1) I made a good first final pass on the shots that I want to use in my reel, and showed those to Angie Jones, a USC animation professor who’s really good with 3D character animation. Yesterday she gave really great critiques on it all, and I am now on my way to fixing the shots up and getting them ready for usage in my reel! Aaand once that’s ready, I’ll be able to start applying to jobs finally. Weee!
2) Earlier today I recorded some extra lines and some ad-libbed dialogue with a few of my fraternity brothers, Andrew Heiderscheit and Aidan Blant, for the party scene in my film. Which meeeeeeeeans that I am officially DONE recording audio for my film! Weeeeoooweeeooweeeooweeeoweeee!!!
And this is all such great fuckinng news because it just means that the end is in sight. I’m a little less than half-way done with the final animation of everything, and also the 2D animation sequences are coming along (I did a bunch of dance cycles that I’ll show on this blog later) and it’s just really exciting to see all of these assets I’ve been creating slowly getting ready to be put all together at once into a FILM! Aaahh! I’m still kind of freaking out about whether or not I’ll be able to finish it all in time, but I feel like I should be OK. I just gotta keep up the pace I’m going at and I should be good…
So yea. Just another simple verbal update. I’m in relaxation mode right now, especially after that recording session… recording sessions always take the piss outta ya, don’t they?
Today I had the truth tea spilled twice for me, which was admittedly mortifying, but for the most part entirely useful and awesome because if I heed the advice I received today correctly, my film will be awesome.
TRUTH TEA PART 1: This tea was more difficult to drink, but it is ultimately more easy to follow. Basically, Bethany Sparks (USC Sound Technician) sat in on my class’ CTAN 401A class to give sound-related critiques on our films, and I was excited as hell to hear it! (And I got lots of really great advice, as well as a new shot suggestion! Y’all will see…) But my heart couldn’t help but drop when, right after my animatic finished playing (which includes my official voice actor recordings), Bethany said to me, “So, this isn’t your final voice audio, right?”
O__O
Luckily, the issue she had was only that the Main Character’s voice is too low, which — is something I already knew, but I gotta admit — I was totally ignoring/denying it until now. (Mainly because I figured I’d pitch it later. Y’know, the whole “I’ll get around to it” thing that eventually leads to one’s artistic destruction.) Also, she said that the mom’s voice sounded weird (and I was like “Drag-Queeny?” and she was like “lol yea..”) and I explained that I had pitched it down 2 whole notes so yea that kinda fucked her voice up as well.
BUT THIS IS WHY YOU ALWAYS KEEP ALL YOUR OLD FILES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!!
And you better believe that my Animatic has ~already been updated~ with fixed versions of the voice audio, because I of course have the original un-pitched versions of all my best takes, because girl, I’m organized. Z-Snap.
(sorry I’m being sassy today. I’m feeling delirious for some reason.)
Anyway, the PART 2 OF TRUTH-TEA DAY was much easier to take because it was animation advice that I got from USC Animation Grad-Student, Greg Jones, and he basically broke down the basics of good animation to me in a really great way:
1) Great Timing
2) Great Posing
3) Body Mechanics
4) Attention To Detail (going the extra mile)
Which makes complete sense, and yet it was so enlightening to hear, and I’ve now written those 4 tenets and pinned them up on my wall above my computer, haha! Also, Greg taught me how to turn on the thing in Maya that makes your keyframes stepped (and not curved together with splines) which is useful for getting the poses/timing down.
Anyway, I know this post is boring, so in return, here’s a link to a video of Raven and Jujube from Rupaul’s Drag Race: All Starslipsynching for their lives to the song “Dancing On My Own” by Robyn, because let’s face it that lipsynch was epic.
I now have the final audio put into the animatic!!! And this only means one thing:
I have no stumbling blocks ahead of me (aside from, you know, ANIMATING THE WHOLE THING)!!!!!!!!!!!! Literally all that’s left for me to do for now is:
1) Finish rigging the Mom
2) Finish modelling/texturing the environments (which will slowly happen over time as I animate, haha)
Aaaand
3) FUCKING. ANIMATE. LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER.
