That's what I'm going to try to achieve with LSGL. I'm going to do my brainstorming in writing, until I've answered every question -- and what has to be shown on screen becomes perfectly obvious.
My second week back at work on LSGL, I set myself a big challenge: write 50 pages of story development within seven days... And so I did!
I wrote 51 pages -- 27,968 words -- in 17.25 hours, over the course of four days. My averages are: 3 pages per hour, 548 words per page, 1621 words per hour.
For comparison, during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) the goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Granted, doing story development is much different from writing a coherent narrative... But still, it pleases me to no end to think that I generated more than half a novel's worth of text in four days.
And, frankly, there's little doubt in my mind that I'll hit 50,000 before February's over. My goal this month is to know exactly what my final vision for LSGL is -- by the 29th. I've got a ways to go yet.
For the obsessively curious, here's your chance to read the story work I did in January:
- January 17 - 10.5 pages
- January 18 - 5.5 pages
- January 23 - 10.5 pages
- January 24 - 17.5 pages
- January 25 - 13.5 pages
- January 26 - 10 pages
(Total for January: 67.5 pages ... 37,181 words.)
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
February 9, 2008
lsgl trailer on strange aeons dvd!
by sven at 7:00 am
Exciting news: the Let Sleeping Gods Lie teaser trailer will be included on Lurker Films' new DVD, Strange Aeons!
This is the 5th DVD in the H.P. Lovecraft Collection. The digital files just went to the DVD production service today, but you can place an order with Lurker Films immediately.
The feature film of the collection is "The Thing on the Doorstep" by Maelstrom Productions -- nice folks, whom I've met through the H.P.Lovecraft Film Fest. The collection also includes the rollicking stopmo short, "From Beyond," by my good friend Michael Granberry.
The timing of this blew my mind: Andrew Migliore, head of Lurker Films and the HPLFF, called me with the opportunity actually during the Monster Month book release party! It turns out that one of the shorts he'd intended to include was too low-resolution -- so a space to fill opened up. I gotta say... It's awful lucky for me that I'm right here in Portland, on Andrew's home turf.
I'm utterly thrilled. Being a film collector myself, my "true north" as an artist is to have the products of my labors purchased and prized by other collectors.
Finally finishing LSGL is my top priority for 2008. I haven't written about it yet, but I did make some big strides in January... More about that tomorrow.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
October 11, 2007
2007 HPLFF review
by sven at 9:00 am
So, the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival happened this past weekend. Had a really good time!
It was great getting to see my teaser in a real theater. But, I've also got notes to remember for next year: When it was shown on the main screen, the aspect ratio seemed off and the text seemed overly jaggy. When I saw it again on one of the smaller screens, those problems didn't seem so bad -- but I really do need to look into how gamma works, because it was definitely a bit too dark. There was no pause afterwards, so people didn't have an opportunity to clap. (Christian was very kind, though, and leapt in with applause the second time around.)
The shorts blocks are always my priority. My top picks:
- A Short Film About John Bolton - Neil Gaiman's directorial debut, retelling "Pickman's Model"
- Frolick - Peter Pan as a cosmic serial killer (really well-acted!)
Also worthy of note:
- Calls for Cthulhu - a call-in show with a plush Cthulhu
- Of Darkness - pre-teen boys read the Necronomicon, and all the lights in the house go out (decent film -- excellent ending)
- The Pit and the Pendulum - high quality stopmo using a silicone puppet -- part of the "Ray Harryhausen Presents" series
- The Statement - "The Statement of Randolph Carter" done with period clothes and pretty decent acting
- Experiment 18 - sequel to "Experiment 17", which fellow HPLFF lifer Christian Matzke showed last year... Nazis re-animating the dead
As for the feature films, John Carpenter's The Thing and In The Mouth Of Madness were satisfying romps. I didn't get to see either Cthulhu or 9 Lives of Mara -- but Wish Baby and Nobody were exceptionally good.
I'm particularly enthusiastic about Nobody. This and Primer are the two best time travel stories I've ever seen. It was gorgeously shot, had a brilliant script, and mesmerizing actors. I really want to see this film win some awards and get broad distribution! ...Even more amazingly, this is the director's very first film -- and it was shot using a regular DV camera. He simply knew how to work with the machine; e.g. avoiding the color red, shooting with high-contrast lighting -- and other tricks I don't really understand. Watch out for director Shawn Linden -- if all goes well, he's going places!
This was the second year there's been a Lovecraftian live comedy performance. "Chuck and Dexter," those lovable cultists, had me belly-laughing. You wouldn't think it -- but Lovecraftian stand-up is really one of the best parts of the weekend!
Thanks to MPH for coming out to the show. It was also good to see Michael B. and Philip F. there. Gretchin: you may have been in England, but even so, you were always with me.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: exhibits & events, let sleeping gods lie
October 3, 2007
a beautiful hoax: the lovecraft filmfest acceptance letter
by sven at 10:00 am
I've been meaning to share this for a while: the acceptance letter that the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival sent me for the new Let Sleeping Gods Lie teaser.
I love this!
I think The Hoax is the highest form of fiction. Cinema comes close, creating an immersive fantasy world; but there's always this fourth wall between you and the imaginary place. With The Hoax, however, fantasy breaks out of its cage and invades reality. I suppose it's sort of like guerilla theater in that sense... The artist's dream life can errupt into being anywhere, at any moment.
An elaborate and beautifully crafted Artist's Hoax is different from "viral marketing." It's perpetrated tongue-in-cheek, with a sense of playfulness that invites the audience to play along -- to embellish, even. Viral marketing, on the other hand, is coercive. It's a con job, where shills are planted in the audience purely for the purpose of herding their marks into the slaughterhouse.
[I'm also a big fan of mixing metaphors: the much maligned linguistic mash-up. ...But that's another essay.]
Anyway: Don't forget that the H.P. Lovecraft Filmfest is happening this Friday. Hope to see you there!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: exhibits & events, let sleeping gods lie, writing
October 2, 2007
LSGL teaser kicks off lovecraft festival!
by sven at 6:00 pm
The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival begins this Friday night... And my new Let Sleeping Gods Lie teaser will be the very first thing shown on the big screen!
Doors at the Hollywood Theater (4122 NE Sandy Blvd) open at 6pm. There is often a long line on opening night, so I recommend arriving early or purchasing your tickets online.
My teaser is the first thing in Shorts Block 1.
Shorts Block 1 shows at 7:05pm Friday night on the Main Screen. It will be shown again at the very tail end of the festival, Sunday night at 10:20pm on the Upper Right Screen. The complete schedule is available at the HPLFF website.
Hope to see you there!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: exhibits & events, let sleeping gods lie
August 31, 2007
let sleeping gods lie - teaser 2
by sven at 3:00 pm
Here's my second teaser for Let Sleeping Gods Lie.
