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Showing posts from June, 2009

How much per minute for animated feature film?

I stumbled upon a discussion on cgsociety about the costs of animated films per minute... So it got me thinking about mine cause I always like laughing to myself about how cheap I do shit and the world will see with HSM and my future production that my quality is rising FAST MAYNE!!! We are the Strange 2007 $20,000 budget 94 minutes- Cost per minute $212.00 Heart String Marionette 2010 $15,000 budget 120 minutes- Cost per minute $125.00 So I'm actually doing HSM for a lot less than WATS and you'll have to take my word for it that the quality will be 10 times that of WATS... Its cheaper because the technology used to make 3d films is getting cheaper and more powerful... Just for fun lets run the same rough calculation on some mainstream animated features... Ratatouille 2007 $150 million budget 111 minutes - Cost per minute $1.3 million UP 2009 $175 million budget 96 minutes - Cost per minute $1.82 million I find it odd that Pixar and most all of the studios I looked at for 3d f

Ninjas Samurais NinjaS

Randomly.... in my brief chats with "Hollywood" back in 2007... a studio was interested in me directing a "Hard R asian themed action film shot like 300" They only wanted me to direct it... they wanted to adapt an anime into live action...they wanted a "Ninja" film... I told them I was making a Samurai film of my own... they said "ninja"... I said ok... well the only Ninja film I would work on is Ninja Scroll... the guy came back and said... "Naw we can't get the rights to Shinobi" uhhhhh yeh... Then I saw this news where Leonardo Dicaprio bought the rights in late 08 and plans to make a live action Ninja Scroll

Kind of a shame...

Some of my favorite 3d animation has come from Marc Craste of Studio Aka in London... If you have never seen Jojo in the Stars its a must see! I really love his style! So I pop on over to his studios site to see what they are working on... and its kinda sad because I WANT TO SEE FILMS like Jojo in the Stars from them yet they are using all that WIN to make.... shampoo commercials <_> I mean yeah everyone has to pay they bills BUT not everyone has that kind of originality and style so for me its kind of a shame to see it used on selling... like hair products... ya know what I mean? There's a few other animators who have made short films I thought were amazing YET they went on to get absorbed by a big company or they just made random commercial things... Like "Canhead" by Timothy Hittle... I know he's at Pixar now... thats nice to make like family films BUT I think his short films were WAY more interesting than anything Pixar has made... and there's also &quo

Gotta enjoy the little things

So as much as I can I try to use practical fx in my films... Ya know like real fire and the like shot with a video camera... So yesterday I was shooting dust for an hour in my studio 0_o I know right.... AND I was excited about it! When your working on a huge animated film project there is a lot of monotony ON THE COMPUTER so whenever I get a chance to do something real its really fun... making stuff in the computer is so much more flexible and powerful but burning things in real life is much more fun ^ ^ So after I shot my dust and was exhausted from the excitement... WATS production artist Sean Boyles came over and shot FIRE for some stuff I need in HSM. Now I'm back working on the compuTerZ...awwww... no risk or setting self in fire...awwww...

Pixologic is flippin teh SCRIPT

So if you follow this blog you know I have become a big fan of Pixolgic Zbrush and I am using it for most everything in my new animated feature film... It allows you to create extremely detailed high poly meshes... for a face I'm going up to about 7 million polys... obviously you dont want a scene full of characters with heads that have 7 million polys....soooo I use lo res meshes with SPD maps applied to get the detail when rendering...it works but it adds a lot to render time.... and THEN... Pixologic released "Decimation Master" a new plugin to reduce poly counts... I just tried it on one of my 7 million poly models...and I took it down to 50k.... and there's no real difference?!?! it AMAZING! I mean if you zoom in to an extreme close up you can see some detail missing but otherwise its great....so now I have to decimate all my models ^ ^ AND also Pixologic announced Zbrush 4 coming in August and they announced one new feature GO ZBRUSH which makes the 50 clicks a