And after that, of course, comes lighting/rendering/compositing but that’s not something I’ll have to think much about for a while. For now though, really all I need to focus on is hunkering down with Maya (and occasionally Plastic Animation Paper) and GET CRACKING. ‘Cause I got no other excuse now haha.
1) I modeled the Hero’s Mom FINALLY!!! I won’t show it for a couple more days though because I feel like that deserves its own post. But I’ve gotten a really great first pass on the head/hair/body of the Mom character, and it’s actually looking really good… right now I’m just trying to come up with last changes to do to it but to be honest I’m not totally sure if I want to do much with it at all.
…Oh, OK fine here’s a render of what she looks like:
Notice how her hairline lifts from her forehead a bit there. Yea, I still need to fix a few things…
2) I have FINISHED editing together the dialogue audio!!! What that means is that all the lines in my film that involve characters saying actual sentences, I now have final versions of those lines. Aaand I’m really happy with them! The audio for things like Gasps or Pantings or Screaming, though, I haven’t gotten final versions edited together of. But whatever. The dialogue is the more important stuff, I would say, haha.
3) I’m currently putting together the 7th version of my Animatic, which will include this finalized audio, and once it’s done, I’ll throw it up on this blog. So stay tuned, Phantoms! It gets brighter and brighter all the time. 😉
Because I’m wavering between constantly wanting to just pass out (and by that I mean watch endless youtube videos), and getting myself to keep working, which is hard when the work I need to do right now can be summed up in this image:
Those are audio files! Each with unique and descriptive filenames! See, one really great thing about my Sound Technician (whose name was Kim Patrick, and she is AWESOME) was that the audio files she gave me came ALREADY CUT UP more or less into their individual takes! Which will make putting them into after effects/selecting the best takes REALLY EASY.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I still have to name them all according to what lines/sounds are in each of them before I can work on them. Because… yea. That’s how I work. I can’t stare at a folder full of files called “Mean Girl_1.wav, Mean Girl_2.wav, Mean_girl_3.wav” and not end up sobbing quietly to myself 5 minutes later.
So that’s been fun (not really)
In other news, I’m rigging the Mean Girls’ friends! Evidence of that is the first image of this post. Ehh? ehhhh? See what I did there?
Also, check it out, the monster house has color! Or at least its’ starting to:
The colors fucking suck, I know. I just kinda applied them based on what seemed right at the time, and NOT based on the painting that Theo gave me, so I’ll take a closer look at that soon and get it crackin’. Luckily, I’m learning about surfacing techniques in my Lighting And Rendering class, so in a few weeks I’ll certainly have a much better idea of how to make this house look old and creepy with just the click of a button! Woohoo!
But yea. I’m just chuggin’ along as usual. Once I get my sound organized/put into the animatic, I’ll be doing some serious RLO animatin’ though, so stay tuned for that. Yeaaahhh buddy!
With a thesis film as spooky and ghost/monster-oriented as mine, I’d be stupid to not make a post like this. Happy Halloween, everybody!
(It’s a Jack-O-Lantern with the Mean Girl’s face carved into it) (“Carved”)
Anyway, in more official news, I did my voice actor recording today! It went really well! It got a bit stressful though when I had like, 2.5 characters left to record and I was suddenly informed that I had only 50 minutes left… but I managed to get it all in!!! It was funny, I got all the actors to do their lines and I finished that at EXACTLY 6:59PM (one minute before my time was up) and as I was about to pack up, I was like “Oh I can just do the lines that I’m voicing next time” (As the main party monster) and the ADR booth technician I was working with was like “How many lines do you have left?” and I’m like “Just 3” and she was just like “Eh, whatever, let’s record them anyway.”
So I really did get everyone’s lines recorded!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY. All I need left to record are the party monsters, and lord knows that’ll be a hoot, haha!
Woo Woo WOoo Woooooooooooooooooooooo!
Happy Halloween! And MUCH more to come, now that I finally have my audio!!
