They can't all be heroeS

The fancy shots you see in trailers for animated films are probably mostly all "hero shots"... not that they have heroes in them... its just an animation term for a fancy or complex shot... They tend to slow things down when working because well... they are more complicated.... So lets say a normal shot is a character looking up and saying a line.... and a hero shot is like a character running at another, slicing his head off which rolls on the floor then jumping through a window....

I've found I can kick out 1-3 hero shots per day... I've done up to 20 normal shots a day... if they were all heroes I would finish in 2020... luckily there's lots of villains so I try to finish before 2011 ^ ^

What film festivals and can do for YOU and ME

Physical film festivals have been dying a slow death of irrelevance as the interweb gains ultimate power but they are still useful to filmmakers for getting some press BUT I still think the way most of them in US work is BULLSHIT

Wanna know why the "indie" filmmaking scene is mostly rich kids who go to expensive film schools?

Here's how it goes...

You pay a fee... $50 - $100 for a feature

A) You get rejected AND they are nice enough to keep your money
B) You get accepted THEN they send you a page of EXACT technical specs you must meet so they can screen your film

Example: "We are the Strange" was HD.... so my cheapest full quality option was HDCAM which cost about $1,500.00 for one copy

When the film screens at the festival... people PAY to see your film yet you get NOTHING and yeah you just had to pay out of your pocket to make a tape for them AND you had to pay for your flight and lodging to attend the festival.

So why would a filmmaker do this? To get exposure you say? Well in the past this was the ONLY way to really get any exposure BUT today NO FILM FESTIVAL can match the exposure you can get for being feature on youtube for just one day...

So you don't "need" film festivals for that...the interweb pwns them badly...

NOW the Hollywood brainwashed amongst you might say "yeah but IMPORTANT people will see it at the film festival" again this is NOT true... YES many Hollywood types go there to schmooze but they are lazy fUX and most of them are at parties all the time anyway... its easier for them to click a link and see your shit online... If you build buzz online THEY will see it regardless of what fest your in...

Now what are film festivals good for these days? Well a lot of old media press still pay attention to the going on's at the big fests like Sundance so if you can get in one of those use them for the press...

NOW I must say with my new film "Heart String Marionette" will PWN hard... so I'm not going to pretend like I'm some lost little indie filmmaker hoping to be accepted by some festival... It's all about what festivals can do for me... And thats the attitude we need to take... stop letting them leech off of us with us getting nothing in return... I mean most big fests are filled with studio/celebrity produced fake ass "indie" films... they NEED the real shit every once in a while so they can pretend they still have street creD nah mean...

So I as a real moPHUCIN filmmaker d00d Sayeth...

Entry fee's are ok... I'll pay and play the game that far BUT if my film is in the fest I AM NOT PAYING TO MAKE A TAPE TO PLAY AT THE FESTIVAL... I will give the festival a digital file and THEY CAN MAKE A TAPE that they can keep in their archive..The bastards ask you for a free copy of your film after for their archive anyway...

If the festival is charging for my screenings then...

A) they pay me a screening fee

or

B) they give me a percentage of the ticket sales like %50

So if any film fest people are reading this you need to get in contact with me ahead of time if you want to screen my new film which will be completed late 2010... and you know ahead of time that I'm a pretentious bastard BUT I can back it up over 9000 times.

The only fest I'll jump through hoops for is Fantasia in Montreal because they really championed my film at the fest...it had great screenings and won a few awards... and also the festival in Waterloo... real animation fans there....

Seeing as this film is going to be FUCKING insane and epic I'd like you all to be able to see it in a theater on a big screen... So that will be my priority...

And I must say after all the fests I attended in all the different countries... the REALIST one was in Waterloo... no "celebrity" bullshit... no parties... no VIP bullshit...just great UNIQUE and CHALLENGING films from all over the world and a crowd of knowledgeable and appreciative peoples.

Knowing what you want....

Since I'm working so fast now I'm wondering why I was so slow in the past.... Most of it had to do with not knowing what I wanted... NOW I am much more prepared and confident so I just make a decision and go because I know I did all the hard time refining and researching so I know what I'm going to do is on the right track... in the past I jumped into doing things before the ideas, concepts and everything else had enough time to marinate.... You have to dig deep to get the good stuff...

What kills you is second guessing... Now when I'm about to final a shot and send it to render... my tweaker self starts to rise up and cast doubts but then I say out loud "I'm down with this" and I click the button to send it off.... What has really helped as well has been my new workflow where if there are any problems after shots are rendered I make a note in the same folder as the shot and I will fix them when everything is done.... In the past it would bore into my brain and I was constantly reworking past shots *going backwards.... instead of making a note and moving on... Its all about MOMENTUM...once its moving forward DONT GO BACKWARDS because you'll have to expend a metric SHIT_TON of energeeZ to get moving at the same speed again...

In the past I would spend a lot of time fixing and reworking shots that probably got edited out anyway 0_0 So now I'm choosing the wait till the end so that I spend the time on the shots that are required instead of having to have everything perfect all the time...

Its kinda weird though because as I was doing wats I kept watching the stuff that was finished and re-editing and thinking about things but now its like the movie was already finished and I just have to print it out...know what I mean? I think that THIS is what your supposed to do... Hitchcock said something about it... like the film is already made he just has to film it.... So yeh I finally got it meh thinks... you gotta BUST on the pre-production and REFINE REFINE REVAMP REVAMP and just grind it all in your mind and keep reworking the script/storyboard/animatic till its at its best.... THEN once youve got THAT go and make the film... You will have so much CONFIDENCE because you know EXACTLY what you want and you will get it.

After one month: Many many terabytes

Finished another sequence today... I'm through 3 of about 40.... I haven't done an exact count yet but I think I could through over 200 shots in the first month... The render's are about 140 shots behind me though 0_0 On average 4-8 shots finish rendering a day....but I add 7-14 new shots per day as well...

All and all I'm pretty happy with the way things are going... one looming problem I can see is storage space... the first 6 minutes that were rendered took 59 gigs of space.... The film will be about 120 minutes so figure that out 0_0 AND thats just for the 3d renders.... then I need to comp all the shots and render them to a 10bit video file etc... So yeh its a good thing drives are relatively cheap...its too bad a 2tb drive is the biggest you can get though... I could use a few 4tb drives... BUT thats not a problem right NOW so I won't let it eat my brain...I just make a note then I'll deal with it when the drives are %80 full.... then I'll probably try to do some "Hard Drive DRIVE" fundraiser or something ^_^ Thanks to yall that have donated... you've helped me get this faR!!!! OR I could get a little craftier and just ask some hard drive companies to donate a few... both Seagate AND Hitachi are nearby... whatever the case it will work out somehow...

I will move on to the next sequence tomorrow.... its going to be fun because it introduces two of the other main characters...both of which are ummm full of character ^ ^ AND I get to animate the first really scary horror type scenes with this monster d00d that I know will freak you the fuck out... seriously...I had my doubts when I was designing him but I decided to go for it and make him as fucked as possible so he and his... ummm... accessories will steal the scenes most likely 0_o

But anywarS... I'm going to push to finish ahead of schedule... To do it in a year I need to do churn out 10 minutes a month.... this month I did 20+ I'll try to keep that up and MORE! ^_^

MUST...Urgghhhh...meet QuotA...

