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Bit Films spring 2012 internships

2012-01-08T20:04:00.001-05:00

I'm happy to announce our new call for spring Bit Films interns! We've got four different roles to fill on the ongoing Tube open movie project being run by Bassam Kurdali.

Click here to read about the opportunities

Applications are due via email on Monday January 30th, 2012 (please read the call for details).

Those of you following along might notice that we don't have any Caldera internships this spring... that's because the film is in its final stages of post-production and will be appearing in festivals soon! Congrats to the entire team on a job very well done.

Caldera grading, Apple Color, and framerates

2011-10-25T19:31:00.002-04:00

I'm very happy to report that we've begun color grading on the new short Caldera. It's a real treat to be finessing it at this level, as each shot is absolutely gorgeous. Let me share a still before I get to the geekier point of this post.

Now, Caldera is natively a 24fps production, however, when we dragged our Apple Prores 4444 QT clips into Color it locked the project framerate to 23.98 for no apparent reason. The number appears in what looks like an editable value box, but you just can't edit the value. Of course this throws a wrench into our pipeline, which involves grading and then reconnecting to the graded .mov files inside FCP. FCP doesn't like it (properly so) when the key properties of a .mov file (rate, duration, etc.) change after a reconnect, so it is very unhappy when I try to swap a 23.98 file for a clip it's expecting to be at 24.

What a pain. Luckily, some simple hackery seems to have fixed it. The actual Color project is itself a folder, and one of the items therein is an XML file (in our case, called "calderaGrade.pdl"). The top of the file looks something like this (note I had to paste an image because I can't figure out how to get the XML tags to pass through blogger... sorry!):

A screengrab showing the XML tags in one of Apple Color's pdl files. Note that the framerate in this image has already been changed from 23.98 to 24 fps.

As you might guess, changing the tag to 24 and restarting (AND rerendering) seems to make 24fps files just as we hoped. Phew. This narrowly averted my having to take the movies through an extra Compressor pass like I had to do on The Incident at Tower 37 (see here for some of the gory details of that conforming process).

More to come as we push the film through these last phases of production!

Bit Films Fall 2011 internships announced!

2011-09-18T16:08:00.002-04:00

Come one, come all - we've got some great positions to fill on Bassam Kurdali's open film TUBE, and applications are due in a week! We need animators, 3D generalists, and simulation/rigging experts.

View the call for applications here

Thanks in advance for sharing this with whoever you think might be interested.

Final Cut exports look different from the sources!

2011-08-24T09:28:00.013-04:00

So "Caldera" is nearing completion, and it's looking terrific. Gorgeous, in fact. But it's not done yet, which means that life should be returning to this blog. Because in the final weeks of production come the nasty little problems that make directors and editors wonder why the hell they got into this business in the first place...

To wit: recently, director Evan discovered that the QuickTimes we are exporting from Final Cut Pro have a slight color shift compared to the QuickTimes we are cutting together.

Note that we're attempting to do a full online edit, here. Apple ProRes 4444 on input and Apple ProRes 4444 on output. So there shouldn't be anything happening on export. FCP is certainly not rendering, we would know that because it would take forever. It doesn't. The exports are fast. Also, we're not using any filters on these clips. This problem shows itself with a single QT movie dropped into a new sequence then exported using the same codec. What gives?

FCP is doing *something*, though. Check out this split-screen:

On the left is the original QT, on the right is the one exported from FCP.

The answer lies below, if you want to jump past the gory details.

I have toured through all of the little hidden FCP switches I could find, and though I tried them all (especially those related to gamma), I got the same results. I also threw the little secret QT player preference switch that says "Enable Final Cut Studio color compatibility" but that only adds some warmth to the files. And, I will note, it changes the look of both the original and the exported QT movie, so it can't be the culprit.

My theory is that although FCP is not re-rendering these movies, it must be adding some flag which tells QT player to display the same data differently. I'd like to figure out what that flag is and strip it, somehow.

This is when it's good to have a bunch of movie viewers around. If it's some weird little QT flag, some older viewers may not recognize it.

First thing to try is Shake. And in Shake, both the original and the exported movie look the same (good!) and they both look the same as the original looks in QT player! Which is good, because the director is approving shots based on how they look in QT player.

The Shake example still doesn't tell me what the flag is, how to stop it from happening, etc.

It gets weirder. If I load both clips into Compressor, and view them through the Preview window, they both look darker and they both look the same but neither looks like the bad FCP exported version in QT player. If I apply a gamma correction of .8197 in Compressor (the inverse of 1.22, which is the gamma 1.8 to 2.2 conversion factor), then they both look like what we want them to look like.

Gotta love this business to be in it. Because if two Apple apps display the same movie differently, then you're kind of hating life.

Some web searching led me to this thread on the Apple support forum. A lively discussion of FCP adding QuickTime "atoms" when it exports movies. This looks like what I'm grappling with. I downloaded the amazing tool JES Extensifier, and yes, I can see that the atoms are set differently between my imported movie and what FCP exported. Here's what JES EX says about each:

Above: The JES Extensifier Inspector screen for the FCP exported movie

Above: The JES Extensifier Inspector screen for the original movie

FCP has written values for the colr and tapt atoms but the input movies don't have them. Note that the tapt atom has something to do with frame size so I'm ignoring it.

So what is the colr atom? Some light reading says it's essentially a required color space identifier for QuickTime movies. The two choices for the colr atom are nclc and prof, and the one FCP added to our movie was nclc (short for "nonconstant luminance coding").

Required? But the ProRes 4444 movies we make with Shake don't have the colr atom and they look perfect. Hmm.

Anyway, if I use Extensifier to remove the colr atom from the FCP export, the movie looks the way I want it to in QT player. Hurray! But the story continues, because the movie doesn't look right in Compressor. So I must dig deeper...

FCP is setting the colr atom to nclc with HD as the default. It is apparently assuming that we're making HDTV material.

There are other arguments to the colr atom (primaries, transfer function, and matrix) which are indices used to identify a linear color transfer function. Further reading shows that the index settings of 1, 1, 1 -- which is what FCP gives us -- are for 1920x1080 HDTV (SMPTE 274M-1995). If I change them to 2, 2, 2 (all unknown) using JES Extensifier, that's probably "better" than just removing them entirely. Luckily, QT player makes the movie look right both with 2, 2, 2 and without the colr atom entirely. But Compressor needs more.

The gama atom also needs to be set to 1.8 for Compressor to also show the movie properly. What the hell, Apple? Why aren't QT player and Compressor returning identical results for identical atom settings?

Anyway, I've got the movie looking right in QT player and Compressor now. While it's not entirely an intellectually satisfying result, I'm going to run with it for now. It looks right. We can finish this movie. Thank you to Jan E. Schotsman for Extensifier tool!

Summary and conclusions:

FCP is adding the colr atom to our ProRes 4444 movie on output, and I see no way of telling it not to (nor do I see a way of configuring it). FCP seems to assume that we are doing an HDTV project and is "helping" us by identifying such via the colr nclc atom.
Apple apps do not seem to respect these atoms consistently. QT player does listen to colr. But the same movie in Compressor looks darker. Setting the gama atom to 1.8 in Extensifier and keeping the colr atom to nclc 2, 2, 2 makes the movie look the same (and correct) in Compressor and in QT player.
If these atoms are NOT present and if you're using an app that expects them, the app will have to guess what you want.
Older apps, like shake, seem to ignore these atoms entirely.

The Incident at Tower 37: online!