In October the teaser will be showing on the silver screen at the 2007 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. If you're in Portland, I hope to see you there!
Want to find out more? You can check out the first teaser, which premiered in 2005... Or, if you want the whole "behind the scenes" story, you can peruse previous posts in the blog's Let Sleeping God Lie category.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
August 29, 2007
lsgl: teaser submitted to lovecraft festival
by sven at 4:18 pm
I've submitted a teaser to the 2007 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival!
After announcing that Let Sleeping Gods Lie won't be finished in time for this year's fest, I got a lot of feedback from folks saying that I should at least do a teaser. Even Andrew Migliore, the festival organizer, wrote a note to that effect.
It was my original plan that I'd put together a teaser if the film wasn't going to be done in time. However, I now know that LSGL is only going to be about 5 minutes long. I worried that showing a 2nd teaser would raise people's expectations too high -- so they'd feel cheated when they find out how short the final product actually is.
Solution: The teaser is only 14 seconds long. I squeezed in my best shots, and give away just enough to whet people's appetites.
I finished off burning the DVD Monday night (8/27). Gretchin and I drove over to Migliore's house to deliver it. Afterwards, Gretchin treated me to a celebratory dinner at a new vegan restaurant, "Nutshell." Delish! (Thank you!)
And after that, we stayed up until almost 6am, watching a total lunar eclipse from a nearby field. ...Truly, the "stars were right." ;-)
[Forgive the wait: I'll see about getting the teaser online sometime in the next day or two.]
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
August 20, 2007
"let sleeping gods lie" will miss sept 1 deadline
by sven at 12:00 pm
I regret to announce that Let Sleeping Gods Lie will not be finished in time for this year's H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
I've made enormous progress this year on the film. At the beginning of the year, I'd say the film was about 15% complete. Now, I'd say it's 80-85% complete. I am extremely proud of what I've produced so far... This project is going to be unlike any other Lovecraft film you've ever seen.
I want to thank everyone who's been supporting me during the big push:
The local friends, whom I haven't seen at all during the past four months of monastic isolation...
The online friends who have cheered me on, and who will no doubt be disappointed (as I am) at having to wait even longer for LSGL's completion...
The actors, who have repeatedly martyred themselves beneath black stocking masks and heavy winter coats...
And Gretchin, who's been the most fantastic Creative Advocate a filmmaker could ever ask for.
The kamikaze "filmmaking-to-the-exclusion-of-all-else" approach that I've used this summer now comes to an end. I've been actively outlining plans for a revised production schedule -- but for the time being, I'll be keeping them to myself.
Suffice it to say: I am missing a deadline, but I am not giving up. Let Sleeping Gods Lie will be completed.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (8) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
August 16, 2007
lsgl: continental drift
by sven at 11:59 pm
So, the Elder Things are supposed to have come to Earth millions and millions of years ago... And while I've illustrated that some time has passed by showing the cave before it was all icy, I don't think that's really communicating the idea.
What I want is a time-lapse shot of continental drift, so you can actually see the Pangaean supercontinent break into the seven continents we know today.
My first version shows the Earth spinning; the second shows the same morph sequence with a stationary planet. I think both are kinda confusing. I've only got five images in the current sequence. I really need to draw some more inbetweens. ...Even then, though, I'm worried that the concept won't communicate.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (8) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
August 11, 2007
lsgl: act 2 animatic - enhanced!
by sven at 11:59 pm
Yesterday I made an animatic using hand-drawn images. Today I took that animatic and replaced each still image with a CG clip. None of the clips are final -- they're all just place-holders, really -- but even so, the new enhanced animatic gives me a much better sense of what's going on in Act 2.
For the first time, I was able to string together the prologue and what I've got for Acts 1, 2, and 3 and see how everything's coming together. Gut reaction: "Wow! It's gonna be great!!" ...AND... "Ouch! There is so much that needs serious editing."
Having music and sound is really deceptive. It makes the film seem like it must be almost complete -- because audio brings everything so much more to life. But don't be fooled! Act 2 doesn't have a single finished shot yet, and its current soundtrack is needing to be re-kerjiggered yet again.
What's worse, after seeing what I've produced so far, I realize now that the current pacing for Act 2 is way too fast. That problem's going to be particularly unhappy to work on, I expect...
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
August 10, 2007
lsgl: act 2 animatic
by sven at 11:59 pm
I've been feeling for a while like I'm flailing... Lacking a clear sense of how to proceed with the movie. So today I finally got around to making an animatic for Act 2. It's extremely rough -- but it's enough to start moving on.
I also did some work today on a new still shot of the cave entrance.
The Elders are supposed to have come to Earth during or before the Paleozoic era, when there was just one super-continent: Pangaea. I wanted to create an image of the cave before Antarctica broke off and got so chilly... It's hard to know if the image will communicate when it's all green (since it's part of the distress beacon's transmission) -- but the land is supposed to be a desert during this period.
I actually created a whole new mountain for the Paleozoic shot; I wanted it to be much more jagged, before erosion wore it down. The only thing that the new Paleozoic image has in common with the snowy modern one is the distant mountains to the right -- everything else got PhotoShopped from scratch today.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
August 9, 2007
lsgl: zig-zag city
by sven at 11:59 pm
Still doing development work on the Elder Things' city...
Today I did some Googling to find reference images of Minas Tirith (from Lord of the Rings) and Tibetan fortresses. This led to creating several zig-zagging trapezoidal walls. When I overlap them, I get pleasantly German Expressionist chaos.
I also experimented with adding bridges and windows. Adding windows is proving to be more difficult than expected... Today I tried using "Solid Drill > Stencil" instead of "Boolean > Subtract." This worked a bit better, but the procedure is still changing my geometry in a way that messes up the surface texturing. (Translation: the windows wind up looking blurry.)
I tried doing a lighting set-up where there are nine little point lights scattered around different areas of the city. It gives me a bit more control -- but I'm not really sure it's worth all the hassle.
One of the shots I really want to create involves the camera looking down into a chasm -- where we see a Shoggoth climbing up the wall toward us. I still haven't been able to create a set that gives me a camera angle I really like for this purpose.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
August 8, 2007
piano repair
by sven at 2:47 pm
I've had a broken F on my electric piano since about January... With the soundtrack work that I've been doing for Let Sleeping Gods Lie, it was finally time to make the repair.
I've got an HP 2800G Roland digital piano. It has weighted keys; one of the counterbalances broke and needed to be replaced. This was my second time making this kind of repair on the instrument.
I found replacement parts at Keyboard Engineering, Inc./The Master's Touch Music Store @ 3213 NE Sandy Blvd. They could special order a replacement counterweight for $15, or sell me a used one on the spot for $5. (Thank you, Gretchin, for doing the initial research!)