Some times its a grind... it is animation which YES is fun and exciting but after a couple hundred shots you start to get fatigued and lose inspiration and its a struggle just to sit still in front of the computer... this is where all the planning and workflow projections come in handy... if you did your homework you know exactly how many shots you need to do a day to stay on schedule... my minimum is 7 shots a day... BUT I try to double that or do at least 10... but on those GRINDY days I barely make it to 7... and thats good enough....everyday you can't be a super speed world beater... some days you just gotta do what you gotta do to get the job done... The important thing is to NOT stop EVER do your quota even if your crying and bleeding from your FACE.... because all it takes is to give in to procrastination ONCE then it festers and takes over and before you know it..FAIL.

Some times I don't want to have to do everything but I just moan and do everything anyway ^ ^

Its weird how the powers of procrastination work....they are indeed powerful... and if your a creative person doing self motivated personal projects they BE your worst enemy...

NOW saying that.... make sure and come up with a quota that while bustin out shots you still have enough time to refine them and make them good quality... So say I've gone over my quota for the day but I sense myself becoming frustrated, losing focus or wanting to take shortcuts...thats when you call it a day... and as long as you hit your quota you can sleep well that night.

Mistakes make things great

The above photo I took while on a morning bike ride is full of photographic errors..mistakes... chromatic aberration, lens flares, lens glare, grain, circles of confusion...all kinds of crap ^ ^ but I love that stuff...

The thing that SUX about 3d is that the "camera" takes perfect photos every time... so unless you work to add in them errors your going to get perfect plastic pictures...which I don't like... NOW taking the "mistake" thing a ways past photography and into animation itself...Stop motion gives you TONS of mistakes for free haha... things are shaking, grimy, gritty...they can go out of focus easily...the light may flicker... you get all that with no work.... you have to work to make it clean...

Seeing that HSM is all 3d... I guess many would assume that my work will lose its creepy jittery edge or somethin... well it is a lot more refined but I did a TON of work so that it looks handmade...and not just in the construction but in how its animated... you'll see when you SEE it ^ ^

This shit is easy ^ ^ it's all in the pre-pro

I don't mean to be too cocky about my speed of production on this new film so far... but it looks like in the first month I'll be able to do 20 minutes of finished animation... thats full 3d animation with many characters, crazy huge complex sets and it looks amazing like nothing seen before....if people thought WATS looked like a 30 million dollar film this one looks like a 200 million dollar film ^ ^

NOW seeing how fast one d00d can work I'm wondering WHY small no-budget teams all over the world are not kicking out high quality 3d animated features? Cause seriously this shit is easy! The tools are so powerful and flexible and allow you to work really fast and a few decent quad core boxes give you lots of rendering power...

Well the reason I am able to work so fast is because I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I WANT... from each shot, each character....from everything...there is no hesitation because everything was worked out in the LONG pre-production I did... most people dont do enough pre-production, they rush into production... YOU MUST LOVE THE FILM IS ITS RAW pre-production form... don't fall into the trap where you tell yourself "this is ok BUT it'll will be amazing fully animated" If the story and the mood and the suspense and everything isn't there in the script, it wont be in the storyboard, it wont be in the animatic and it WONT be in the movie.... my crappy animatic made me cry when I watched it so it worked then at that rough stage.... So I can be confident and just execute when in production...

The problem is most 3d filmmaker people look at the film as an "animated film" instead of a film that is animated... they rush through or bypass essential pre-production work and start modeling shit cause thats what they know... but in the end they either never finish or produce a really long demo reel that speaks to no one but other 3d geeks... I became a 3d geek but I was a filmmaker first.

So if people aren't doing it now I'm going to make it my thing to go around the world with HSM and help people start making they 3d features ^ ^ Cause I'm tired of seeing all this kid stuff... Pixar is great but the real world is a scary fucked up place and film/art should reflect the world its made in not just the shiny bits... ORIGINAL 3d animation for feature film production has been in the light so far... who else is going to take it onto the darkside? CAUSE trust me these 3d tools were MADE to make disturbing things haha Any of you who are into the Silent hill games know this...

Production notes 10-21-09

Notes on workflow etc..

Copy exr renders from render server folder onto workstation media drive... copy project file from render into archive on render server... import exr sequences from renders into After Effects... organize and rename each shot... save AE project file as Sequence name... render out temp quicktime movies to do offline edit and to give composer/sound designer something to work off of... as I go through the files in After Effects I made notes of problems with shots... I have a folder in the AE project that holds the notes... just folders using the description text to keep notes.... So when the whole film is animated and I reopen these AE projects to do the final comps I will fix/re-render the shots that have notes... I'm not doing that now because I want to move forward... seems like a better way to work for me...

Just finished editing the first sequence...which is a little over 6 minutes... looks good... on one shot the alpha channel was missing for one frame?! and on several others I forgot to turn on transparency render in the z-blur setting... just minor technical stuff... no problems with the animation at all ^ ^

So I hand off this sequence to the composer, Endika... tomorrow so he can get started...

3 weeks/ 10 minutes

So I've finished animating the first 10 minutes of the film... I've broken the film into 45 sequences based on location for workflow purposes... So I did Sequence 1 & 2... As you can see in the pic two more shots need to render...then I can load all the img sequences into After Effects to make the temp .mov's to drop into the edit... I think its more than 10 minutes though cause I added a lot of shots that weren't in the animatic... but yeh... Then all the shots from sequence 2 that are done will go on to render...

THoughts so far...

Running out of drive space... My render server drive is a 1tb drive and it only has 335gb free right now... I'm rendering 1920x802 exr sequences... an Rgba pass and a depth pass... on average a 10 second shot is 1gb total for both passes... Deleting the project folders off the render server for the finished shots will reclaim a lot of space but its apparent that I will need to buy more drives (Thanks to THorgin for donating to the hard drive fund ^ ^)

Motion clips are awesome... I'm using C4d's motion clips extensively... I find them very easy to use and flexible... its a smart thing to create the most common motions for all your characters before production...

Really need to pay attention to scene optimization to keep the fps up when animating multiple characters in a scene...

If you put 8 hours of work in each day....things will get done... well duh right? ^ ^ but really... consistency is key....

The original storyboard is just a rough guide... I redid the storyboards for both sequences before I started them and will probably do that for the whole film... I have a totally different point of view now and I have to update the film as such...

The time of thinking/planning is over...now is the time to act... you have to trust that you really did squeeze the best out of your story/theme so that now you can just focus on the animation from shot to shot and get it done...

I'm kinda tired ^ ^ I was scheduled to finish this sequence on the 23rd but I finished early so I can do something else for one day...

Do you really want to be pwned by these guys?