So my friend/former-fellow-Dreamworks-Intern, Theo Aretos, agreed a while back to do concept paintings for my thesis film! Which is GREAT because I fucking SUCK at designing things. (and yet I took on the challenge of designing my own characters, but whatever, what’s done is done)
Anyway, he has so far gotten 2 paintings done: The exterior of the Monster Mansion, and the initial Hallway inside the Monster Mansion that the Hero enters before stumbling upon the party room:
And to be quite honest, I am absolutely swept away by these paintings. They’re exactly what I asked for, too — Not super-finished, sketchy paintings that get the shapes and colors down, but don’t bother too much with the detail. So before you get all concerned, I purposefully asked him to keep the paintings sketchy. Because that way, it gives me more freedom when I model these structures into real life! And really, the important thing that these paintings give me is style and color composition, which are the two things that I am the absolute WORST at when it comes to film-making. So thank you so much Theo!! And I can’t wait to see the rest of the paintings! (That’s right y’all, he’s designing the School Yard, Kid’s Room, Kid’s House, and Party Room as well! And he described his idea for the Party Room recently and I pretty much died with how awesome it sounds, so YEAH BABY shit is getting DONE.
Anyway, and just in case you’re concerned about whether or not I’ll be able to model these paintings into real-life 3D models, worry no further!
These are 2 production shots of the exterior of the Monster Mansion. It’s not finished, as you can obviously tell, but already it’s looking pretty fancy, in my opinion! I really only need to append another handful of structures and fix some of the sizes before it’s time to start texturing and lighting it! Wooooo.
BUT IN OTHER NEWS~
I have officially gotten my entire cast-list for voice actors for my film! YESSIREEE! And without further adieu, I give you the list (In order of appearance):
Hero: Jesse Pilchen
Hero’s Mom: Celia Rivera-Baron
Mean Girl: Christina Cook
Mean Girl’s Friends (Archer, Bil, and Edgar): Michael Malconian
The Party Monsters: Whichever of my Fraternity Brothers feel like going into a recording booth (none of the party ghosts have any real lines, so it’s not a big deal)
Main Party Ghost: Me!
Yes, I’m doing one of the voices. After watching my Animatic through all its stages, I’ve realized that, while I can’t really pull off a middle-shool-boy voice, and CERTAINLY not a middle-school-girl voice, I definitely CAN pull off a goofy Ghost voice. The rest of the actors, however, are other USC students, and I’m SUPER excited to record them! I’ve been struggling to lock down a date with the ADR people, though, but with luck, it’ll happen this coming Wednesday (yes, on Halloween. I’m aware of how perfect that is.).
ANYWAY, ONE LAST BIT OF NEWS~
I’ve officially decided on which 2D animation software I’m going to use for my film! This was a point of concern because I really don’t like Flash or Toon Boom, because they both function in Vector-Based lines, which quite frankly look like shit in my opinion. They just don’t look like the lines that I draw on paper, whereas animation software that works in Bitmap Lines end up producing work that looks WAY better. It requires more work, but I know that it will pay off in the end. Also, I’m considering having the party monsters be colorless (just filled in with white) both for simplicity’s sake and for style. After all, juxtaposing a full-color world with 2D black-and-white monsters will be… quite jarring, won’t it? 😉
Anyway, after shopping around for free (or very cheap) animation software, I found that the best match for me was PAP, or “Plastic Animation Paper,” which is a really fucking fantastic free program that can import footage, animate bitmap-cels on top of it, and it exports that animation really beautifully.
I only got this program a couple days ago (and I’ve been partying this past weekend due to Halloween) so I only have a very rough sketch-up of the first bit of 2D Animation I’m doing for the film:
…and even that rough sketch of the animation isn’t done. I did all of that today though (including figuring out how the goddamned program works, which took time in of itself) so as you can see it’s a fast, lightweight program that, if I put the effort into it, will produce good product. So yay!
Oh, and P.S. to those non-animation peeps reading this, the difference between Bitmap Lines and Vector Lines is such: Bitmap Lines are based on pixels, and when you scale them up in size they lose quality. Vector Lines are based on mathematical points in space, and when you scale them up, the points get scaled up, and the computer just fills in based on the new numerical location of those points. So as a result, they lose no quality when they’re resized. However, Vector Lines (because they’re so geometric in nature) don’t look nearly as natural as Bitmap Lines… it’s sort of like the difference between buying a cake from the store and making it yourself. Although the quality isn’t necessarily as perfect as the store-bought cake, there’s more heart in the home-made one.