I bought five used counterweights, expecting that I'll probably need to make this repair again at some point. I'd probably be wise to even get a few more (including counterweights for the black keys, which are shaped differently) -- there's no telling when Roland may stop producing these parts.
I'm known for playing loudly, but I don't think that the break is entirely my fault. The counterbalances inherently take a lot of stress... I could see, rumaging though a bag of used parts at the store, that stress cracks are common.
There are hinges at the back of the piano so the whole top can swing up and back. To open it up, you need to remove the 8 screws on the bottom of the instrument that are recessed, and 6 small screws on the back (the ones that aren't associated with the hinges).
Once the top of the piano is off, you also need to remove the front guard in order to access the keys. There are 6 screws underneath the guard to remove, and then 2 (on either side) which are located inside the piano itself.
The keys come off at their hinge point. Putting them on and taking them off depends on the flexibility of the plastic: just slightly expand the key with your finger, and it pops off the hinge easily. The lubrication appears to be a dark gray teflon grease -- so be aware that you'll probably get some on your hands.
Everything else should be self-apparent when you get to this point.
Mostly I'm writing out these notes for myself, so it'll go faster the next time I have to do this.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: let sleeping gods lie, music
August 6, 2007
lsgl: stampede music
by sven at 11:59 pm
Here's a clip of the stampede that I finished... Gosh, almost 2 weeks ago now.
I've been thinking that the musical score for a stampede ought to involve lots of overlapping drums... Like a cacophany of feet, eh? So I spent a chunk of the day putting together a test track. Listen to the mp3 by clicking here. (642 KB)
(If it were an option to use someone else's music, I'd use "Jungle Dance" from the 1933 King Kong soundtrack by Max Steiner.)
Another chunk of the day was spent refining the Elder Things' city. I like the idea of there being lots of tiers to the place... I'm thinking in the next version I may try doing a bunch of bridges over chasms.
Trivia: Lovecraft had a bona fide passion for arches, and specifically mentions that the Elders made good use of them in their architecture.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie, music
August 5, 2007
lsgl: sound montage for distress beacon
by sven at 11:59 pm
I've put together a voice-over sound montage for Act 2. Listen to the mp3 by clicking here. (688 KB)
Enormous thanks to Gretchin, who I also recorded reading the monologue. She helped edit the script -- and over all, I think she gave a better performance than I did. Unfortunately, although I had high hopes for using a digitally transformed female voice, I couldn't get the sound texture I was looking for with her takes.
The take that I wound up using some painfully melodramatic lilts... But I think that after remixing it into a montage, some of the more egregious lines may actually work -- they become sorta musical. (Tell me if you think I'm wrong!)
The underlying string-section is a GarageBand loop.
I expect there will have to be some tweaking when it comes time to combine this sound clip with whatever I come up with for acts 1 and 3 -- so there's still room for change. ...Even so, I'm thinking this might be good enough to begin building upon.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
August 2, 2007
lsgl: city planning
by sven at 11:59 pm
Today I worked on developing the look of the Elder Things' city. This isn't a final design -- but I'm very happy with where it's going.
Can you tell that I was inspired by Jabba the Hutt's palace?
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
July 31, 2007
lsgl: act 2?
by sven at 11:59 pm
Work has been getting increasingly miserable. The shots I've produced this past week don't look any good to me. The tentacles refuse to do what I want them to. And thinking about nothing but the film is finally turning my brain to mush.
I think there are only about six shots left to do for Act 3... Unfortunately, they're all really difficult ones.
So, rather than continuing to hit my head against this wall, I'm switching focus for a while.
I'm doing development work on Act 2: the distress beacon's message -- which explains why the Elder Things are in the cave, and preps the audience to understand what's happening when the Shoggoth arrives. I've already cut the epilogue from the film... But I don't think the story can hold together without Act 2.
My anxiety about Act 3 -- a lot of it is probably actually due to Act 2. I just don't have a firm grip on Act 2 yet... So when I've tried to imagine what I'll be working on after Act 3's done, the future's been a big horrifying unknown.
What's Act 2 look like? What's the story? Can I get it done in time?
Act 2 is the only part of the film that has a voice-over. I've been re-writing the script again, trying to get it down to bare essentials. Based on my most recent drafts (which I'm not happy with yet), it looks like Act 2 will be around 30 seconds long. Maybe 40. ...Doesn't sound like much -- but it's potentially a lifetime in animation.
There are a number of ideas that I need to communicate:
- the Elder Things come from outer space
- they had a whole civilization on Earth, with multiple cities
- they had slaves: huge gelatinous blobs called Shoggoths
- almost all of the Elders were wiped out during an uprising
- all of this happened millions of years ago
- the Elders in the cave are hiding, waiting for rescue, forever hunted by the Shoggoths
Trying to come up with a script that says all this quickly and compellingly has been sort of like writing lines of poetry.
The visual look of Act 2 is still being developed, too. My main thoughts right now are that I want everything green and distressed with static. The shot that I'm most excited about involves an army of Shoggoths climbing up the walls of an enormous city. Exactly what this city is going to look like is still up in the air -- but I've been looking at pictures from the original Astounding Stories publication for inspiration.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
July 25, 2007
lsgl: shoggoth eyes
by sven at 11:59 pm
Today's work... Two clips: The eyes of the Shoggoth assessing the Elder Things' stampede -- and selecting a victim.
The Shoggoth eyes are recycled Elder Thing eyes which have been hue-shifted. Shoggoths were grown in a vat -- so it makes some sense that the Elders may have used their own DNA to get things started. (Sorta like sour dough bread.)
Getting that watery/gelatinous feeling required huge amounts of gaussian blur -- and then a symmetrical ripple on top of the whole thang.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
July 24, 2007
lsgl: enter the shoggoth
by sven at 11:59 pm
The Shoggoth sees the distress beacon, barrels toward the cave, and then down into the depths of the mountain.
Flying through a tunnel is sort of a CG cliche -- and that bothers me. But I really felt like I needed to connect the outside arctic world to the interior cave world, and a Shoggoth POV shot was the way to do it.
For a few weeks I was a bit flummoxed about how to accomplish this shot... Then I found inspiration: the opening credits for Fraggle Rock. The fragglers had a camera fly through a window into a workshop, down through a hole in the wall into a cave system, and out into the Gorg's garden... And I think it was all accomplished with nothing more complicated than dissolves. ...Ah-ha!
Here's a "monster cam" clip that I wound up rejecting.
I thought for a long time that my "monster cam" shot was going to have interesting distortion -- like in so many Dr. Who episodes. But ultimately I think those kinds of shots only work when you're repeatedly forced to wonder who's lurking, peeping at the main characters. It's a suspense-building tactic... And my film's just too short to put that element into play.