Ya know I get a lot of " you should make movies for Hollywood" comments from well meaning but unknowing peoples... Well once you sign a contract ANY of the cogs in the system your pretty much owned by one of these old men... Pictured are Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch... two "media moguls"... Americans responsible for turning popular media into the TRASH it is today and subsequently eroding American values and the minds of all of its citizens...just to make a buck..yeah///

So the people in the Hollywood system can PRETEND to be all edgy or whatever but in the end they are OWNED by these old men... They cannot do anything without the approval of old men like these... yeh sounds great 0_0

They push they warped values and distorted ideas on the world...and everyone bows down to them as they slaves just to make a buck... maybe your a slave to them? How does it feel? Is it great? I mean your "successful" you probably own a nice haus and car and wife and have children just like the ones raised in the Disney labs? Your probably an "important" person right? They let you in those "VIP" areas yes? Thats right you've MADE IT! You've made it right into the pig pen with the rest of the bloated swine... enjoy rolling in your own waste... perpetuating your own myths and legends onto a mostly unknowing numbed populace... bUT KNOW THIS... there are some desperate people watching you... we are watching you... you grow richer and more "powerful" in a paper money business sense... but in this new online world you grow weaker and more ignorant... you continue to step on our toes and wave your fingers at us unable to see that your empire is crumbling... soon there will be nothing to shield YOU from US... does that make you comfortable?

The "media" became what it is now because these old bastards were able to control it all print, tv etc.... The internet is out of their control... at least it is until they try to regulate, segregate and censor it... now everything I've written so far was metaphorical eh... but if they fawk with the interwebs its time to RIOT... that is IF anyone out there has any GUTS...mass media has done a great job turning people into slaves who quiver in the face of any "authority" figure... research "power to the people"...read about what happened in San Francisco in the 1960's.... people of all races and cultures came together, celebrated they differences and stood against they common enemy... and the system shook in its boots.... I will live to see it shake in its boots again... I know this... but this time the people won't take the free LSD and waste they minds away...

Ooops that was quite an insane rant wasn't it ^ ^ Here's the old guy I work with...

Voices of HSM: Meet JP teh mophuCiN Genius ^ ^

One of the things I'm really excited about is the voice actors that are going to be in HSM...


So the first person you should meet is JP Anderson... known to peoples around the world through his amazinG band RABBIT JUNK... and also as the digital hardcore pioneer with his project... again, its amazing THE SHIZIT...he just released a new SHIZIT album and its is SO WIN go download it!

Here's the first SHIZIT video I saw..its an old one but I've been a fan ever since I saw this..


I've never met JP in person... I've just been a fan of his music in which he pretty much does everything himself and he like owns all other bands... and he's just one d00d ^ ^ Inspiring stuff... So yeh then I made that video for one of his RJ tracks


Yeh then I was listening to a new EP he put out in which he does a little voice acting and I was like I HAVE TO ASK HIM IF HE'll do a voice! I emailed him and much to my excitement he was into it ^ ^

So JP will be the voice of THE main character in the film and with his vocal flexibility and awesome DEATH screams I think his character will sound like nothing you've ever heard before in a film... so I'm really excited about it!

So yeh pleaS check out his music...most of it is available on Itunes and he offers tons of free downloads as well...

My thanks go out to JP for making such awesome music and for lending his mega vocal Skills to the film ^ ^

ChallengeS+

The biggest challenge so far has been working on shots with multiple characters in... right now I'm working on a shot with 7 animated characters... I use the c4d layer system to solo the chaR I'm working on then switch the others back on for previews... with 2 characters I can play the scene back around 24fps... but with 7 it slows to 3fps...which isn't really useful.. So I have to animate the scene is passes...2 chaR at a time... which works but slows the workflow down a lot... thankfully there aren't that many shots with gangs of characters....OR maybe there IS?! looks over storyboards ^ ^

Something I've been fighting is being TOO resourceful... I know tons of animation shortcuts...meaning I know lots of ways to complete shots as fast as possible with as little animation as possible... I learned this rushing through wats trying to make a deadline... BUT in HSM I'm not doing this... I'm fully animating everything...it takes longer but since I don't have a deadline really and I'm out to show that I have improved all my skills I might as well show off my animation skills you never knew I had ^ ^ This is a big fight I find making animated films... Do you focus on telling the story and just do enough animation to tell it? Or do you only focus on the animation? Or do you do both? Solo or small teams might have to make some sacrifices to complete a big project in less than 5 years...

Since I had to cringe for like 2 years since I made wats looking at my own "cheap" animation I won't do that again... because its a horrible feeling... knowing you can do better and being judged on stuff thats not your best work... I was able to get away with it on wats because of the crude nature of the characters and the overall style but I don't want to have that feeling again...

So on my past work if an animation was "working" to tell the story in the shot or do what it was supposed to do I moved on to the next...but not now... every single shot has to be "right" and I wont move on until it is...no cheap stuff... getting things right has to do mostly with getting reference when a shot isn't working... if it doesn't look right...keep acting it out in the mirror and study the timing to you figure out what isn't right...

So I still don't think I've proved myself with my work so that I can honestly call myself an "animator" just yet... I'm a filmmaker yeh...but after HSM is done my work will be at a high enough level so that I'll be able to call myself an "animator" and be proud of it ^ ^

I've always had tons of creativity... which can take you pretty far... but now I strive for technical excellence, refinement, and depth in all aspects of the thangs that make a "film"

Pride...and having a chip on your shoulder can drive you to great lengths... its my artistic inferiority complex that has gotten me this far...and it will take me further... After HSM I will take on my greatest animated challenge with my next feature that will have...gulp.... animated humans.

I guess the purpose of this post is to let peeps know that you never feel like your "good enough"... but you just need to keep striving to be better....step by step...little by little.... shot by shot.

To whomever created the HSM imdb entry

Thanks for adding the film ^ ^ but there are a few errors in it...

In the details it lists "St8nime" which is spelled wrong as its missing the r.. its "str8nime" see related link

And "Heart String Marionette" will not be in Str8nime... I have developed a new style for this film.. the name and details will be released as the film is closer to being completed...its way more pretentious and complicated ^ ^

My name is also spelled wrong as it has a period that shouldnt be there its " M dot Strange" not "M. dot Strange" Its wrong on the "we are the strange" imdb but I don't know how to change it...

Also the country of production is not "USA" it is the "Internets".... this is something I'm doing on this film... I do not consider myself an "American Filmmaker" anymore as I don't have much in common with American people and if you want to get into details I'm more Draconian in nature... So those of you that knew I was a reptilian alien in disguise you are CORRECT.... so yes I consider myself an "Internet Filmmaker" as the internet is a more fitting home for aliens.

You can also list the composer as "Endika"

Thanks!

Starting to move...

So I've animated 106 shots in the first two weeks of production... I haven't gotten to the crazy swordfights just yet but I'm pretty confident about everything ^ ^ The last shot I animated was an 800 frame one...

It's a bit too soon to make any projections but I'd like to do 250 shots a month so thats what I'll be shooting for this month...

I haven't looked at any of the finished 3d renders yet as my emphasis is on moving forward instead of wasting time and ruining momentum by tweaking off minor issues on shots... all the shots are organized and saved so if there is a prob I just open the scene file...fix and re-render... So on my workstation I have a "SHOTS" folder..this is what the hierarchy looks like...