2011-03-21T09:17:00.010-04:00

YouTube
Vimeo

Tower 37 is a ten-minute animated short film that was produced collaboratively at Hampshire College and has spent the past two years in film festivals worldwide.

We are releasing it online today, World Water Day, to bring even greater attention to humanity's role in creating and perpetuating this planet's critical water issues. Our film is allegorical, but the challenges we face are real.

Please enjoy, and share! Here are some links to more information and resources related to the film, its making, etc:

ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM

TakePart.com has a recent interview with me and suggests ways you can take action, like donating to Water.org and giving up bottled water (especially those single-use plastic nightmares).

LEARNING ANIMATION

Tower 37 was created within the unique undergraduate animation curriculum at Hampshire, which offers a mix of individualized and collaborative instruction. You can get a taste of animation at Hampshire from a recent demo reel, reading a bit about our program, and/or by following the video journey of a final-year interdisciplinary Hampshire animation student.

Bit Films offers spring, summer, and fall internships for current students and recent grads who want to work on films like Tower 37. Watch the Bit Films website for details. You can also peek at the two amazing projects we're working on at the moment, Caldera and Tube, at their respective sites.

INDEPENDENT ANIMATION PRODUCTION

If you're interested in the ins-and-outs of producing and/or distributing a project like this, There's a long history of Tower 37-related posts on this very blog.

Tower 37 was produced using the open source web-based production management and support system called HELGA. We're looking for developers!

Three weeks of trivia

2011-03-02T22:16:00.003-05:00

I'm posting daily trivia questions about Tower 37 on Twitter as a way to keep myself busy before the upcoming release. There's a #tower37 hashtag you can search on if you want.

These include some never-before-seen treats, like deleted scenes, concept art, etc.

Tower 37 release - one month away!

2011-02-22T22:11:00.009-05:00

I am happy to report that on World Water Day, March 22, 2011, we will be releasing The Incident at Tower 37 online for all to see. Watch this space, the Bit Films website, Facebook, and/or Twitter for details as that day approaches.

World Water Day is a wonderful opportunity to share the film globally given its commentary on the relationship between humanity, water, and the Earth's other inhabitants. Please help us build an audience and grow the conversation by sharing your ideas of people, organizations, websites, blogs, email lists, and more that should know about the film!

Tower 37 color script paintings circa 2006-2007

Bit Films Spring 2011 Internships

2011-01-07T15:29:00.003-05:00

If you follow the Bit Films story, then you definitely know about our internship program. If not, it's a great way to participate actively on a high-end, independent animation production under the tutelage of experienced mentors and artists. We've just posted the call for applications for our Spring 2011 session:

Spring 2011 Internship details here

** One project, Caldera, is nearing completion! This is your last chance to be involved with this film!

Applications due via email on January 31st, 2011.

Anima: a festival of contemporary animation by women

2010-12-01T13:09:00.012-05:00

Valley animation fans: come see an amazing showcase of recent work by female animators!

7-9pm
Sunday December 12th
Main Lecture Hall, Franklin Patterson Hall
Hampshire College
FREE
parental note: this is not an all ages program

Click here for the facebook event page and tell us you're coming!

The fall 2010 Women in Animation class at Hampshire College has assembled an outstanding program of international and award-winning short films made by women that feature a wide variety of media, techniques, and subject matter. The work is inspiring and fresh, much of it coming from emerging artists who are sure to leave their marks on the animation world.

Official Selection (alphabetical order)
Astronomer's Sun, The (Cope, 2010, UK)
Benigni (Vuorinen, Partanen, Ottelin, 2009, Finland)
Chrigi (Kofmel, 2009, Switzerland)
El Doctor (Pitt, 2006, USA)
Forest (Schulnik, 2009, USA)
Lebensader (Steffen, 2009, Germany)
Miramare (Müller, 2009, Switzerland)
Notebook (Lohbeck, 2008, Netherlands)
Soft Plants (de Swaef, 2009, Belgium)
Tongueling, The (Vuorinen, 2010, Finland)
Triumph of the Wild 2 (Colburn, 2009, Netherlands/USA)
Windows, Masks & Doors (Orenstein, 2007, USA)

festival program

Making a DCP entirely with open source tools (update)

2010-11-20T01:06:00.000-05:00

Here I detail my most up-to-date pipeline for producing a DCP with open source tools. I have used these techniques to produce a DCP for The Incident at Tower 37 that has (to date) ingested and played properly on Doremi and Dolby servers. This technique is an updated version of the original pipeline I posted earlier this year, but with many small but important changes (mostly related to audio and proper formatting of the hard drive).

Step 0: prepare sources

My source video was a 24fps lossless QuickTime movie, RGB color, 1920 x 1080 (16:9). For the purposes of this document, call it INMOVIE.mov.

My source audio comprised of six wav files for Dolby 5.1 surround, each 48kHz mono and 24 bits per sample. This bit depth is critical! Dolby DSS servers considered the DCP corrupt until the audio sources were 24 bit.

Step 1: export PNGs from source QuickTime movie

Tool: ffmpeg
Version: SVN-r21770 (compiled locally)
Command:

ffmpeg -r 24 -i INMOVIE.mov -f image2 %08d.png

This marches through the video file outputting a lossless, compressed PNG 24 times per second.

Step 2: convert to 12 bit per channel XYZ color images

Tool: ImageMagick's convert
Version: 6.5.9 (compiled locally)
Must be run once per PNG frame.
Command:

convert FRAME.png -type TrueColor -alpha Off -depth 12 \
-gamma 0.454545 \
-recolor "0.4124564 0.3575761 0.1804375 \
0.2126729 0.7151522 0.0721750 \
0.0193339 0.1191920 0.9503041" \
-gamma 2.6 FRAME.tif

This takes a 1920 x 1080 PNG from step 1, removes any alpha, sets the bit depth to 12 bits per pixel, and does a linear-space color shift from RGB->XYZ. Then it writes the image out as a TIFF. According to a comment I saw here, only one of the dimensions of the image need to match 2048 x 1080.

Step 3: convert TIFFs to JPEG-2000

Tool: OpenJPEG's image_to_j2k
Version: 2.1.3.0(compiled locally from subversion revision 543)
Must be run once per TIFF frame.
Command:

image_to_j2k -cinema2K 24 -i FRAME.tif -o FRAME.j2c

This takes longer per frame than convert, in my experience. About 2x longer.

Step 4: make all the necessary DCP files

Tool: OpenCinemaTools
Version: 1.1.2 (compiled locally)
Tool: asdcplib
Version: 1.6.37 (compiled locally)

NOTE: the next time I revisit this process I'm going to try using the new openDCP library instead of OpenCinemaTools, which is not actively supported and was quite challenging to build.

This step has five substeps, each of which generates one or more of the files needed for the DCP. Naming conventions are very important in DCP land, so I highly recommend that you read about them yourself and make informed choices. When you see DCPFULLNAME below, that's shorthand for what I used, which was the mouthful:

TOWER37_SHR_F_EN-XX_US-XX_51_2K_ST_20101105_OV

Command A (create a video MXF file from the folder of J2K files):

asdcptest -v -E -L -c PROJ.video.mxf FOLDER_OF_J2KS

Command B (create an audio MXF file from the six wavs):

asdcptest -v -l 5.1 -E -L -c PROJ.audio.mxf \
left.wav right.wav center.wav \
sub.wav surrLeft.wav surrRight.wav

Command C (create an XML composition playlist):

mkcpl --kind short --title DCPFULLNAME \
--annotation DCPFULLNAME --norating \
PROJ.video.mxf PROJ.audio.mxf > PROJ.cpl.xml

Do check the output of command C and confirm that the durations of both video and audio are identical. The XML tag for this is "IntrinsicDuration."