Too bad this shot didn't work out -- I really dig the colors! The hot pink, peach, and lavender reminds me of old oil paintings of sunsets that pioneers made as they headed west, trying to communicate to the east coast what's out here in the wilds. It's not a color pallete that I think I've ever seen in a video.
Incidentally, the zoom in the rejected clip was done just by increasing the image's scale. I tried and tried, but I couldn't seem to make the speed of the "camera" feel right using this method. So ultimately I brought the clip into LightWave, projected it onto a flat panel, and had a virtual camera fly toward and through it. Much better results.
...There's a general principle here that I've been discovering: It's usually very difficult to simulate Z-axis travel using only 2D animation software. If at all possible, try to use 3D software when you need an object to appear as if it's moving toward or away from you.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
July 20, 2007
lsgl: pseudopods ahoy!
by sven at 11:59 pm
This is the first shot where we see the Shoggoth's pseudopods emerge and start smacking down Elder Things. It took four agonizing days to pull together this 2.5 second shot.
The first thing I had to do was create a new animation for the falling Elder Thing.
The galloping Elders use a run cycle. Their legs go in circles endlessly, and when I move their whole body forward at the right pace, it looks like their legs are responsible for propelling them. If I were to add keyframes into this animation, it would break the run cycle -- so the falling animation had to be done separately...
At the instant when the Elder Thing gets hit by the pseudopod, I pull a fast switch. The running elder suddenly pops over 90 feet stage right, and I put the falling elder in its place.
I really don't like this fall very much... But given that it's only on screen for such a brief moment, it's passable.
Working on this shot, I've come to see the Shoggoth as having three body sections: the wet part that sticks to the walls, the main mass, and the pseudopods.
To make it look like the mass of the Shoggoth is beginning to bulge into the room, I first composited a 2D clip of the wet blob on the cave wall using AfterEffects... Then, I projected this clip onto a flat panel in Lightwave 3D, and deformed the panel. (The photo above hopefully gives you a sense of how I'm pushing the image outward into the third dimension.)
I tried and rejected a lot of different ways of making the pseudopods. I had really hoped to be able to do them using 2D compositing in AfterEffects... But there was just no way to get an adequate sense of depth, the feeling that these things are shooting out at you. The clip above should give you a sense of how flat the compositing approach was turning out.
The pseudopod design that I settled on, incidentally, is largely inspired by the lake monster just outside the door to the mines of Moria in Ralph Bakshi's 1978 cartoon version of Lord of the Rings ("speak 'friend' and enter").
It looks like most of the water tank footage I shot won't get used in Let Sleeping Gods Lie. Drat. One exception: some of the out-takes can be used to simulate the Elder Things bleeding.
I am so glad to have this shot done! Now that I've established the look of the pseudopods, I ought to be able to do the rest of Act III without any more big hitches.
...I'm a bit worried, though. When I string the shots that I have together, they go by really fast. I may have to create a number of quick little interstitial shots which I hadn't planned on -- partly to pad the length of the climax, partly to help orient the viewer to where they're supposed to be standing in the stampede at any particular moment.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (5) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
July 15, 2007
lsgl: smack-downs for all
by sven at 11:59 pm
This is the last shot of Carl before he gets smacked down.
Lighting was a big problem. With Carl dead-center in the shot, it seemed that wherever I put the lights, they were going to cast awkward Elder shadows across him. Solution: I fell back on my "sometimes the explorers emit light" rationale. Given that Carl's about to bite it, it sorta seemed emotionally right for him to have one last moment of brilliance.
While working on Carl's shot, I realized that I'd never tried putting the lavamen back in the livingroom where they were born. I thought it looked interesting, and wanted to share. [In the final shot, I flipped the clip horizontally and did some cleanup on the lavaman fx.]
Here's Andrew getting smacked down.
I'm conflicted about whether or not I'm actually going to use this shot as-is. If I do, then I'm committing to killing off Andrew. My original plan was to have him be the sole survivor. I feel like there needs to be a witness to the carnage at the end of the film -- a quiet epilogue. Trouble is, I'm running out of time.
One good thing about killing Andrew off at this point in the film is that it lets me get the pay-off for the lavaman effect out of the way: at some point, we've got to see the hot body cool off, and the red bleed out.
I might do two versions of Andrew's smack-down: this one, where he dies -- and one where he's merely knocked out. ...Given that I only need an "Andrew lives" version if there's going to be time for an epilogue, though, I'll probably put that job off for a while.
One thing that drives me nuts about this shot is that there aren't Elder Thing legs in frame. Having an open patch of floor makes for a good composition -- but it doesn't feel right given the chaos we've been seeing in previous shots. Trouble is, it's just about impossible to get an Elder in the shot without it stepping on Andrew. Or, if I try to put it in the foreground, the camera winds up being actually inside the Elder. Hopefully the shot's fast enough that people just won't even think about it.
Guh... Gotta just keep moving. Next on the to-do list: shots that involve the Shoggoth's pseudopods.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
July 12, 2007
lsgl: layers upon layers
by sven at 11:59 pm
I thought that I'd completed the most complex shot in the film. ...I should know better than to say such things!
This shot has 20 Elder Things in it. The file was so huge, I had a 5 minute lag time just to select an item in the scene -- forget about modifying it! So, by necessity, I broke the shot up into parts.
I wound up having to do four separate renders out of LightWave. Let me walk you through 'em...
[Huh. Now that I think about it, I realize that it actually took me less time to render 20 elders using 4 passes than it did to render out 15 in 2 passes: 7 hrs 15 min vs. ~13 hrs. Interesting! It looks like there's a tipping-point at which managing too many calculations gums up the machine's ability to process them. ...Too bad that doing multiple renders requires babysitting the computer. I'll have to look into this further.]
This is what the cave looks like before I color-shift and hyper-saturate it in AfterEffects. Early on I tried to create a surface texture within LightWave that was this vivid -- but couldn't do it.
The shadows belong to the midground Elders. The models are actually in this scene -- I've just made them invisible.
I figured that the shadows of the background Elders would mostly be occluded, so there was no point in wasting render time on them. The shadows of the foreground Elders, on the other hand, would have fallen directly across the explorers -- so I decided to cheat the shot and have them not casting shadows either -- for the sake of a good visual composition.
Render time: ~165 min.
I kind of like how the background Elder Things turned out... I'm wondering if I could recycle this animation during the "deep history" segment (Act II)?
Render time: ~117 min.
Once again, I did choreography using lo-poly stand-ins. Choreography took about 5 hours. Programming the choreography into the animated models took about another 2 hours. Doing the initial set-up -- matching the virtual camera angle to the real world camera angle -- that was ~2 hours, too.
In the midground, I put one Elder that's going faster than all the others to help create the feeling that these clones are actually unique Things. There's also an Elder that's about to pass really close to Andrew -- which sets up the next three shots, where Andrew's getting knocked down.