SHOTS/Sequence/Sequence01/Shot_0001/C4d project file+audio files for lip sync+text file for notes

So I have a folder for every shot on the workstation.... then on the render server I have a folder with folders for each sequence and inside of that are the C4d project files for each shot that was rendered.... same project files that are on my workstation, you need to save them on the server to do network renders so I keep them for redundancy.... also everyday I use Allwaysync to backup the project files and other important things to external Usb drives... So the shot files are in 3 places for safety... 3d renders will be in 2 places.... If anybody wants to send me a 2tb bare drive or 3 ^ ^ pleas do! The 1tb drive on the render server is already halfway filled... will have to buy some more tb's soon...

Boundaries?

I was listening to this podcast in which this d00d was talking about the Australian film industry in the 1970's or the lack thereof ^ ^ So all these crazy hardcore filmmakers just went out and made crazy fucking films full of sex, violence, and car crashes... as that kind of subject matter was still "taboo" back then... Now if your an internet filmmaker like me who bows to, and answers to no one when it comes to subject matter why would you not go beyond the boundaries where most filmmakers stop?

I mean seriously you can do anything you want and no one can stop you.. you can put in online where people will be able to watch it...so what is with the boundaries?

Today sex, violence and car crashes are pretty normal in film ACTUALLY if you've seen Cronenberg's "Crash" he mixed all three ^ ^ And now that Hollywood has a bankable genre like torture porn you can't really "shock" people anymore... I still think its funny that those films are marketed as "dangerous" and edgy and all that yet they were made by a big studio so in the end a boardroom of middle aged rich white men made all the decisions haha

I mean the same thing kinda happened here in the US in the 70's with midnight movies..with Lynch, Waters and Jodorowski... but like... WHERE ARE THE FILMMAKERS PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES NOW?!

Because most every unknown filmmaker like me that tells meh about his/her idea/film just generates a yawn out of me because it is so tame and safe... If you want to make normal shit why don't you go work in the business? They don't understand that when you make run of the mill films you are competing with run of the mill Hollywood films with 1000x the budget and resources...so you can't win... I mean I'm not like some genius for going... hey wait I can't compete with that I need to do something different... but why does no one else do this?!?!

So before you go ahead with your idea for your big film... really look at it and if its too similar to the mainstream fare... work your idea some more until its in its own class...

Early in the development phase of HSM... I had written a straight Samurai film... then I said... "wait, anyone could write and make this film... I need to make a film that ONLY I could make" So thats what I did..or I'm doing ^ ^

So that bring me to another thought... So if your an internet filmmaker you really are competing against ALL THE MEDIA on the internet not just films...everything... So your torture porn isn't going to be too edgy because with a few clicks I can watch real video of a real person being mutilated to death...

So what boundaries do you go beyond? I say structural ones... redefine what a "film" is WHILST still delivering all the dramatic goods of a film 100x better than normal films ^ ^

In case you missed something HSM related

This blog is the best place for all the "Heart String Marionette" making of info... but I also have a youtube playlist documenting things... here it is in case you missed something...

Twas the AO that was killing meh

After tweaking the shots that were taking forever it seems it was the Scene Ambient Occlusion that was causing the taking of forever to render to go along with the single threaded plugin... I had NEVER used AO for whole scenes before as it was too computationally expensive to render in a non-ridiculous amount of time... but I was like I got a quad core 3.4ghz lil farm with 8gb of ram each shUD be ok... well it wasn't... was too slow to I switched it off on all the scenes and now they are rendering at a good speed... So when that plugin goes multithreaded my renders will FLY ^ ^

Seems the gfx card fix hasn't stopped the random freezes on my main system... it froze earlier today while I was animating... after restarting I tried to open the project file I was working on and it was corrupt and wouldn't open : ( BUT then I remembered Cinema 4d has like a crash log folder where it tries to salvage project files that were open when there's a crash I went in there and found the shot and it worked : )

So I work on... and I have to remember that I do have limited hardware resources so I can't go nuts with the quality or get lazy by not optimizing scenes... how to optimize? by switching off and/or deleting everything in the scene NOT seen by the camera...

So far I've been using C4d's layer system to switch things on and off in scene hoping to keep the fps decent to do the character animation.. it works really well as you can just press the solo button for a character and work on it...

So now that I've done a little about of everything... Work has smoothed out and I'm doing about 9 shots a day... and I'm not pushing it yet... I only went nuts that one day I did 20 shots... but ya know after a certain number of hours of intense focus your mind starts to fatigue and you start making stupid mistakes and getting frustrated...if you've hit your quota already you should call it day... if you haven't hit it... you grit yer teeth and get that shit done! I'm writing in my blog while working now cause I already hit my quota for the day ^ ^ AND I have to do something while test renders run....

Single threadING kills MEH

So now my render computers are about 60 shots behind me... the thang thats makin em lag mostly is the plugin I use to generate the depth passes for compositing... when it calculates and processes the depth map its a single threaded operation... so it only uses one CPU... In 11.5 Cinema is pretty much multithreaded all around so it's really fast... and there are workarounds for things that are single threaded like hair.... I emailed the plugin developer about a multithreaded version and he said he was testing one... I hope he comes out with it soon 0_0

Because at this rate I'll finish animating the film in like 6 months... then it'll take another year to render 0_0

If sHET gets really bad I'll have to go into each shot and crank the detail down and remove thangs... the crazy detail thats in there now will probably never be noticed by anyone anyway haha... its just my tweaker perfectionist self thats all NO YOU NEED THAT.... yeh I have to remember that I'm just a d00d with limited hardware resources... if I had access to a real render farm with 50+ nodes it wouldn't be an issue at all..but I only have 4... haha... poor little thangs IM KILLIN EM 24/7

Lunch break thoughts

I'm on my lunchbreak from todays work... here's some thoughts and thangs on production...

Was getting random crashes with my gigabyte 4870 card... found the fix here applied fix now tis fine...

Had my first challenging shot yesterday... 10 second shot took me 4.5 hours to do... mostly because I was trying to use pivot objects in place of nulls to move a walk cycled character AND later I found out thats not what the pivot object is for ^ ^ but yeh...

Renders are still really far behind... I've probably animated about 50 shots now but only 3 shots have finished rendering so far... I'm going out of the country for Christmas/New Years for 3 weeks so I'll leave the renders on then and hopefully they will catch up cause I keep stacking them shots!

Oh yeh Ricky about FK on the arms... I chose FK because when using IK its really hard to control the position of the elbow... you have to also animate the arms solver to get things right and it just makes a mess and still never gives you nice arcs like FK does... thankfully cactus dans tools have an IK/FK switch which makes it a seamless switch even while animating between IK/FK... also with IK you tend to get this floaty arm look that I dont like at all...

Oh yeh I was able to optimize my renders a little bit after I learned about the shadow "Bias abs" setting... on a few of my lights it was set at like .359 which was taking forever to process...I switched them all to 2.0 and it sped them up a lot... its a setting that controls how far a shadow is projected from the object that is casting the shadow... it only needs to be really low when working with extreme CU's or at small scales...

I must say pre-lighting the sets was a HUGE timesaver now that I'm in production...