Command D (create an XML packing list):

mkpkl --issuer BitFilms --annotation DCPFULLNAME \ PROJ.video.mxf PROJ.audio.mxf PROJ.cpl.xml > PROJ.pkl.xml

Command E (create the ASSETMAP and VOLINDEX XML files):

mkmap --issuer BitFilms \
PROJ.video.mxf PROJ.audio.mxf PROJ.cpl.xml PROJ.pkl.xml

I used a bit of shorthand above since I did not identify enclosing folders. I suggest that if you make a DCP this way, you use temporary folders for all the inputs (and the results of steps 1-3), then create a finalDCP folder which you populate with only the files that will be part of the eventual DCP itself (namely, the 2 mxfs and the 4 XML files that come from step 4).

Step 5: get the DCP onto a Hard Drive

Tool: gparted
Version: 0.7.0-4 "live" CD image

I found the best guidance for this step at the Inter-Society Digital Cinema Forum website.

In short, you want an MBR partition table and an EXT3 file system. I booted gparted from the live CD and made a single partition on my portable USB hard drive. NOTE: I tried an HP SimpleSave drive and regretted it. This drive comes with an uneditable partition that mounts like a read-only CD-ROM in addition to its actual storage. My Lacie Rakiki worked great.

Once the disk is formatted, just copy over the 6 files that emerged from step 4 right to the root of the new disk. And it's done.

Some quick notes:

It is important that you check your XML files to make sure the file paths don't contain any incorrect information: if you aren't careful during step 4, your file paths in the XML may be incorrect! Here's what one of my entries looks like in my final ASSETMAP.xml file as an example: file:///tower37fullDCP.video.mxf
I don't know what happens if your audio and video durations are different, so I was careful to make sure mine were not. Check them in the CPL (the tag is ).
Work with a small movie file for starters, a minute or less, until you get the steps ironed out. Then move to your full film.

Good luck!

Thanks:

Wolfgang Woehl
John Hurst
Dave Samson
Bryan Dennis

open source DCP update: need help testing

2010-10-24T21:11:00.009-04:00

As a reader named Vincent posted in August on my open-source DCP process post, this method isn't foolproof. Last week I personally encountered the problem he described where a DCP ingests properly onto a Dolby DSS server, but then appears with a nasty red X on it saying "corrupt." This is happening with a DCP that ingests and plays just fine on a Doremi server.

For those keeping close notes, my problem was on a Dolby DSS100. Vincent's was on a DSS200. He also had a problem ingesting on what I assume was a Datasat DC20 server as well.

It is my goal to ferret out all of these problems and post the solutions here for everyone's benefit. If you have access to a server (or servers) and are willing to run some brief tests, you can help! Just let me know what kind of server(s) you can use and I'll get you access to a small DCP (< 1 Gb) that you can download and try to ingest/play.

Thanks in advance!

For your consideration...

2010-10-14T21:31:00.007-04:00

I am very excited to report that The Incident at Tower 37 has been submitted to the 83rd annual Academy Awards! Wherever it goes in the competition, I want to thank the supporters of the film from all over the world for rallying behind it during this wonderful festival run. This includes fest directors and programmers who picked it from the submission pool, to the audience members who came, watched, and shared their feelings with me about the film. You all are the reason we put so much effort into the festival run in the first place!

... and to those who have followed my DCP posts, yes: I submitted Tower to the Academy in the form of a home-rolled DCP.

Drome pix and a Tower 37 review

2010-09-07T22:29:00.002-04:00

Sorry I didn't have any visuals when I posted about the Bit Films Fall Internships, but check out a few recent snaps of the summer interns and our lab spaces, below. Applications due next Monday!

The Tower 37 review comes from a viewer at Seattle's One-Reel Film Festival, who considered it the best of the Animated Life program:

The film’s noticeably low-budget CG doesn’t reduce its effectiveness in the least – this is a gripping and poignant environmental allegory with an absolutely beautiful score (from composer Evan Viera). The film’s earnest message is about as over-the-top as “Captain Planet”, but it doesn’t resort to cheap manipulation to showcase it.

Now for the pix (photo credit: Kevin Cline)

Bit Films Fall 2010 Internships

2010-08-27T09:34:00.009-04:00

I'm pleased to report that internship information is now posted for the Fall 2010 session!

Fall 2010 internship details here

This is our fifth consecutive internship session, running from September 20 to December 17, 2010. Applications are due (via email) no later than Monday September 13, 2010 at 5pm (EDT). We understand that this is short lead time for those in need of making visa and travel arrangements. Because the projects are ongoing, the internship period is flexible; if in doubt, apply!

Everything you'd want to know about the two films being produced in-house (Caldera and Tube) is available via the link above. Today I want to mention the amazing work environment that surrounds the productions and is home to the work we do.

First of all, the studio is on the Hampshire College campus. During the fall, classes are in session so the place is buzzing with activity -- there are lectures, shows, presentations, screenings, sporting events, and more happening all the time and right next to the studio space. Interns have audited Hampshire courses in the past and we certainly expect this to continue.

Nearby Amherst and Northampton are politically liberal college towns with lots of food and entertainment. The PVTA bus system connects them, Hampshire, and the other four colleges in the Five College Consortium so transportation is straightforward. There is also a bike path connecting Northampton and Amherst (which summer 2010 intern Josh ran daily as an impressive commute/exercise regimen).

In addition to lots of US participants over the past four sessions, we've had interns from China, Argentina, South Africa, France, and England be a part of the program in the past. We are eager to fold different voices and histories into the studio so we do our best to support international applicants through the Visa process, finding a place to live, and getting oriented.

So check out the call for interns, look into the films, and see about joining our crew. We look forward to hearing from you.

Request Tower 37 on OpenIndie

2010-08-09T09:41:00.004-04:00

I was very excited when I first heard of OpenIndie, the website that will let fans request independent films and allow people anywhere to host screenings. They now have a nice little film widget (below) that lets you request the film really easily! Please check it out if you haven't already and ask for a local screening of Tower 37 -- or host one!

Gender Roles in Pixar's "Day and Night"

2010-07-07T21:45:00.012-04:00

Pixar's latest short, "Day and Night," marks an exciting new direction in mixing 2D and 3D animation while hearkening back to animation styles of the past. And I appreciate that it strives to share a valuable lesson in understanding and acceptance.

Lots of people are raving about it, but overall I found the short rather depressing. To me, it was about two spoiled white boys who figure out that they have everything they need already, and they're exactly alike too.

But most troublesome for me were the representations of women, and in particular how men behave around women. It's even a step back from Knick Knack, from 1988, where at least the voiceless white buxom mer-woman was awake and active in her courting of the male snowman.
Side note: the mermaid in Knick Knack had digital breast reduction surgery early in the new millenium. John Lasseter is quoted as saying this was done because "it was just crossing the line for me personally as a father."

The clip I remember most from "Day and Night" was where Night discovers a bikini-clad woman inside Day's sleeping butt. If you haven't seen the film, that sentence may make absolutely no sense. Thankfully, the clip is available online as a part of an odd little making of video. Jump directly to timecode 1:17 if you want just the clip I'm discussing here, or watch the whole thing, below.

Anyway, the woman is sleeping on the beach. She's totally unaware of being spied on by a huge and phallic-nosed Night (just watch that nose when he first is aware of her existence - schwing!). He's a total voyeur, and she is utterly vulnerable.