Render time: ~150 min.
The explorers are done entirely in AfterEffects -- which means essentially no render time to wait out.
The front two Elders were the quickest to render...
Render time: ~30 min.
...After I had these five layers of animation, I composited them all together in AfterEffects. Color correction happens at this stage: I revved up the cave, and gave each layer a green tint. Actually, there are two shades of green going on -- "spring" and "seafoam." I've felt that simply tinting the room with one color gives too flat a result. (I'm lovin' what you can do with luma keying! Maybe I'll write about that later.)
Doing a depth-of-field effect in LightWave is extremely render-intensive. To simulate it "for cheap," in AfterEffects I applied a mild gaussian blur to the foreground layer.
Having a foreground layer hugely helps glue the explorers into their environment. Yet, when I watched a test clip, they still didn't feel as in-the-world as I wanted. So, I used a two duplicate layers of the cave backdrop that were brightened and masked off with feathered ovals to simulate gentle spotlights on Carl and Andrew. ...It's an effect that I've used "judiciously" rather than consistently: a suggestion that the "lavamen" actually emit light onto their environment.
Compositing time: ~1.5 hrs.
During the renders, I could usually go do other things. So... Amount of focussed attention on this shot: 13.5 hrs.
Amount of time the shot's on screen? Forty-eight frames -- about a second and a half.
But it's a really GREAT second-and-a-half, dammit! I'm proud of this shot. I think it's probably the best I've done.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
July 10, 2007
lsgl: the heat is on
by sven at 11:59 pm
Here's the sequence where the explorers get surprised by the hive waking up around them.
Act III is all about quick-cuts... But I found that these two shots have to go in slo-mo, nonetheless. There's only 65 frames here (two days' work); when squeezed in between other quick-cuts, there wasn't enough time to even process what you were seeing.
Plus, y'know, I want the audience to have a moment to really feel what it's like to have something 13-feet-tall galloping directly at you.
It was supposed to get up to 106 degrees in Portland today. Don't know if it actually got that high outside, but it did hit 95 in the studio for a couple of hours.
As a preventative measure, Gretchin improvised some extra cooling for the 'puters: two fans pointed directly at the machines. Thank you gl.!!!
How many machines have I gone through while working on Let Sleeping Gods Lie? I think I've had two LaCie external hard drives die on me -- and last summer the power supply on the G4 burnt out, necessitating a new hard drive in the process. Another hardware failure at this point in the game would be no good at all...
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
July 8, 2007
lsgl: stampede choreography
by sven at 11:59 pm
Woo-hoo! I've just finished the most complex shot of the film!
I think I like it. ...But then, it's been more than 2 weeks since I last completed a shot -- so a lot of that emotion might just be relief.
The final render for the stampeding Elder Things took more than 13 hours. Due to how I've chosen to deal with colors, rendering shadows would have to be done in a second pass. I'm hoping that for just this one scene I can cheat the shot and omit shadows. I want to believe that the chaos of motion will distract folks from looking at the ground too closely.
Here's the final galloping Elder Thing animation. It's not perfect -- but ought to be plenty good enough. It looks best from the side; I'm less happy with the front view, which seems a bit flat and mechanical. There's also a little a little a little stutter, which seems to only be visible from the front. I'll cope. :-)
With 15 fully-animated Elder Things, the stampede shot is krazee complicated. The stats:
- objects: 888
- points: 1,355,686
- polys: 2,375,522
- bones: 7275
- IK chains: 165
If I tried to animate all that at once, the computer would totally bog down and give me killer lag times... So to get around that, I did all the choreography using lo-poly stand-ins.
The green objects in the clip above simulate the Elder Things' silhouettes. The clapping pink bars on top represent the rhythm of the 25 frame run cycle. It would look ridiculous if all of the Elders were running in lock-step -- so I had to put a good deal of thought into how to stagger the cycles, trying to make them look naturalistic.
Here's what the stand-in Elders look like from above. I color-coded them into groups, so I could plan out sending them toward the camera in waves.
When I select all of the objects, bones and controllers that collectively make up a single Elder Thing, the highlighted bits create a baffling tangle of indicator lines. In this case, however, I was delighted to see that that the indicator lines happen to create a scarlet star. Smile.
In the stampede shot, the Shoggoth is supposed to be oozing in through the hive's only exit. Since I decided to make the Shoggoth opaque, I'm not sure that the concept "reads" anymore.
To rectify the situation, I put together a "before" shot, so we can get a good look at the exit. ...After all the agony involved in getting the stampede assembled, arranging and rendering a simple still shot was bliss!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
July 5, 2007
lsgl: a three-legged dog with training wheels
by sven at 11:59 pm
I'm working on the most difficult shot of the film right now. We see the Shoggoth blocking the cave's only exit and dozens of just-woken-up Elder Things stampeding away.
I've finally got the Elders' legs doing a satisfactory gallop. How does a five-legged Thing run? Imagine a three-legged dog with training wheels being ridden by a watermelon jockey... That's what worked for me.
There are quibbles to be had with this gallop... The feet hit ground with their delicate tips, rather than with a more load-bearing part of the "foot." The mid-leg doesn't have as much of a "shock absorber" reaction as I'd like. And there's a moment where the rear three legs are all off the ground at the same time, which doesn't seem plausible. ...But it looks OK to me at this speed -- and that's good enough.
The arms are still giving me grief, though. I still haven't quite wrapped my mind around how they should move.
Here's your first glimpse of the Shoggoth. There'll be some minor tweaking, but I'm pretty happy with it as-is. (Unfortunately compression for the web has made this clip muddy.)
The silhouette for the Shoggoth was created by throwing some india ink into a wet sink.
The texture of the Shoggoth is boiling sugar... Which is then layered upon itself and hyper-saturated. Hot spots get color-keyed out.
I originally thought that the shoggoth would be translucent in this shot. Turns out that it looks better if it's opaque. Maybe we'll be able to see a bit of the protoplasm's translucence in later shots when the pseudopods are smacking down Elder Things .
A little less than two months left until the deadline! EEEEEEE!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
June 27, 2007
see my films at PLATFORM on Friday
by sven at 3:38 pm
See my film work on the big screen this Friday -- FREE!
This week I'm attending the first PLATFORM International Film Festival, here in sunny (!) Portland. My short "The Great Escape" and the teaser-trailer for "Let Sleeping Gods Lie" will be shown during Friday night's open screening.
The show is at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (1111 SW Broadway) -- on the fourth floor, in Brunish Hall. The open screening begins at 7:30pm, and is free and open to the public. I was the very first person to sign up -- so be here at 7:30 sharp or you'll miss it!
...