ALSO stupid ME forgot that I can't use texture channels set to "alias" or "circle" for animation cause like they flicker... looks fine for stills BUT...so I had to go through all the assets and make the switch to MIP

So yeh I'm not too worried about the slow renders....if worse comes to worse I'll like try to raise money to buy more render nodes ^ ^ THE FUTURE IS an animator having an app he can distribute that works like folding@home or the Seti thang so you all could help me render the films... it is possible now... its just that the bandwidth isn't there to send all these huge textures and giant files back and forth right now.... if I was in South Korea or Japan it might be possible locally as they have SUPER fast connections but here in the U.S. our technical innovation is handcuffed by the greedy media conglomerates... SHET I'm in SILICON VALLEY?!?!? Shouldn't I have the fastest interneTS in the world?!

But yeh... aight back to work.

So it seems I need like ILM's render farm

Your pal M dot animates shots faster than his computers can render them... Its only day 3 of production but I decided to like get macho and work like crazy for 9 hours... I'll eventually get up to 12.... but in 9 hours I animated 20 shots... and DONT WORRY THEY ARE AMAZING ^ ^ So now there's like 41 shots waiting to render with shot 0001 at %95 haha...

Whatever..its a good problem to have...

Thoughts on doing full 3d character animation in C4D so far... I don't have any complaints... I'm able to work really fast... I created an "animating" layout and a "render prep" layout... that I switch back and forth from when working... Cinema 4d's timeline has some quirks... but I only said "GAWD DAMNIT FUCK YOU" like twice in 9 hours...thats a good ratio... I find myself animating straight ahead instead of pose to pose... guess its the ghetto stopmo animator in me.. ALSO I HATE IK on arms... So I'm using FK for all the shots... Since all the set lighting is already done I only need to light the character...I created a gobo lighting rig for that... its a spot with switches for tree's shadows and all kinds of other thangs to add shadows to the lights...got the idea from a real rig in the book "painting with light"....aight I'm ouT.

Mdot: 22 Computers: 0

So it seems as of right now I can only do 8 hours of straight animation work before I go braindead and start to lose focus and makes mistakes... that's when you know when to call it a day or night... So I've done 2 days work so far... animated 22 shots... but none of them are finished rendering yet 0_0 This set is kinda crazy though... I'm making the film in order so this first seem has to impress you all ^ ^

Mistake I made... I forgot that when doing multipass renders with NET you have to manually set the multipass save path after doing the "save project" command to the render server... had to fix that... also forgot to add a compositing tag on all the characters so they are not affected by Ambient Occlusion... AND I forgot to add IK/FK switches on some of the characters so I had to fix that too...

TO finish the film in one year I have to do 6 shots a day... every day... I'll have an idea how feasible this is by Dec 1st... First month of production is going to be the slowest as you iron out problems and smooth out the workflow.... second month should be up to speed...so yeh... I'm excited for this new challenge!!! Once I smooth out all the workflow bumps this is going to be really fun since I already took care of everything and all I have to do it worry about the animation...the funnest part ^ ^

Also I want to add a bar graph or something here that I will update every month with the number of shots finished...you know while showing the goal... So you can see where I am in production.

Final tech details before production and thankS

As I go into production I thought I'd share some of the final tech details... and thank some people...

I will NOT be compositing shots as I go along like I did with WATS... Its not very efficient as you end up wanting to change shots which means re-rendering 3d AND re-rendering the comp... also I dont want to rush the matte paintings and particle fx work for each shot... So I will go through and animate and render all the 3d... then when the whole film is done... start comping the finals...

I was able to sort out my Exr problems.. the problem was with After Effects interpretation not C4d... so to get Exr working properly with Cs4 right now... You need to check "preserve RGB" in the interpretation options in Cs4... change the project to 32bit of course... add the "hdr compander" effect to the footage with an expansion gamma of .4545...

Once I get to comping which will like be a year from now I will render out the finals to the SheerVideo 10bit codec... mega thanks to Andreas from bitjazz for his awesome help and support ^ ^

Thanks to Paul Babb and Maxon for making the best and most powerful 3d animation software for artists AND for helping me out ^ ^

Thanks to Cactus Dan for his help and support and for developing really easy to use flexible character animation plugins for Cinema 4d... his free 4+ hour video tutorials allowed me to take my rigs to the next level this time around.

Thanks to Per Anders who is the developer of DeGamma.... Just 6 months ago I was ignorant to the benefits of a linear workflow but now I can't live without it and it has brought a level of realism to my shots that I've never before achieved.

I would ALSO ^ ^ like to thank C4dJack for developing his 3 awesome plugins which I will use in pretty much all my shots in the film.

Thanks to Philip from Frischluft for his help and support and for creating the BEST DOF blur plugin in the world for After Effects

Thanks to all the d00ds at Blackmagic Design from Australia and San Jose for having me out to speak and for their help and support.

AND I would also like to thank Nate and Sarah from youtube for helping out a weirdo animator like me ^ ^

Also I would like to thank Liz and Tishna for having me out to speak at so many places!

AND! Of course I would like to thank YOU for sticking with me and supporting me all this time ^ ^

I will do my best... and my "best" these days is 9000 times better than what you've ever seen from me before!

There's actually lots more people I need to thank but this post could go on forever... I'll put you in the credits of the film aight!
----------------------

So yeh I actually start making the film tomorrow... ITS ABOUT TIME right ^ ^

Notes of the ODD

After the 24th revision of the HSM script... it has some weird parallels with WATS, subtextually of course ^ ^ AS I would never give you the same thang twice... BUT one of the characters from WATS plays a different character in HSM... well actually two ^ ^

Which two characters do you think are in HSM?

Rain? Ori? Blue? Him? Emmm?

I must say... archetypes are archetypes... and there are certain ones I like to use...this is relevant to my interests(from wikipedia)

Jung outlined five main archetypes;

The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation

The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless

The Anima, the feminine image in a man's psyche; or:

The Animus, the masculine image in a woman's psyche

The Persona, how we present to the world, usually protects the Ego from negative images (acts like a mask)

I wrote a little about how I was tying abstraction layer theory from computing to my filmmaking process on this blog in the past... while there is a layer that is very Jungian I must say... my good friend, one of the 4 people I talk to in real life...is in a PhD program for Psych... she's taught me a lot of psychology and I study it on my own as well... I work a lot of it into the things I make... If people think that WATS was JUST about some doll trying to get ice cream... haha... they are missing quite a LOT ^ ^

BUT you can't expect everyone to understand all the layers at once... so you need to make it interesting on every layer... at every level... that is my goal... it will be exciting and interesting on a purely visceral level and you can keep digging deeper and at every level it will be stimulating... this be my goal...

Tonight I did run cycles and dynamic fx practice... production starts in one week.

The value of replaYabilitY

As I r making this film and thinking about the future... I think that to be successful and survive as an artist you need to create things that people will want to watch more then once... Putting the film in its entirety up for free on Youtube will always be part of my plan... NOW if I only had income from that I would be deD... I had to sell DVD's to survive to make another film... So besides the 2 people who bought my DVD cause they pitY poor lil weirdo meh... I figure there was something about WATS that made people want to watch it more then once... Was it all the audio visual madness packed into it? Was it the several soundtracks? Was it for the bonus features? I da know... but thats what I'm trying to figure out...