Night's first reaction to discovering her? He looks around. Guilty and nervous. Like he found a wallet on the ground. I fear for that girl when he then lowers his eyelids and throws out his gigantic tongue. He transforms into a total sleazeball predator.

He finally makes his physical move to capture her inside his belly (animation theorists will have a field day with the metaphors this new technique offers). But when she's not there, he looks at his foot like he might have stepped in something. I can only assume he's trying to find her.

Women (silent, blond, sexy, white) as property to be acquired, hunted, and ultimately captured, by men who must be sneaky, tricky, aggressive, and physically superior over one another.

This isn't new stuff for animation, and many give "Day and Night" a nostalgic "Get out of Bad Gender Dynamics Free" card because Tex Avery and others did this kind of stuff generations ago. But I watched with my 6-year old daughter and 9-year old son, for whom nostalgia played zero part. For them, it was just another demonstration of how boys should behave around girls. Badly, I'm afraid.

Thanks to all the participants in the recent e-discussion about "Day and Night" that occurred on Hampshire College's animation mailing list.

summer in full swing

2010-07-06T10:31:00.007-04:00

An awesome Bit Films sticker photo by Jeremy Brown, from SIGGRAPH 2009.

It's sweltering hot these days in Western Massachusetts, so thankfully the AC is functional and the Bit Films crews aren't melting. I've been doing a lot of script writing, while the Caldera and Tube crews are deep in production. Caldera recently completed its successful kickstarter.com campaign, so big thanks to all who contributed!

Really I was psyched to find Jeremy's photo and I wanted to share it.

A new challenge: an open source remote review tool

2010-06-24T15:30:00.004-04:00

The year opened with a self-assigned open source DCP quest for The Incident at Tower 37. Now it is summer, and with Caldera deep in the animation phase with an amazing team both local and remote, we've got a new set of problems.

The particular one I'm looking to solve is related to animation reviews. Our ideal tool would allow the director to load up HD QuickTime movies on his machine, point at the screen, talk freely, hear what others have to say no matter where they are, pause and restart the video, scrub to a particular point in the playlist, and make annotations. And so on. Remote participants would be watching the same movie at the same quality and hearing the comments/seeing the director as he spoke.

This problem has been solved a hundred times by lots of different people. I know Animation Mentor has some solution for running reviews with bunch of participants, for example. With all the World Cup soccer I've been watching lately on ESPN3, it appears that live streaming of HQ (if not HD) content works even on my paltry DSL line at home. I've also read about cineSync which seems to be designed for this kind of situation. However, I have yet to find an easy and free solution.

There are a few paths worth exploring. If I could set up a situation that streams the director's screen and audio input in a bandwidth-sensitive way (like ESPN3) to anyone interested in watching/listening, that would be great. A test with simple iChat-based screen sharing between two macs didn't do so well, however - the network couldn't maintain a bandwidth that led to satisfactory results on the viewing end. Too choppy and blocky.

Another idea is for every interested party to pre-cache the movies being reviewed, and then have the director launch a master movie player. All participants would launch slave players, and the control commands (play, pause, seek to X, and so on) would be all that would have to be sent over the network from the master to the slaves. Pluses: this is almost possible already with VLC using its TCP interface, and it ensures that everyone is seeing the highest quality video independent of bandwidth. Minuses: it doesn't allow for annotation, nor audio communication. This would handle just the video part.

Part of working on a problem like this is knowing what the heck to search for while doing my research, and I confess that I'm rather ignorant in that regard. What I might call "remote animation review" someone else might call "live streaming screencast" or something. I will post my results as I go, but honestly part of posting this before having any results to share is to ask people for their help finding the sub-components of this solution online. Thanks in advance.

online reviews

2010-05-13T10:34:00.002-04:00

Some great Tower 37 reviews appeared online recently, posted by folks who saw the film at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

"...My personal favorite short is The Incident at Tower 37. This seemingly simple story is loaded with political and moral undertones, making it far more challenging than many viewers may realize. This particular short alone makes the entire program worth it."

- Michael Smith, FlickSided.com

"...In Chris Perry's brilliant short entitled The Incident at Tower 37, one of the on-duty guards at a corporate-run well designed to drain a lake of every drop of water has his resolve weakened by a strange amphibious creature.

The pangs of guilt which overcome the lone employee of a powerful conglomerate in The Incident at Tower 37 actually have an important consequence: In a moment that defies corporate logic, the man on duty in Tower 37 realizes that his actions are destroying an entire ecosystem and he reverses the flow of water.

The quality of the artwork in Perry's HD animation short is absolutely breathtaking. His film about preserving the environment becomes all the more compelling in light of the recent environmental crisis in the Gulf of Mexico (thanks to BP's catastrophic oil spill)."

- George Heymont, My Cultural Landscape Blog

"A fable about a man, water, and intelligent frog-fish creatures. Visually stunning CGA that could have come out of Pixar."

- Lincoln Spector, BayFlicks.net

One Frame at a Time wrapup

2010-05-13T09:51:00.005-04:00

The One Frame at a Time animation event at Hampshire went great last weekend. I thank our filmmakers for exposing us all to some outstanding work (including older films by Raoul Servais and Georges Schwizgebel -- both embedded below), and for sharing their production methods with those who attended the master class.

The nice thing about a flexible, participant-curated show is that we could squeeze in some other treats, like Bill Plympton's new short "The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger" (clip below) and a 16mm print of a Mr. Magoo "Fuddy Duddy Buddy" hand-delivered to the screening by Emily Hubley.

I hadn't yet seen Bill Plympton's new short even though it has been collecting awards at many festivals lately. It was a lot of fun, and there was a great resonance with my interests of late since I've been researching food and agriculture for another project. I also smiled at the parallels between the young cow and the young protagonist of my short Catch from 2005 - both have at least some portion of their lives shaped by billboards!

Thanks to all who attended and participated. With luck we'll be able to repeat this process next year and bring a new slate of animation work to viewers in the Valley.

One frame at a time

2010-05-07T08:39:00.005-04:00

I have no good excuse but many poor ones for not posting this event earlier. With luck, however, today's article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette/Amherst Bulletin or yesterday's lovely Tower 37 review on George Heymont's blog will help draw a good audience for the show.

Details:

Three award-winning independent animators will be at Hampshire College this Saturday hosting a master class in the afternoon and a screening in the evening. Both events are free and open to the public, but there are limited seats for the master class so priority for those spots will be given to current 5-college students.

The animators are:

Aaron Hughes and Lisa LaBracio, director and producer (respectively) of "Backwards," and Jake Armstrong, director of "The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9!"

a frame from "Backwards" by Aaron Hughes and Lisa LaBracio

a frame from "The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9" by Jake Armstrong

Schedule:

3-4pm, MASTER CLASS: The animators will present the workflows from their respective projects. The format will be casual, with audience questions encouraged. Location: Adele Simmons Hall room 126 (the ASH lab).

6-7pm, SCREENING: There will be a screening of indie animated shorts selected by the participating filmmakers and the event organizers. This is NOT an all-ages show, and it will START ON TIME so that people can make it to other events on campus that evening. Location: Franklin Patterson Hall, Main Lecture Hall.

The program is ever-evolving, but is likely to include the following films. Follow the links below for samples, but save your real appetite for the screening!