Oh, almost forgot! ...Tonight (Wednesday) there'll be a screening called "Portland Animation Showcase" at 9:00pm in the Whitsell Auditorium in the NW Film Center (1219 SW Park). A music video that I worked on is going to be shown: "Moodbot," directed by Rob Shaw. I made the armature that went inside the little girl puppet. You can get tickets at the door for $10.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (0) | categories: exhibits & events, let sleeping gods lie, stopmo
June 24, 2007
lsgl: another compositing strategy
by sven at 10:22 pm
Yesterday I ran into a tricky compositing issue... Which led to an interesting solution.
When combining footage of actors with a CG environment, it's critical that the camera angle from the real world and the camera angle in the CG world match.
One way to find that magic angle is to set up CG stand-in explorers. This works best when the actors are only moving from left to right (or right to left) across the screen.
Shots where there's depth -- where the actors are walking toward or away from the camera -- are harder. For those, you can create a sort of CG ruler. You make the ruler the same height as your actor, and the same depth as one stride. That allows you to match up the ball of the foot and the top of the head for the actor at point A and point B.
...But in the shot above? Neither of these strategies work. There's depth involved -- but I can't see the actor's feet. And, to make things even worse, the actors are crouching -- so I can't easily gauge their height.
After a lot of frustration, it occurred to me that I could maybe get the angle from footage I took with the same camera set up, but which isn't actually going into the film. I found a shot where you can see me taking a full step that seemed like it might work... (I include the actual clip here so you can laugh at my "directing" style.)
Before I got too far into that approach, though, I realized that I was staring at an even better ruler: the living room wall!
I got out my tape measure... That wall is 9' tall, 13'9" wide. Being just a flat panel, it was the easiest thing in the world to model.
Over in LightWave, I fussed and fiddled with the virtual camera until I got the CG wall to match up with the real one.
Then, I removed the CG wall, set up some stand-in Elder Things, and rendered out a test clip with the explorers reacting to them. Did it look right this time...?
YES!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (4) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
June 23, 2007
lsgl: quick cuts
by sven at 4:48 pm
Over the past few days I've been going through my new DV footage... Downloading, selecting the best takes, adding the "lavaman" effect.
I've also tightened up the storyboard. After a lot of frustration and reworking, I think I've got the shape of Act III finalized.
Act I shows the explorers discovering the distress beacon and deciding to turn it on. With the exception of the last few explosive moments, Act I is very slow-paced and somber.
Act III, on the other hand, is fast-paced and chaotic. The Shoggoth appears, the Elder Things awake and stampede, the explorers get smacked down.
Check out the clip above... I wanted to share a comparison of what the DV footage looks like raw, versus what it looks after I've doctored it with the lavaman effect. (I also wanted to share a sneak-peek at what some of the quick-cuts are going to look like.)
I'm really pleased with the continuity between the two shots that show Andrew getting knocked to the ground. The poor soul threw himself down on that futon almost 70 times for me! (THANK YOU ANDREW!)
Unfortunately, there's still a lot of good stuff that won't make it into the film. The shot above is particularly difficult to part with... It's got fabulous drama -- but just doesn't fit into the flow of action the way I'd hoped.
Oh well -- at least I can give it a little of the honor it deserves by sharing it on the blog. :-)
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
June 19, 2007
lsgl: 9 days = 8 seconds
by sven at 11:59 pm
It took 9 days to create 8 seconds of film. Eight good seconds, I think. But still... Ouch.
One of the things I like about doing stopmo with physical puppets is that it's really engaging. You hone your concentration into a laser-focus and march boldly forward: accumulating one frame, then the next, then the next.
CG, on the other hand, has a different rhythm. You fuss and tweak and test... And then you set the render going. And wait. And wait. Sure, the computer "does the work" of creating inbetweens for you... But that just leaves you waiting helplessly on the sidelines while it goes about its business.
So, while I'm getting some really pretty images, I'm not digging the process.
Of course, it's probably not even fair to call what I'm doing "animation" in the usual sense. It's more like special effects work. CG character animators try to keep their rigs (CG puppet skeletons) as simple as possible, so their characters can be manipulated quickly and intuitively. The Elder Things, though -- they're anything but simple. Get a load of these statistics... In the bit of the clip above where the Elders are opening their eyes, there are:
- objects: 358 (mostly invisible controllers I've set up)
- points: 673,569
- polygons: 1,186,898
- bones: 2736
- IK chains: 66
Krazee!
What I set out to create: The Elders wake up, opening their eyes. Then they see (before we do) the Shoggoth blocking their only escape. The Elders stand up so they can start running.
The transition from waking up to standing up turned out to be too abrupt. I needed a segue shot. So I spent a day working on the shot of the leg-tentacles that you see above. It's a shot that I've been imagining for four years -- so this seemed like the logical place to throw it in.
Trouble is, it just didn't work. Why? Well, in the first shot the camera is up at eye-level with the critters. In the next shot, it's down on the floor, and canted at an angle. If there were a person attached to the camera, moving from the Elders' eye-level to pointing down at the legs to pointing up feels like an awkward, implausible motion.
I happened on the solution by accident: The camera has to be animated, too -- apparently falling from its first vantage point, landing on the floor.
From an editing point of view, having the camera fall adds action to the scene, making things seem more chaotic. (Which is good for this scene!) From a meaning point of view, showing a close-up on the eye implicitly gives us the moment of mental transition for the Elder, where it goes into a panic. And motion-wise, having the camera fall downward -- it makes it look like the critter is standing up, which flows nicely into the motion of the next shot, where we really do see the creature rise.
For the bit where the camera is at floor-level, I did something a little sneaky. I recalled hearing somewhere about a trick Leni Riefenstahl invented while filming the 1936 Olympics... In order to make the athletes seem even taller and more heroic, she actually dug trenches so she could point the camera up at them from below ground level. I've got the same thing going on here: the camera is actually positioned 2 feet underground.
So, right now it looks like animated CG shots are taking 3 days apiece. Shots where I only need to do a still background plate in Lightwave, which then gets composited with actors, have generally taken one day. ...If I don't start getting faster at doing the animation, this project's in trouble.
I've been doing a bit of brainstorming about the "deep history" segment. I've come up with a new way of telling that part of the story that I like, and that's more succinct. But the way things are going now, I may have to cut it down even further -- maybe to just 15 seconds! ...If that's the way things go, it'll be a big disappointment.
I've started harboring fantasies about getting a bare-bones version of the film done for the Lovecraft Filmfest -- but then doing an "extended version" that I shop around to film fests worldwide. I don't know how I really feel about that concept yet... Too soon to say.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (7) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
June 17, 2007
finding my c(g) legs
by sven at 11:59 pm
I feel like I'm finally beginning to get a feel for how to animate CG models. (Knock on wood!) It's been a week of migraines to get to this point, though.
Today's big victory: I figured out a bug that was plaguing me all week.