What is it about a movie that makes you want to watch it again? What is it about a movie that makes you not just want to watch it for free but buy it to watch again?

NOW... I think it has a lot to do with the narrative and how solid or open it is... there are plenty of movies I've seen that I LOVED when I watched them but since the narrative was so straight forward and sealed up by then I had no desire to go back and try to unlock some mysteries or search for other interpretations... So I watch those movies but I do not buy them... NOW one film I bought that I watched several times was "LOst Highway"... you can watch it 10 times and have 10 different interpretations...

HERE is the catch though... when a NORMAL audience encounters a film like lost highway and they are unable to totally decipher the narrative they assume it has a "bad story" Since the normal person watches films as an escapist activity and doesn't want to use they mind whilst doing so they believe it is the film that is fault and not they own lack of mental activity...

SO as time passed directors became WIMPS and started to FEAR they audiences... and when the biZ and the bean counters took over that spelled the end... So they cooked up "good stories" which means... dumbed down stories you've seen 100 times before repackaged over and over...

So as a filmmaker I believe you have to RISK losing some of your audience the first time they see the film... its worth it though because if you succeed...a great deal of the audience will watch it three more times...

It works the same way in life... You can give people cliched responses to everyday questions OR you can say something odd... they might not get you at first BUT they probably won't forget you ^ ^

Passes..layers... revisions...

I finished test rendering all the sets... and I finished testing all the chaRacters by animating them doing the thang they gotta do most in the movie... most everything worked ok... had to redesign some things simply because after looking at them with fresh eyes I thought they sucked so I redesign them OR the designs weren't functional so I redesigned thems as well... Didn't have to redesign too much...

Only minor probs with the renders of the sets... a flickering texture I had to change from Alias to MIP... and some shadow map and AA issues that cranking them up a little fixes... but yeh I was actually surprised there wasn't anything too major...

For WATS I didn't test anything haha... just got to animating shots and going OH shit this doesn't work PANIC PANIC PANIC ^ ^ So what you will see with HSM is M dot Strange refined... every aspect of the film is mega refined... from the script to the characters to the setS to the character animation... and it all has to do with passes, layers and revisions... experience bring you patience and knowing to get great stuff you can't do it all at once... you have to do it in layers...

So this coming week... I will animating the characters some more to create motion clips to use in the film... think of these as hand made motion capture clips... so I'm going to hand animate a bunch of motions for each character to build a small library of motions so when I'm in production I can grad the needed animations and apply them to the characters BUT don't worry NOTHING will be canned looking ^ ^ I'm tricky enough now to know how to add variation to each clip so that no two will be the same... has to do with layering procedural animation on top of the clips and switching various hierarchies off and adding hand animated stuff on top of the clips... AND I will share ALL MY NEW HYPER TECHNIQUES with YOU when HSM is released ^ ^ You should be excited because I've learned some really great techniques...

Also if it was to be rated... HSM would definitely be Rated R... might be NC-17 for insanity and disturbing imagery... but there is going to be nudity and graphic violence AND there's a lot of FUCKING bad language...Just like my real life!!!! 0_0 So I must apologize to those of you who like my stuff for its light hearted "ice creamy" themes... HSM will not be this way... its my darkness... The forthcoming further adventures of Rain and Ori will be lighter though... so don't worry if HSM comes out and you think I've become the devil.....because nothing has changed... I've always been the devil ^ ^

Just thought I'd let yall know ahead of time.

I'm pretty sure "WE" are winning ^ ^

I recently subscribed to Cinefx because i cannot read enough and I had enjoyed it in the past when a friend who worked in the visual fx industry gave me a stack of old ones... ANYWAY I was reading the latest one and looking at fx/animation stills from Transformers 2, GI JOE, the new Harry Potter movies and more furry animal bullshit..... AND THE VISUAL FX/COMPOSITING SUCKED! I couldn't believe it?!?! I don't watch these kids of films but the work was not only derivative and cliche...it was HORRIBLE! Technically it wasn't even well done... I mean as much as I hate Hollywood films they always had a technical edge but after looking at these stills I think they technical edge is gone now because I see much higher quality stuff online done by regular peoples... done by "amateurs"... maybe my eye just has gotten that much better but I was shocked at the crappy quality of the work...

The work I was looking at in Cinefex was so derivative the stills from Transformers 2 were literally taken out of other visual fx films like they were exact copies from shots that were in Minority Report and that awful terminator sequel with the female terminator... So originality GONE and then the comps were BAD... they were missing all the little nuances that good artists would add to the shots IF THEY CARED... now what I'm saying is that the professionals working on these films have mad skills BUT since they work for douchebags on derivative, vapid, trite VOMIT that they call "movies" they dont care...so they put no effort... no love into they work...

The stuff from the new harry potter films was gaWD awful... it looked like they using After Effects filters from 2001... bland and generic CG clouds... uninspired, fake looking magic beam fx... really fake, flat looking comp of live actor into cg scene... I mean do people just accept this crap these days? What the fawK are they doing with those bajillion dollar budgets? Because its not going into the look...

Like for example... NOT everything in the real world is perfectly clean... it takes work to take props and sets both digital and cg look dirty... yeh effort is required BUT it really adds to a film worlds reality... watch films from the 60's 70's and 80's... the filmmakers probably put the work in to make things like dirty and real but these days everything is spotless... pay attention next time you watch a film... these days I dont think the filmmakers care... they are in too much of a hurry doing whatever they do to add these touches...

NOW we "amateurs" love our work and we believe in it because it is OURS so we will add the extra detail and love... and thats what is making for higher and higher quality "amateur" work... So over time as we get better and they get worse... there will a point when we "amateurs" as a whole will pwn the world in most all aspects of life... AND I believe a lot of "professionals" will get fed up and join the ranks of UN-professionals as well...

So if your a nobody like me and are feeling sorry for yourself because you think you cannot make "professional" looking films etc because you don't have the money or the big fancy uninspired crew to back you up... stop kidding yourself and get to work!

THIS is how you make an AWESOME movie ^ ^ Dororo

I don't know how I had not seen the film Dororo (2007) until now?!??! I just watched it and it was the BEST film I have seen in a LONG TIME... It was so great... had all the things I love in a film... so you should go watch it now!

I can see people saying some of the fx were low budget and cheesy but I dont give a fawK cause the story and everything else was pure WIN... I grew up watching Godzilla, Ultraman etc so I like the guy in a suit stuff...

The story and its nuances/themes and how it call came together was pure genius... clearly the work of a master and it was...as its based on the Manga by Osamu Tezuka... I've read a lot of Tezuka's stuff and watched a lot of the Anime based on his works like Black Jack which is one of my fav's... yeh if you want to learn how to build suspense and tell great exciting, heart wrenching stories study his stuff as he was a master....

Apparently they are now making Dororo 2 and 3... and looking at it as a "Japanese lord of the rings" trilogy ....The Lord of the rings films didn't really speak to me...I guess cause everything was so western, obvious and overdone...films like that make me angry and bore me......

I'm really looking forward to more Dororo films ^ ^

Still tweakinG on...