Backwards (Aaron Hughes, Lisa LaBracio)
The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9 (Jake Armstrong)
The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger (Bill Plympton)
What Barry Says (Knife Party)
Pigeon: Impossible (Lucas Martell)
The Incident at Tower 37 (Chris Perry)

Event Organizers:

Chris Perry, director of "The Incident at Tower 37" and assistant professor at Hampshire College
Kevin Cline, media wackjob at Hampshire College

Summer 2010 Internships

2010-04-24T00:45:00.003-04:00

After three tremendously successful internship sessions last year, we are happily embarking on our second year of internships with the 2010 summer session, once again hosted at Hampshire College.

See here for the details. Applications are due May 3 via email.

A little info on both summer projects can be found at their respective websites:

Bassam Kurdali's film Tube (with shouts out to amazing international interns Jarred and Pablo)

Evan Viera and Chris Bishop's film Caldera (which YOU can help fund via kickstarter.com)

We're looking forward to reviewing your applications. Don't miss out!

Thanks, Harriete at Comcast!

2010-04-13T19:20:00.005-04:00

Wow, I just had the most terrible and hilarious online chat experience with a Comcast "customer service" representative. The screen grab of the transcript pretty much tells the whole story.

A few assuring words and then BAM, thrown to the sharks. Time to look into satellite TV!

April fest news, batch 1

2010-04-12T08:43:00.004-04:00

Tower 37 was playing all over the country this weekend: Oregon, Florida, Connecticut, and California (LA). I was able to get to the Environmental Film Festival at Yale on Thursday, for both the Dan Rather interview and our screening that followed it. Many thanks to the projectionist who actually gave a damn about what the film looked like. He called me up to the booth to confirm his projector settings and make sure I liked what I saw. I can't think of anything more comforting before a screening than knowing you're in good hands.

We were paired at Yale with the documentary The End of the Line, about the overfishing of the world's oceans. It was chilling. My sushi ordering habits will not be the same.

My story about the Yale trip would not be complete without mention of Ikea. Before hitting the festival, Kevin (the mad genius behind most of the video on Hampshire's website) and I buzzed through the New Haven Ikea. Now this might sound bizarre to those of you near urban centers, but since our closest Ikea is two hours away it makes sense to go by anytime we're within striking distance. The purpose of the visit, other than hot dogs and Swedish chocolate, was to find the centerpiece for the basement screening room that's rapidly coming to life chez moi. The mancave, as it is known locally, was in need of a couch.

Well we found it, a 2.5 seat leather number that met the major requirements: very comfortable, and not too wide for the runway-like basement. Great. Done. The helpful (?) warehouse workers talked about how this was a new item that needed "lots of assembly," which at Ikea is kind of an odd thing to hear. I was psyched, though: assembly meant smaller packaging. You just can't stuff a big couch into a Forester.

But sometimes you have to. Despite the musings of the employees, it came pre-built. Wrapped in cardboard and plastic. A full six feet long and 2x3 feet on the other dimensions. Oops. So with just a few minutes before the Dan Rather interview, Kevin and I rapidly eviscerated the car, and when the back seats were laid down--oh boy!--we were able to get about 80% of the couch in.

Having a couch stick out the back of a car would be fine if we weren't about to park on the streets in New Haven for 5 hours. The Yale kids don't have to worry about urban crime too much since their buildings look like they could withstand an assault by the huns if they couldn't get their hands on pirated electronic key cards (no, seriously, they look like impregnable medieval structures). Luckily, before pulling out of Ikea, we had the wisdom to try pushing the front seats forward and jamming the whole thing in. And it worked. So we drove to the venue with the ass of the couch jutting out, parked, and in the middle of 5pm foot traffic around the Yale campus we casually exited the car, smashed the seats forward and pushed the beast all the way in. Then left the overstuffed ride on the streets while we learned about fish, news, and how to make a Wiskey Sour the New Haven way. Going home was a breeze, literally, with the couch peeking out towards the south like it wanted to return to Ikea the whole time.

I don't have any feedback from Oregon or Florida, but at least one person caught at least one of the Los Angeles shows this weekend. Producer Daniel kindly scanned the stub you saw at the top of this page after he watched Tower 37 at the Laemmle's Sunset 5 in Encino. His report follows:

Went to see T37 at the Leammle this morning. The film looked great and sounded even better. I don't know if this theater had the best sound system of any of the theaters I have seen the film in, or if the DCP just has amazing audio quality, but I've never heard the soundtrack sound so vibrant and full. It was a really immersive experience, also I had the rare opportunity to just watch the film and enjoy it rather than having my attention on gauging audience reaction.

I'm so glad we've now had multiple confirmations of the success of our home-grown DCP; see this thread for information about our process if you're in search of making your own DCP.

This coming week includes more screenings in Florida and California (Sonoma and Beverly Hills, in particular). So there's sure to be news to share after they've come and gone.

A year and counting

2010-04-05T09:28:00.005-04:00

Tower 37 concept painting by David Cahill, 2005

Producer Daniel reminded me last night that Tower 37 began its festival run with a screening in Providence on April 4, 2009 -- one year ago (yesterday). What an incredible year it has been, and contrary to what I anticipated when this all started, in many ways we are just warming up. Our success at certain festivals has translated into invitations to other fests, so with luck Tower will be showing even more broadly as 2010 continues.

Marking the anniversary was a wonderful review in Southern Oregon's News Source, the Mail Tribune. Writing about the Ashland Film Festival (we are a part of their Animation Shorts program), Bill Varble writes:

Passing on the usual templates for computer animation — the innocuous "family cartoon" and the special-effects blockbuster — director Chris Perry has crafted an quirky, eye-popping little narrative with a point.

Tower 37 is (a) a super-size water tower and (b) an example of hubris. It is monitored by a low-level functionary unaware of (and probably indifferent to) its disastrous environmental consequences. Then one day it's struck by (a) terrorists, (b) heroes, (c) inexorable fate.
This is a visually stunning little film that proves political stories can have some punch.

So happy birthday of sorts to our little film, with thanks and congrats to everyone who has been a part of it!

Tower 37 concept painting by David Cahill, 2005

From Towers to Turtles: Caldera

2010-03-23T22:06:00.008-04:00

As Tower 37 has been winding down its festival life, I have been putting more of my animation energies into a new film: Caldera. This beautiful and thoughtful short about a girl struggling with mental illness is the brainchild of Evan Viera and Chris Bishop, two long-time collaborators and friends who birthed the idea when they were teaching animation in China. The film is one of the first two films (the other being Bassam Kurdali's Tube) being produced in Hampshire College's Animation Incubation Studio. Locally, it's the "Nerd-o-Drome."

My responsibilities vary on Caldera. I recently finished rigging the turtle character, which I had previously done some shading R&D for as well. Now I'm going to spend some time doing what lots of people have tried but most, in my opinion, have failed to do very well: get anime-style 2D "toon" renders out of a 3D pipeline.

I don't want to start a charged aesthetic debate here, rather, I'll do my best to be scientific and present reference images, analyze them, and post the results of my efforts. In other words, this is an engineering challenge. Evan and Bishop have done their work coming up with great concept art; I'm going to see if we can get motion that does the art justice:

Bishop has done some turtle animation in an underwater shot which I'll be testing turtle shading on; Cali (the girl) will come a little later when he's done with a shot that features her. Cali's going to be harder for lots of reasons which I'll get into in future posts.

So for now, the above concept painting will be my target for the look of the turtle, even though the shot I'm working on is staged further away and features him (him?) in profile. The first image from this post is a comp I assembled during shading R&D, with painted texture detail by Evan, also based on the same concept painting. The main features are looking good, though the edge lines are visibly absent, and of course motion causes everything to go crazy. Making one frame is pretty easy; the real challenge here is going to be to make it look right over time!