A wrote a few days ago about wrestling with the eyestalks. The clip above shows the final outcome for that effort. Unable to figure out what was causing the little "epileptic fit," I wound up simply re-animating the whole thing.
I was worried that the mysterious bug would show up again... And sure 'nuf, it did. In the clip above, watch the lower left-hand corner and you'll see the leg have a little unintended spasm.
What causes it? Short answer: It happens if you try to make the arm-tentacle's hand pass through its own elbow.
See, the Elder Thing model is basically just hollow skin. To articulate it into poses, you create a skeleton of bones, each of which has magnetic force that deforms the skin's polygon mesh...
The arm-tentacle's bones are rigged using "inverse kinematics" -- which basically just means that you pose the end of the bone chain, and the computer will figure out how to bow the chain so that it follows the hand's lead...
And if you try to make the hand pass through the elbow? Then the the computer has a problem, and it will suddenly pop the arm-tentacle off in a totally different direction.
This problem was really hard to diagnose for several reasons:
- When one of the IK chains freaks out, all of the IK chains stutter. I was seeing the stutter in the leg -- but the offending pose was actually up in the arm!
- You can't tell that the arm is trying to pass through itself when IK is turned on -- only when it's turned off. (I'll illustrate this point later.)
- The stutter doesn't coincide with a keyframe. The hand tries to go through the arm's elbow between keyframes, when the computer's interpolating a motion path for me.
- Given the complexity of the model, it's easiest to create poses while looking at orthogonal views (e.g. top, front, right). To see where the problem's occurring, you need to view the model in perspective, and zoomed in on the correct controller.
Let me show you the problem up close:
The model stutters on the change between frame 12 and 13, and between 19 and 20. Above you can see the arm bowing nicely...
...and then, in the very next frame, the arm pops to this pose! (Yeesh.)
That box in the center of the screen is what controls the position of the hand. I pose it independently of the skeleton. When IK is turned on, the computer will do computations to make sure that the last bone in the arm is touching it.
Now let's see what frames 12 and 13 look like when the IK is turned off...
See that thin white line that the box is traveling up? That's its motion path. In frame 12, the box (the "wrist goal") is getting close to the arm -- but hasn't touched it yet.
In frame 13, the box is now touching the (unposed) arm. This little transgression -- this is what causes the IK to freak out and makes the entire model stutter.
Boy am I glad to finally have the mystery solved! Not knowing why the model was out of my control -- it was torture.
Other good news: I figured out what causes a recurrent crash. If I have a LightWave file open -- and then replace it by opening another -- then when I go to render the second file, LightWave is going to crash.
It's not a situation that I can really avoid. But at least I can be smart about when I save my work. And I know that if I want to render a file other than the one I currently have open, I'm just going to have to quit the program and start it up again.
(Upgrade the software? I could upgrade LightWave 7.5 to 7.5d for free if I wanted -- but I've been reading about other bugs that show up in 7.5d. Too dangerous, methinks, to muck with mission-critical software while I'm on a deadline.)
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
June 15, 2007
h.p. LOLvecraft
by sven at 1:34 pm
...Couldn't resist!
(Pop reference: Lolcats)
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
June 13, 2007
lsgl: a sharp poke in the eye
by sven at 11:59 pm
The past three days have been spent trying to animate the Elder Things waking up... It's been pretty miserable.
Three challenges.
One: This is the first time I'm really doing "character animation" in CG, and I'm struggling to get comfortable with the tools.
Two: I'm trying to figure out how to make a beast that has never existed -- and which has no Earthly analogs -- look natural.
Three: Mysterious technical problems have arisen (related to gimbal lock?) and I've been trying to trouble-shoot them.
Let's look at a sampling of renders that illustrate...
The clip above was my first quick test. My initial conception of the eyes was that the stalks do all the moving, the eyeballs are fixed in place. I discovered with this clip that the eyestalks can't be too flexible, or they start looking comedic.
To what extent do the eyes function independently versus in unison? My initial thought was that each eye essentially has a mind of its own. So I did this test render (above) where each stalk moves around randomly. ...I was thinking about simulating the way that human eyes dart from point to point.
Nope -- don't like it. The Elder isn't five separate creatures; it's one -- and has to act like it.
This clip also made me realize that the Elders are inherently a bit wall-eyed. Human eyes don't point in parallel lines -- the eyes' sight lines converge upon a single point. With Elders, though, in a neutral pose the sight lines point away from each other.
Having seen in the first clip that the eyestalks ought to be somewhat stiff, I decided to try taking that idea to an extreme -- having them locked in place, the eyeballs doing all the moving. Result: creepy, but not in a way that fits into the film.
Still, this clip made me decide that the eyeballs do need to move in their orbits somewhat... Probably only 20-30 degrees in either direction.
So, my new conception: Both eyestalks and eyeballs can move, but both should be somewhat stiff. And the five eyeballs all try to focus on a common point, rather than waving around independently.
How to accomplish this, from a workflow perspective? Animating one eyestalk at a time wasn't working out. I decided to pose all five eyestalks, save the file under a new name (so I could backtrack), and then move on to the next pose. And I decided to pose stalks first, then go back and animate eyelids, then go back to pose eyeballs in third pass. ...This plan of attack seems to work out pretty well.
I was feeling pretty pleased with the clip above... But then that weird little epileptic fit at the end emerged. Despite several hours of trying to eliminate it, I just couldn't figure it out. Ultimately I just had to admit defeat and start over -- not knowing what to do if this problem comes up again. Unhappy!
Production has slowed down to a crawl -- which is very hard to swallow. But I just keep telling myself that doing the CG animation will get easier as I keep getting more familiar with the process.
My random observation of the day: I wrote at one point that I was feeling "utterly baffled." ...Hey! That's anagram for "butterfly's leaf!" Neat!
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June 8, 2007
lsgl: i love math!
by sven at 11:59 pm
I've got the first three shots of Act III in the can now. It's exciting to feel momentum beginning to build again. Earlier this week I was working and reworking the storyboard -- and kept feeling like I was just spinning my wheels. Here are the new shots strung together:
Earlier today I had cause to shout "I LOVE MATH!" ...Um, let me explain.
Taking Gretchin's and Jeffrey's advice, I decided to speed up the explorers' egress. Easier said than done, though. See, in AfterEffects it's easy-peasy to tell the computer, "shrink this clip down to 73.5% of its original size" or "stretch it to 147%." Trouble is, the film isn't actually made out of rubber.
I've got 30 frames per second. It's easy enough to halve that to make 15 frames -- just delete every other frame. Or double it to 60 frames -- just slip in a duplicate of each frame. But if you ask for an odd percentage? Then the computer has to start cutting frames or slipping in duplicates at odd intervals. And it shows.