Still tweaking on EVERYTHING haha... revised the script and animatic three times in the past two days... it came in late but my umm STRANGE sense of humor made its way into HSM after all... it was looking like it was pretty serious until now ^ ^

So besides that... I'm still doing the final checks/tests of the characters... found myself adding FK switches on all of them for they arms... wielding weapons to animate is much easier to do with FK than IK... So cactus dans plugs already have a switch BUT its on the arm joint nested in the Hierarchy since I'm all fancy now I wire my own controls via Xpresso onto the Characters main controller... so yeh doing that stuff... test animations... adjusting joint limits controlled by hand, foot and finger tags.... pretty much just like optimizing everything...

Still doing test renders of the sets... so far no major problems... some flickering textures from AA being set too low....

ALSO since thinking about all 2000 shots and 45 sequences at once is making me crazy... I decided to treat the production like the production on several short films... I broke production into 10 minute chunks... Some chunks contain as few as 2 sequences or as many as 6... I just grouped them into 10 minute pieces... So I'm planning on doing a 10 minute chunk a month... looking at it this way will allow me to regroup at the end of each cycle and further prepare/tweak the storyboard/shotlists/animatic for that chunk... So now I just have to think about the next 10 minutes... complete that than the next 10 and so on... Since I'm making the film in order it should work out well....

but DAMN I'm getting really ancy cause I just want to start making the fucking movie all ready... but as I know from the past when I was a fool... FOOLS RUSH IN... then they fuck shit up and spend 4 times as much time trying to do things right... on HSM I'm going to adequately prepare and do it right the first time and PLOW THROUGH PRODUCTION!!!! ^ ^

So far so good... its looking like all my patience and planning is paying off.... now just a few more weeks....

Everything old is new again?!

Ya know there's this saying in pop culture.... where they bring shit back from like 20 years before and say "Everything old is new again" So like... So if all the "new" is really old.... then there is nothing new? COUGH Hmmmm is this a natural phenomenon? OR is it just because once a company originally develops or purchases the rights to some intellectual property they want to keep reusing it over and over because its cheaper and easier? Me thinks this is so...

So don't buy into they "there are no new ideas" bullshit... there are plenty of new idea but since they dont own a license on them they dont want you to use them haha... OR you can develop them on your own then you sell it to them and all of a sudden something new emerges to be recycled for 20 years COUGH *Tim Burton* COUGH

Yeh its "easier" to do the same thing over and over and to recycle the same shit forever BUT be warned! Emerging audiences will not stand for such craP... So I think you will have to be original and innovative every time you make a film or you will die a horrible obscure death with no massive P & A budget to save you.

Working out the buGS

So what I'm doing now.. is doing test animations of all the characters while practicing animating ya know and rendering out flythroughs of the sets... I'm looking for problems in the characters and the sets... Like I learned that c4d hair freaks out sometimes with moving lights...so I converted it the hair to polys...bug deD... then I learned that NO 32bit formats rendered out of c4d create a proper alpha channel when using volumetric or visible lights so BACK TO 16 bit TIFFS for me.... Exr seemed too good to be true as it was 32bit and half the size of 16 bit tiffs but yeh...I had to abandon it... ALSO had some gamma issues and undervoltage probs on one of the render slaves... fixed that up... oh yeh so my render slaves are all Q9300's but I OC'd them to 3.33ghz... they run c00 like that...

So yeh as I'm trying to be creative and have fun doing the first animations with the characters I have to squash bugs along the way and work around tech proBlems... BUT its looking pretty good ^ ^

Oh yeh I learned that Open GL performance heavily depends on CPU clockspeed... q9300 at 2.5ghz = 6000 Cinebench opengl score.... SAME Q9300 Oc'd to 3.33ghz = 7600 Cinebench OpengL score... So if I could have done it again I would have paid my friend 4th_Dimensional_Rob to build me a 4ghz water cooled i7 beast for maximum Open GL performance ^ ^ He got a 10,000 Cinebench OGL score on his craY_Z tweaked i7 rig...

But yeh... I hope to put most of these tech things behind me soon and just focus on storytelling, animating and acting.... and oh yeh the mega hellS_A awesome JP Anderdon of the totally pwning band Rabbit Junk has agreed to voice the main character in HSM... I seriously pumped my fists for like 15 minutes after I got his email haha...

AND Motion Clips are the best thing ever in C4d... I'm using them for everything... and also since you can define the hierarchy that the motion clip affects you can create motion clips for individual body parts etc... So you could have a run cycle clip and a upper body gun firing+recoil clip... you can combine them both = running + firing gun... Also the motion clip transitions rule...makes it REALLY easy to blend separate motions seamlessly...

Alright back to my machines.....

We are the creators AND producers of the future.

As you know I don't want to have anything to do with the "Hollywood System" at all... well yeh I don't... but I'm writing this to warn of about a certain type of person... there are people in the "indie" film scene NOT because they are making films that don't fit in the Hollywood system i.e. something different... BUT because they don't even have what it takes to be in the "Hollywood System" i.e. desperate for ideas.... So these people will wear they plastic shiny badge of "indie" to get close to people like me or you... why do they want to get close to us? Well you probably guessed it... to glean some of our originality and creativity to use as they own... because we don't have money BUT we have ideas.....since they don't have any ideas they try to pluck them from you... Know any of those people? Maybe you can't spot them yet...

About 8 years ago when I was young and gullible... one of these people suckered me in and I told him all my ideas and he went and started a non profit based on my ideas... well actually he went one step further... back then I was making films in my community as "someguy"... this dirtbag took my films and said that he was "someguy" and that he made them blah blah and got funding to start this filmmaking center.... so yeh...

So pretty much all the Hollywood types have left me alone now... BUT I wanted to tell you a little story about something that happened recently so you can raise your red flags if you encounter such people...

"Indie" film producer contacts me says "I just love your stuff and what your doing and I just want to help out your cause by giving you a new Mac" I had lunch with this d00d a few years ago as he wanted me to direct some sci-fi script he wrote...... So then it becomes "Yeh I'm going to give you a Macpro just because I want to support your new film" So I'm like ok great... then something strange... he says "Can we videochat to go over the details?" I think that its kinda odd but I say ok....So I video chat with the guy... and he starts asking detailed questions about HSM... "So whats it about? What style is it going to be in? Whats the world like? Can I see the animatic?" Of course being a crafty bastard myself I don't give him any truthful answers ^ ^ THEN after trying to glean information from me he says "So before I give you the Macpro can you sign a contract?" ...Whoa whoa I say " I'm not signing any contract" then he goes on to say... "well and its an older MacPro"... ends up being the very first one which is only a dual 2.6ghz machine which isn't useful for rendering... So like he had some old mac lying around and tried to use it as a carrot to lock me into some contract and/or get information useful to him and his career.

Now I know that guy is probably reading this... he claimed he just wanted to help support me... like ALL OF YOU HAVE... but you all didn't ask me to sign contracts or pry into what I'm doing in HSM... because I think you all trust me? And REALLY just want me to make the best film I can for you... your not trying to steal anything from me or trick me... you don't have any other agenda's... So I think that you all are GREAT PRODUCERS ^ ^ So now that you know that guy is reading this... if you feel like it can you, MY PRODUCERS please tell this guy how to do his job ^ ^ Cause your a BILLION times better at producing meh thinks.