Ending with a bang

2010-02-28T12:14:00.006-05:00

Well April seems to be THE month for Tower 37. April 2009 was our premiere month and we showed in 7 different fests. This April, we are already slated for 9 fests and there are still some we haven't heard back from. I keep the calendar as up to date as possible, so use it.

Some March/April festivals of note:

Cleveland International Film Festival
Florida Film Festival
The Environmental Film Festival at Yale
Ashland Independent Film Festival (WISH I could go to this one)
Beverly Hills Film Festival
San Francisco International Film Festival

I have one story to share in advance of the big fest month; others will certainly follow.

You go to a film festival and want to see some animation, right? So you go to the animated shorts block. Makes sense. Unfortunately, though, at the Tiburon International Film Festival this week Tower 37 is NOT in the animated shorts block. Which wouldn't itself be a tragedy because we're paired with what looks like a cool movie about surfing. Except... they're at the exact same time. So you have to choose: animated shorts or Tower 37. I hope there's a good surfing contingent in Tiburon.

Making a DCP entirely with open source tools

2010-02-26T15:42:00.013-05:00

this technique is now obsolete - try the latest method instead!

Here are the steps I followed to produce a DCP for the 11-minute short film The Incident at Tower 37. It has ingested and played properly on a Doremi DCP-2000. The projector was a Barco model. Everything below was done on a Linux machine.

Credit where it is due: as I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm building off the work of the people behind asdcplib and OpenCinemaTools, and the users on the Red user forums who have published software and instructions that they have used/created while traversing this bumpy path. Big thanks to Wolfgang, Pavel, Marc, Samson, and Josiah.

In the interest of brevity, I'm not going to explain why I chose program X over program Y -- those interested can read my previous posts where I go into more of those details. Also, I'm not trying to present the be-all, end-all DCP manual here; this is just what worked for me!

Step 0: prepare sources

My source video was a 24fps lossless QuickTime movie, 1920 x 1080 (16:9). For the purposes of this document, call it INMOVIE.mov.

My source audio comprised of six wav files for Dolby 5.1 surround, each 48kHz mono.

Step 1: export PNGs from source QuickTime movie

Tool: ffmpeg
Version: SVN-r21770 (compiled locally)
Command:

ffmpeg -r 24 -i INMOVIE.mov -f image2 %08d.png

This marches through the video file outputting a lossless, compressed PNG 24 times per second.

Step 2: convert to 12 bit per channel XYZ color images
Tool: ImageMagick's convert
Version: 6.5.9 (compiled locally)
Must be run once per PNG frame.
Command:

convert FRAME.png -type TrueColor -alpha Off \
-background black -extent 2048x1080-64 -depth 12 \
-gamma 0.454545 \
-recolor "0.4124564 0.3575761 0.1804375 \
0.2126729 0.7151522 0.0721750 \
0.0193339 0.1191920 0.9503041" \
-gamma 2.6 FRAME.tif

This takes a 1920 x 1080 PNG from step 1, removes any alpha, pads the image with 64 pixels of black on each side so that it becomes 2048 x 1080, sets the bit depth to 12 bits per pixel, and does a linear-space color shift from RGB->XYZ. Then it writes the image out as a TIFF.

Upon further reading, I interrogated my own decision to force the 1920 x 1080 images into a 2048 x 1080 container by padding with black. Apparently, you only need one dimension of the source imagery to match either 2048 or 1080 and the OpenJPEG encoder will do the right thing.

The new conversion line I used today omits the padding and looked stellar at the theater just moments ago:

convert FRAME.png -type TrueColor -alpha Off -depth 12 \
-gamma 0.454545 \
-recolor "0.4124564 0.3575761 0.1804375 \
0.2126729 0.7151522 0.0721750 \
0.0193339 0.1191920 0.9503041" \
-gamma 2.6 FRAME.tif

This must be run one frame at a time, but it's very easy to distribute ranges of frames to multiple processors if you have them.

Step 3: convert TIFFs to JPEG-2000
Tool: OpenJPEG's image_to_j2k
Version: 2.1.3.0(compiled locally from subversion revision 543)
Must be run once per TIFF frame.
Command:

image_to_j2k -cinema2K 24 -i FRAME.tif -o FRAME.j2c

This takes longer per frame than convert, in my experience. About 2x longer. Also easy to distribute to many machines, however.

Step 4: make all the necessary DCP files
Tools: OpenCinemaTools
Version: 1.1.2 (compiled locally)

This step has five substeps, each of which generates one or more of the files needed for the DCP. Naming conventions are very important in DCP land, so I highly recommend that you read about them yourself and make informed choices. When you see DCPFULLNAME below, that's shorthand for what I used, which was the mouthful:

TOWER37_FTR_F_EN-XX_US-XX_51_2K_ST_20100212_OV

Command A (create a video MXF file from the folder of J2K files):

asdcptest -v -L -c PROJ.video.mxf FOLDER_OF_J2KS

Command B (create an audio MXF file from the six wavs):

asdcptest -v -L -c PROJ.audio.mxf left.wav right.wav \
center.wav sub.wav surrLeft.wav surrRight.wav

Command C (create an XML composition playlist):

mkcpl --kind feature --title DCPFULLNAME \
--annotation DCPFULLNAME --norating \
PROJ.video.mxf PROJ.audio.mxf > PROJ.cpl.xml

Do check the output of command C and confirm that the durations of both video and audio are identical. The XML tag for this is "IntrinsicDuration."

Command D (create an XML packing list):

mkpkl --issuer BitFilms --annotation DCPFULLNAME \ PROJ.video.mxf PROJ.audio.mxf PROJ.cpl.xml > PROJ.pkl.xml

Command E (create the ASSETMAP and VOLINDEX XML files):

mkmap --issuer BitFilms \PROJ.video.mxf PROJ.audio.mxf PROJ.cpl.xml PROJ.pkl.xml

It is important that you check your XML files to make sure the file paths don't contain any incorrect information: if you aren't careful during step 4, your file paths in the XML may be incorrect! Here's what one of my entries looks like in my final ASSETMAP.xml file as an example: file:///tower37_complete3.video.mxf
I don't know what happens if your audio and video durations are different, so I was careful to make sure mine were not. Check them in the CPL (the tag is ).
Work with a small movie file for starters, a minute or less, until you get the steps ironed out. Then move to your full film.

I hope this is useful for some of you! If you see any mistakes above, or have suggestions to improve or generalize this pipeline, please let me know.

Making a DCP, post 4

2010-02-08T13:34:00.005-05:00

Today I got to watch my latest DCP of The Incident at Tower 37 in its entirety at the theater! 5.1 surround! Crisp and clear picture! The only problem is, it looked like this:

instead of like this:

You just can't have a movie about water where all the water is orange/brown.

So what the heck went wrong?

My current image transformation pipeline is as follows:

QuickTime movie -> PNG files (by way of mplayer)
PNG files -> 12 bit per pixel, color corrected TIFF files (by way of Imagemagick's convert)
TIFF files -> JPEG-2000 files (by way of image_to_j2k, courtesy of openjpeg)

Step one of figuring out this problem: isolate the place where it appears. Luckily, my test from last week looked great, so I have an example of a working set of images to compare with the broken set. As it turns out, my original PNG files are messed up. I can't believe it. I generated over 15,000 PNG files and never actually looked at one of them to confirm that they were right. Rookie move.

The good news? The rest of the pipeline worked great 'cause my bad-looking PNGs (with the brown water) made it all the way into bad-looking JPEG-2000s on the theater screen. Half full, baby!