Anyway, that’s all for now! Hopefully this is enough progress to show to my class tomorrow (it’s my group’s turn to present and I’m kind of nervous because I spent 2 of the last 3 weekends either partying or going to NorCal, soooooooooo yea I didn’t actually make that much progress in the last 21 days, gulp) but yea.
So this weekend I didn’t do anything. Like, I did a little bit of revision on the Mean Girls’ Friends, but like… yea I didn’t do anything.
My excuse, though? I was in NorCal the whole weekend celebrating my dad’s 60th birthday. And if there’s one thing I’ve found to be true over the years, it’s that when I’m spending time in the house I grew up in, I can not do ANY work WHATSOEVER. It’s just a fact. I’ll sit at the computer, I’ll try, but there’s just something in the air, and suddenly I’m off doing something else. Usually looking at Facebook. But basically, this past weekend was a mini-vacation for me, haha.
But even though I didn’t do anything, that doesn’t mean that progress wasn’t made on my film!
First of all, I did Voice Auditions on Thursday, and while only 5 people came out to audition, I really liked 3 of them, and over the weekend I confirmed with those 3 actors, and I now have voice actors for 5 of my characters in Phantoms In The Dark!!! (One of them will do 3 different characters) I won’t reveal their names yet, however, because I still need to find an actress for one ~very important role,~ but I know who I’ll audition for that, and so in a few days I’ll probably have my full cast list ready. Woohoo!
Also, over the weekend I got my first round of feedback for a couple of shots for my film! I submitted W.I.P. playblasts of the shot of the main character climbing over the wall, and the shot of him getting grabbed by the tentacle to two people who I worked with/got to know at Dreamworks, and they both got back to me on what they thought of it! They both thought that my animation of the kid struggling with the tentacle worked really well, which is REALLY exciting to hear, woohoo! They also both agreed that the tip-toe needed work, and they both had suggestions on how to fix that, as well as the wall-climbing. But yea! It’s nothing I can’t do, and I’m super excited to put those shots into their final clean-up stages and get them ready to go! WOooooooooooooooo
(here are the shots by the way:)
😀 😀
Oh and wanna know one other thing I did over this past weekend? I got tickets to see the Misfits live in LA on November 18th.
So I’m on the verge of getting many things done. Let me list the ways!
– I’m finally getting on the ball and will (*fingers crossed*) hopefully have completed some voice-actor auditions by the end of this coming week. I still need to lock down the room though so that’s in the air.
– In order to avoid becoming super fucking lazy, I went ahead and started up the Scene-Files for 14 of the 30 Scene-Files that will comprise my film. (Before today I had only started up 4). Now, I haven’t actually animated in any of the new ones, but just the fact that they’re set up now means I don’t have to get over the mental-block/procrastination-fodder of “I don’t wanna have to set up the shoooottttt” anymore, because it’s already all set up. Time to animate!
– Speaking of animation, I’ve gotten 2 shots ready to show to people who I trust to give me good advice on how to improve it. And so that process shall begin like, 30 minutes from now!
– I got a message from my OTIS student friend, Theo Aretos (who I also interned with at Dreamworks) recently saying that he’s almost done with the concept designs for the environments for my film. So soon I won’t have ridiculously-crappy-looking standin-environments for my film! Wooooohooo!!
– I heavily revamped the 4 friends of the Mean Girl of my film (and by this I mean I changed their bodies) and all that leaves is fixing their faces some, and then I’ll have a second pass on them to show around to people! Woohoo.
So basically, there’s a lot of potential in the air. Will I persevere and continue to make progress? Or will I just open up a bag of Doritos and never finish my film?
Just kidding, of course I’ll persevere. PERSEVEERREE!!! (I really need to stop making these posts after 2AM)
But in the mean time, here’s at little something I did for homework for another class:
You’re probably wondering what the fuck this is. This is my homework for my Lighting And Rendering class, and we had to demonstrate Caustics (aka when light is refracted through transparent objects like water or crystals) and Subsurface Scattering (which is used to make skin look real). So I figured, what the hell, I’ll put the Mean Girl from my film into a sassy pose and turn her into an ice sculpture and a skin… sculpture… thing. She kind of looks more like water in the ice sculpture one though, and she looks a little waxy in the skin one. But whatever. I’m not trying to be a surfacer…
MmmaaaxxxRubinThesis 