So yeh in this new wave of REAL INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING the traditional role of producer is DEAD... they are useless babbling desperate men with money signs in they eyeballs and no talent of they own to make shit happen in the world... filmmakers used to need them before BUT now if your savvy enough and not lazy you don't need these bastards....now in the film business this would be called "burning bridges" haha... but THATS A BRIDGE TO THE BUSINESS and you know my stance... FUCK THE BUSINESS... THIS IS ART AND I'LL FIGHT TILL THE DAY I DIE FOR IT!

So no more producer d00ds... your audience becomes your "producer"

So if your like the d00d I mentioned in this post... please don't waste your breath... stay away from me as I don't have the time to waste with people who aren't really down.... if you want to help me out with no strings attached c00.... if your just trying to glean shit from me stay the fuck away because I'm not that stable of an individual and I don't handle anger well...to put it lightly.... well yeh who cares... I should let you, my producers know.... I have violent fantasies all the time...they are very detailed and go on and on and I start breathing heavily and have to calm myself down BUT I don't act them out in real life I put them in the films.... for now haha... I mean its probably a good thing I make films because my other career choices were...serial killer and DEAD.

So thanks to you all my REAL Producers.... and because of you, I don't need "THEM"... so yeh I'm totally glad you all are really there for me ^ ^ I am doing my BEST right now to make something awesome for YOU!

CoDex Codecs...

Now here's some really geeky stuff that doesn't seem like it would matter that much to most BUT when in production your format choices are important....

My process for HSM is... Rendering 1920x802 24fps EXR image SEQUENCES out of Cinema 4d... with at least an RGBA pass and a depth pass out of ZBluR... I did a bunch of tests and EXR produced the SMALLEST files out of the 32bit formats which I want with my 3d renders so I can push em hard in After Effects if I want too... So yeh if ya don't know...32bit files are pretty much the highest quality you can make right now as opposed to 16bit and 8bit..... So EXR out of C4d...

So then I have to composite these thangs in After Effects and then render out the quicktime MOVIE files to edit themS... The codec chose to render out the final movies that will make up the master version of the film is the SheerVideo 10 bit codec... Its a lossless 10 bit codec but only a fraction of the size of the other lossless codecs... for WATS I used uncompressed which makes for HUGE files... which is fine wif todays mega hard drives but smaller files travel around the network faster and they are easier to work with because the SheerVideo files only require 33 megs a sec to playback whilst uncompressed is 125 megs+ So that means you need a RAID to playback uncompressed BUT the SheerVideo files can play back on any decent 7200rpm sata drives... like the one in this old Macbook Pro ^ ^ So yeh with Sheervideo I can playback lossless 10bit 1920x802 files on a 4 year old laptop...I think thats pretty suite... So yeh check out the SheerVideo site if you need a 10bit codec made of pure win.

Oh yeh! Also to speed up working with image sequences in After Effects I bought the "Immigration" script for AESCRIPTS there's ton of awesome free ones too like Panorama for yer 2.5d matte paintings.

I'm not THAT nice ^ ^

So every once in awhile I get emails from animation students who take it as their duty to tell me how technically flawed my work is... they point out that what I do would make they masters OH I mean teachers scold them for being bad animator drones... Now my initial reaction is to always think of my own quoteth ^ ^ "A persons advice can only go as far as they have gotten" BUT today as I got this mail after watching and reading a bunch of "filmmaking" podcasts and blogs that were totally focused on TECHNICAL issues I am writing public reply to said peoples.

--------------
Well this may not make any sense to you since you are studying animation BUT the least important thing when making an animated FILM is the animation... NOW all the people all over the world who love WATS don't care that a lot of the animation was crude and crappy...WHY?! because its a FILM it has mood, emotion, feeling...a depth... They knew one d00d did his best to try to convey this emotion and to him the emotion was more important than the technical things.....

Note:
I AM NOT A STUDENT AT AN ANIMATION SCHOOL
I AM NOT AN EMPLOYEE AT AN ANIMATION STUDIO...NOR WILL I EVER BE.
I AM NOT A SLAVE. I DO WHAT I WANT.
I know you are taught to appease your masters but I have no master.

YES technical proficiency can enhance it of course BUT when one person is working on over 1000 shots alone in less than 3 years compromises have to be made... I had to choose... make the best technical film I can make OR make the best film I can make... I chose the best film and it was sucessful... if I made the best technical film it would not be a film it would be a DEMO REEL and I would still be working on it now... thousands of technically perfect films come and go everyday and no one cares WHY because they dont have the other things I mentioned that makes for a film... I was an artist FIRST then I learned animation.

Understand my philosophy? I DO NOT make films to be enjoyed by animators or technical people FORGET THEM because they job is to never be satisfied and nitpick over every little detail... i make films for PEOPLE.... and LIVING people connect with the emotion not technicalities... I don't go see films for the "special fx" myself...

Why do people love David Firth's animation? Why do they love KnoX's claymations? They are far from perfect technically but those d00ds have hundreds of thousands of fans and I'm sure they love making the stuff...... we are HUMAN after all... we want emotion not perfect fucking f-curves... animation supervisors want perfect f-curves not people.

So a choice needs to be made and I made mine... I serve the emotion.
---------------

Now after saying that... yeh yeh I got the whole emotion thing down pat... my goal with HSM is also to make it so technically WIN these whiny animation students and nitpicky technical people will STFU and GTFO if I may be so bold in typing 4chan vernacular.

Yeh all these online "filmmakers" who whine about how x-camera doesn't have this feature so its not good enough to make films with OR X-computer or x-software isn't powerful enough to do "serious" work... most of these people also call they own films "content"...well... (cough) FUCK THEM and they CONTENT and they SERIOUS WORK... the truth is they are TERRIFIED at having to walk on the creative side for fear of failure so they keep making all these excuses so they don't even have to try... if you don't try you can't fail.. and if you haven't failed you can pretend to be some perfect expert in your own mind and try to stop other from trying the things your afraid to do.... Isn't this cycle sick?! YEH and its REAL!

YES those of us who TRY are not PERFECT... me make mistakes.... we have flaws... but we have made things that mean a lot to us and hopefully some other people too... animation students may sit every night and masturbate to demo reels but I don't think many other people do...

NOTHING alive is perfect! No real ART is PERFECT... to be FLAWLESS is to be frozen to be DEAD...EMOTION is ALIVE and in a constant state of movement... to be static is to be void of life... MACHINES can create technical perfection but HUMANS cannot.... I say celebrate our humanity... celebrate our differences and our "flaws" thats what makes us individuals...thats what makes things unique... so this is a bigger discussion which probably leads into the books of Ray Kurzweil and the worship of transhumanism by many unknowing human specimens... BUT I have to get back to work soooooooooo.....

So if your an inspired creative person don't let these technical FUX slow you down... do it your way BUT also learn the technical things yourself so you can tell them to kindly STFU and GTFO as well ^ ^