So let's dig into the PNG making process. It hasn't changed since I made the working test. In other words, my mplayer line is the exact same as the mplayer line I used for the test. So the problem is likely further upstream.

What did change? The source material. The excerpt I tested on last week was a QuickTime movie I made by trimming a final version of the film using QuickTime Pro on a Mac. I trimmed it, then saved it out, flat. Aha. This could be the problem. The QuickTime file I used for the full version had a number of video tracks on it (since I added color bars within QT Pro). Perhaps mplayer didn't know which stream to use, or it somehow misinterpreted the stream itself?

Oh now I have fallen into the rabbit hole. I get different results from mplayer's PNG exporter based on what frame I start with, on what kind of PNG compression I set, and more! It appears to be completely unreliable, at least with my multi-layered QuickTime source file. I'm going to take a suggestion I was given online and check out ffmpeg as an option to create the PNGs, and I'm also going to be cleaner from the outset and make a flat QT source movie with only one video channel.

More to come. Having to export and re-convert all these images again is going to force me to finally distribute this process to our cluster. I can't stand having days pass between tests!

Making a DCP, post 3

2010-02-02T21:39:00.003-05:00

Victory! The smallest taste, but a good one.

After last week's close-but-no-cigar attempt, I realized I missed a critical last step in my DCP-making script. I had somehow spaced on creating the ASSETMAP and VOLINDEX XML files. Once I caught this, I rolled out a new DCP and brought it to the theater today. Plugged it in, and was pleased that the ingest feature recognized my disk. Instead of the properly-formatted DCP name, however, I saw a UUID in the ingest window. So there are still some kinks to work out.

Aside for the geeky: the UUID that appeared in the ingest window was the UUID of the packing list. I think there's an XML annotation tag or something similar I could have used in that pkl that would have made a better name appear in the ingest window.

Once we ingested the DCP, the next problem was that the CineLister elements window which lists all the DCPs didn't show ours. A reboot made it appear (my theory was that relaunching the program would re-scan the assets folder -- never got to test that theory but the reboot worked).

Aside: the list was sorted by the ContentKind tag, as in, feature, trailer, test, and so on. This is set in the Composition Playlist (CPL) file like so: test.

At this point my pulse quickened. Dave helped build a new playlist with the proper magic incantations to first show black then configure the projector to 2K flat, and we ran it. Though there were scaling issues (he said the projector was at 1k instead of 2k and that it was an easy fix), there was Leed, big as hell, climbing up the side of the tower from u2_01. That's the same shot that opens the online teaser. Heck, I'll embed it again. Too many posts without color recently.

A word on color: the color looked beautiful. I need a longer exposure to it before I say for sure, but thanks to Pavel and Wolfgang for the color transformation matrix they shared on the RedUser forum about DCPs. So far, it's worked great.

So this week I'm going to try and roll out a complete DCP, with 5.1 audio. I'll see if I can work out the kinks in the naming issues, but with luck I'll have more to report next week from the theater!

Making a DCP, post 2

2010-01-26T20:47:00.004-05:00

I was knocking at the door of digital cinema today, but sadly I was not let in.

With gracious assistance from Dave and Dave at our local digitally-enabled theater, and ongoing Linux help from Josiah at Hampshire, I was actually able to plug a properly-formatted USB hard drive into a Doremi DCP-2000. But I clearly don't know enough about making proper Packing Lists because the ingest function on the DCP-2000 did not detect/recognize any of my files. Time to go back to the spec and the forums and see what I missed about those critical packaging steps (If you want to know more about packing lists and other DCP components, you can find the Digital Cinema System Specification at the Digital Cinema Initiatives website).

Curiously, I felt like I was hacking for the first time in years. Sitting in the dark projection area of the theater, we were studying DCPs that were shipped to the theater on hard drives to try and ascertain how they were different from the ones I had made. Even though we didn't figure it out, it was fun to tweak the package and try the disk over and over again while flickering light from the films illuminated our work. I kind of felt like I was in a sub. It was a long, narrow, enclosed space. The low-frequency drone of the many fans and the many spinning 35mm projectors drowned every other noise out. And just through the little window next to the digital projector, you could see the world of Pandora in its kind-of-like-the-bottom-of-the-ocean glory.

Making a DCP, post 1

2010-01-23T21:40:00.005-05:00

The next phase in Tower 37's exciting life is its conversion into a Digital Cinema Package (DCP). For those who don't know, DCPs are the distribution formats for digital cinema. You can think of them as the replacements of 35mm prints. Those fancy digital projectors showing all sorts of movies at the multiplexes these days take DCPs as input. The DCPs are shipped on hard drives which can be easily plugged into the projectors for complete digital delivery.

Of course I already have Tower 37 as a lossless HD QuickTime file, complete with 5.1 surround sound. You'd think (hope?) that going from one digital format to another would be as easy as, say, converting AIFF audio files to mp3 (aka "ripping" music tracks). But guess what? It's only easy when someone has written, compiled, tested, and released software for doing so. Although I have known this as long as I've worked on computers, it's easy to forget since I rarely encounter a media file these days that I cannot convert perfectly with one of many free software packages.

There are some commercial DCP-makers out there (easyDCP and Wraptor are two), but they are fairly expensive. And, damn it, if we're really just talking about some fancy conversions to a non-proprietary format, there should be something free and available for everyone to use. So yes, I've grown attached to finding an Open Source solution.

Big props so far to the people behind asdcplib and OpenCinemaTools, and the users on the Red user forums who have published software and instructions that they have used/created while traversing this bumpy path. But it's all still so underdeveloped that I've had to recompile stuff locally, make fixes in build scripts, and code my own little process to encode a brief excerpt of Tower 37 into a DCP. I'm hoping to see the test on Tuesday at a local theater, and then to try it out on the whole film if all looks good.

I promise to post a thorough guide if we succeed!

Spring 2010 internships announced

2009-12-18T11:47:00.005-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that the call for applications to our third internship session has been posted. This is our most ambitious spread of internships yet, ranging from two programming positions to lots of generalist and R&D spots, too. We've even got a production management role we're hoping to fill. Please read the post for more details!

I wish we could offer paid internships, but even our directors and intern supervisors are working without compensation. What we can offer instead of money, however, is an amazing set of human and technical resources. Supervisors Bassam Kurdali, Evan Viera, and Chris Bishop bring tons of talent and experience to their roles, as well as an incredible passion to produce thoughtful, independent, and gorgeous animated short films. Once again, our internships will be hosted by Hampshire College's Computer Graphics Incubator Program, which means we'll have use of Hampshire's heterogeneous compute farm and the Incubator Space (aka the Nerd-O-Drome).

Pass the word and help support independent animation!

2009-12-14T09:02:00.004-05:00

A bundle of Tower 37 news today, including a wrap-up from the Artivist Fest in LA by our own producer Daniel. I'm trying not to take it personally, but when I go to festivals I'm lucky to get a Q&A. Daniel gets trophies handed to him, press photos, he gets invited up on stage, you name it. What gives?

Before we hear from Daniel, Bill and Signe are running an encore presentation of the Woodstock Animated Shorts block on January 13th at 92YTribeca, which you Bit Films historians might recognize as the very same place where Tower 37 first screened in NYC almost a year earlier as a part of Hampshire College's Alumni Reel. I really enjoyed the Woodstock program and I strongly encourage anyone in the NY area to check it out in January.

We also heard that the Tiburon International Film Festival is going to be showing Tower 37 in March 2010. This selection is exciting for two reasons: it's my first repeat festival (they showed Catch in 2007), and it's also going to compete with Moondance in the category of "festival with the most of my family members in attendance."