Oh, but it can get so much worse! If you resize a clip oddly -- and then resize it again -- you can start getting some really ugly stutters. ...And that's exactly the situation I found myself in this afternoon. Check out this example:
See the stutters? The larger you make the image, the worse they look. Definitely not something I want to project onto a 20-foot-tall movie screen!
I was starting off with a clip that was already stretched to 170%. It had a lot of digital spatter that needed to be cleaned up... Which required creating something like 150 little black, red, and blue patches (usually onscreen for just one or two frames) -- which was about six hours of work.
The clip above shrank the clean 170% version -- not the original -- down to 60%. I tried a bunch of other likely percentages, trying to turn my 170% version into a speedier clip without stutter... Without luck. Then I remembered one of my fave formulas (no joke) from high school algebra: if A/B = C/D, then D=(C*B)/A.
So: In the first version of the clip, I stretched my footage from 100% to 170%. Let's represent that by this ratio: 170/100. I rendered out the despattered clip -- so it was no longer 170% of something else -- it was just 100% of itself. I want to know what to divide that 100% by in order to get back to the original pace... Represent this by the ratio, 100/X. Solve for X. (Calculators are allowed. This is an open-book test!)
Thus: (100*100)/170 = 58.823529. I plugged the number into AfterEffects as my stretch factor... And it worked!
YES!! I love math!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (2) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
June 7, 2007
lsgl: a big crowd of elder things
by sven at 11:59 pm
Having stirred up a heap of trouble, the explorers start heading back toward the cave entrance. Incidentally, this is the most Elder Things we've seen in a shot so far: 34 of them.
(Plogging is sort of like watching the dailies together, no?)
I've come up with a new tool for helping me get the camera angle right while compositing. I created a box in Modeler that is 6 feet tall x 4 feet long. Six feet tall is how tall the explorers are. Four feet is approximately how long one human step is.
I focus on just one explorer while tweaking the camera. What I'm looking at, mostly, is where the top of his head is, and where the ball of his foot sits (I pick one foot to work with). The trick is to try to get the perceived height of the explorer in position A to match the perceived height of the box's rear face -- and similarly, to get the explorer in position B to match up with the height and position of the box's front face.
Last month I did a little studying up on how artists simulate perspective. It turns out that the main trick is learning how to draw three-dimensional grids. Once you've made your 3D grid, all you have to do to draw an object in perspective is this: draw a cube that approximates the size of your object at the proper position in space, and then sculpt the cube (or several cubes) into the object that you actually want to draw.
My perspective tool is basically doing the job of one cube in a 3D grid. It's much easier to tweak the camera position, angle, and zoom by referencing a box, rather than an organic object... Still, I keep the lavamen stand-ins on hand to double-check my work.
...
Today I tried using media deprivation to help me stay focused: no music, all day!
Very effective... It was much easier to get into (and stay in) the semi-hypnotic state required to do animation. On the other hand, after ten hours that level of focus also starts making me a bit loopy.
Sven quote of the week:
I can see through time. That's what animators do.
posted by sven | permalink | comments (3) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
June 5, 2007
lsgl: mountains of madness
by sven at 5:15 pm
Sunday I did a bunch of work on exterior shots.
I'm pretty happy with this shot of the blizzard sweeping over the explorers' camp.
For those who don't know, this film I'm making (Let Sleeping Gods Lie) is inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's novella, "At The Mountains of Madness." ...So it's nice that I'm finally able to squeeze in at least one shot of an actual mountain!
The image above was PhotoShopped together out of four or five different images. You see how the cave entrance is set into that sort of... glacial shelf? Well, I wound up having to create most of that out of nothing -- picking out colors and digitally painting abstract shapes that blend in with the stuff in the middle.
The "mountain of madness" shot is going to be further modified. It needs blizzard added to it, and then my "Shoggoth cam" effect... Which has yet to be invented.
While experimenting, I came up with the clip you see above. I don't think it's what Shoggoth cam is supposed to look like -- but I'm really intrigued with the look, nonetheless.
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June 2, 2007
lsgl: too much fun
by sven at 8:35 pm
At the drop of a hat, our friends Kristen and Todd came over today to help me with Let Sleeping Gods Lie.
I'm fine-tuning the storyboard for Act III, and needed warm bodies to help me figure out blocking and camera angles.
I think (when we were being serious) I managed to get the shots I was looking for...
But wow -- movie-making that's fun? I could get used to this!
Thanks K, T, & gl.!
posted by sven | permalink | comments (1) | categories: let sleeping gods lie
May 31, 2007
lsgl: act I complete!
by sven at 11:59 pm
I'm surprised and thrilled to have this section of the film done already -- and by the last day of May!
I wound up deciding to cut a few shots. The new edit keeps things punchy, and ends on a nice climax.
Change of vocabulary... I'm now thinking of this short as taking place in three acts -- plus a prelude and epilogue. Here's the structure:
- Prelude: the explorers enter the cave and discover Elder Things (this was the "teaser trailer")
- Act I: the explorers find the distress beacon and turn it on
- Act II: we learn the history of the ancient Shoggoth uprising
- Act III: a Shoggoth enters the cave and massacres the remaining Elder Things
- Epilogue: the sole human survivor surveys the carnage
Instead of cross-fading from Act I to Act II, I've decided to have a more discrete break. The three acts are now going to be treated as if they're separate vignettes.
What would be fantastically awesome: If I could get Act III done by the end of June, and Act II done by the end of July... Leaving August for polishing off the epilogue, composing the soundtrack, and getting everything bundled up for submission.
I seriously doubt that things will run that clean. Act III has a lot of complex CG shots that will have loooong render times. And Act II will require some sets that I haven't even fully envisioned yet, let alone constructed.
But, I'll keep on working with severability in mind. Here's what gets cut from the agenda if I'm running short on time... Things that will impact the story least being listed first:
- the war with Cthulhu's spawn
- explaining how the Elders became weak, arrogant, and decadent after the war
- the epilogue
- all of Act II -- including telling that the Elders came to Earth millions of years ago, and that they were overthrown by their own servants
...Onward!
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May 30, 2007
lsgl: the beacon ignites
by sven at 11:45 pm
A turning point in the story: the intergalactic distress beacon ignites!
This was a difficult shot. It took two days and (exactly) 50 compositions in AfterEffects to assemble 8 seconds of acceptable film.
There's was a lot to squeeze in:
- the basic plate -- the beacon, the cave, the Elder Things
- the blinky lights on the beacon's little horns
- the beam that shoots out of the main nozzle
- the little explosion when the beam ignites
- the aurora on the beacon's screen
- the sparking where the Captain's hand touches the screen before...
- ...and after ignition
- tinting the room with green light
- tinting the explorers and tweaking brightness to simulate depth
- the Captain's left arm had to be grafted onto a different body
- his partner has to slowly back away after the beacon turns on
(I'm posting a larg