Speaking of Catch, I posted the original animatic for Catch the other day. Boy I had some rough sketches in there, but they served their purpose and I hope people find it helpful to compare the film-as-planned with the film-as-delivered.

And now I give the web over to Daniel, who writes:

I attended both our screening last Thursday and the awards ceremony on Saturday night. I've been in LA for a year and a half but this was my first time at the Egyptian Theater. The festival did an excellent job turning the courtyard in front of the theater into a festival space where audience members and filmmakers could all mingle. They had live music and swag everywhere. Very cool.

We played in the Spielberg theater, the smaller of the two screens, but sill a relatively nice theater. I'd say the theater was probably about 70% full...which I think was quite a feat considering it was 7pm on a Thursday night. One of the exec directors of the festival got up and introduced all the films that would be playing (each one had an environmental theme). He also pointed out that I was in attendance and there would be a Q&A following the films, it was at this point that I discovered I was the only person there representing a film.

The screening went really well. Laughs at the size reveal and the dud bomb, "awwwws" at the first reveal of Leed after the helmet pops off and during u5_03 as Leed swims around the pitcher, and gasps of uncertainty when Operator slips and almost hits Leed and as the tower comes apart. It felt like we got the longest and loudest applause of the evening. My only complaint is a technical one. The contrast appeared to be turned up a little too high on the projector, because the blacks were really intense and in some of the shots inside the control room we lost some of the detail in the dark. [editor's note: argh!]

Of the five films, we were the only narrative, the rest were docs. In my opinion, the most interesting (and longest) was Seeds of Change: The ECO Story, about a project to attempt the clean Yangtze River by teaching the poor farmers who work along its banks to use crops that are better for soil retention and thus the earth doesn't run off into the river (there was a lot more to it, but that was the basic idea). This is the second time that I have seen us play alongside a doc and I have to say, I really like the pairing of hard fact and imaginative fantasy. [editor's note: the first time was the Newport Beach Film Festival, which Daniel also wrote about, and there was also the Moondance pairing in Boulder that I attended]

The final film ended and the lights came up, but the guy who had introduced all the films didn't come back in. The audience started to get confused and some people started to get up to leave, so I got up (after being coaxed a bit by the people who came with me, including Tower 37 animator Harry) and ran down to the front of the theater and launched into my own Q&A. We received numerous positive and glowing comments about how affective the film was. I talked about your original impetus for the film, discussed how it evolved during production, and went on to explain how it was produced entirely in an academic environment. After the Q&A ended I talked with the exec director (who eventually came back in, but I was already mid-Q&A). He had been unaware of the academic nature of the project and we discussed how Artivist is a really good fit for our film that seems to stump programmers a lot. He commented how we were one of the few narratives that really fit the fest. On the way out of the theater one of the photographers snapped our photo:

I came back Saturday for the awards ceremony. Definitely one of the most "Hollywood" events I have been to. After the red carpet walk, we headed into the theater where we had reserved seats set aside for us in the front along with a ton of celebrities. We were seated right behind Olivia Wilde from House and The OC who was receiving an award for her humanitarian work. Hank Azaria was also there and also received an award for his humanitarian efforts. At the end of the ceremony, they invited all the attending filmmakers to come up to the stage. The fest uploaded a video of this to youtube.

Overall a pretty positive festival experience!

an aside about Hampshire

2009-12-06T14:36:00.004-05:00

I was recently asked why I teach at Hampshire College and what, in my opinion, makes it unique. This question comes my way so frequently from so many different sources that I thought it was worthy of a public response.

The answer to these questions is the same for me. I teach at Hampshire because of its unique qualities. In fact, I teach at all because of Hampshire's unique qualities. Let me elaborate on a few of these.

At Hampshire I can teach what I want, when I want.

The autonomy I have in devising my own curriculum is incredible. This flexibility at once acknowledges the dynamic nature of academic fields, entrusts me with the responsibility of running my own program, and gives students the opportunity to take fresh, timely courses in contrast with the typically rigid offerings at other institutions. Since I've been at Hampshire I've created twelve different courses and co-created two. For a decade of teaching, that's a lot of experimentation.

Narrative evaluations are immeasurably better academic tools than grades.

Yes they require a fair amount of work, however, reading even a single narrative evaluation of a student's progress in a course will teach you more about a student's individual strengths and weaknesses than an entire transcript from a grade-based institution. A grade is like a black hole, smashing things like effort, creativity, attendance, thoroughness, class participation and other factors of performance into a singularity that's impossible to disentangle. As a student, if you receive a low grade, the lesson is, "do better." Boy that's really giving students their money's worth! A well-written narrative evaluation will actually break down areas for improvement and offer suggestions for future learning opportunities that might offer those opportunities.

Hampshire's academic program, from a lack of departments to student-proposed concentrations and senior thesis projects, is interdisciplinary at its core.

There's a story I've told many times about my own senior thesis woes in college that perhaps explains why this point is so important to me. I wanted to study the computer graphic synthesis of fire, but when I went in search of a faculty adviser, I was rejected by everyone. The physics faculty who I had studied with for years said the project wasn't rooted enough in physics. The computer scientists said it wasn't enough computer science. I think I also spoke with a chemistry professor who had the same response.

Dividing the academic world into independent chunks and requiring students and faculty to work within those chunks unnecessarily marginalizes areas of intellectual inquiry that may span the chunks. It wasn't until I went to the MIT Media Lab that I found an intellectual home that understood this. I still remember my first day, when Stephen Benton told all of us new arrivals that, if they continued running the lab well, we wouldn't find jobs after graduating. Translation: their success hinged on remaining ahead of the curve, working with ideas in ways others had never considered. Thus their graduates wouldn't fit easily into the world's existing categories.

After my extremely positive experience at MIT, I promised myself I would never again be a part of an organization that didn't value cross-discipline studies the way that I did. I cannot stress this enough: until I was 21, I felt like I didn't fit anywhere. I was into movies and computers and comics and sports and physics and a few other things too, but not any one enough to make a profession out of it and push the others out of my life. So far I've been lucky enough to have been able to keep that promise: MIT was followed by Rhythm & Hues Studios, then Pixar, and now Hampshire and Bit Films (yes, at Bit Films we wholly embrace the discipline-crosser).

This history returns to my consciousness term after term at Hampshire. Students come to my office looking for support in their cross-disciplinary academic pursuits. I am so pleased that I can say yes to them and have the structures of the institution backing me up. It goes beyond the students, too, of course: I feel supported in my own scholarly pursuits, which have taken many forms since I arrived at Hampshire.

Although there are more, I will stop with just these three reasons for now. I would like to return to my screenwriting, or programming, or perhaps researching my new spring course on interaction design. Then I'll be heading to campus to watch and celebrate the wildly diverse work completed by the students in my Animation Workshop class this term. As you can see, it is an easy day for me to recognize and reflect upon the value of Hampshire.

year's end screenings

2009-11-29T17:41:00.008-05:00

We are converging on the Pacific Rim in December. In addition to the Artivist fest, which I mentioned in an earlier post, Tower 37 will be a part of the 2D or not 2D animation festival in Seattle on December 5th. The organizers have been building some online buzz, so I thought I'd chime in too.

Here's their festival trailer:

You can also spend some time on their blog to see what the program's going to contain. I don't think a definitive festival guide has been published online yet... watch for it.

Soon thereafter, one ocean away, Tower 37 will be screening as a part of SIGGRAPH Asia 2009's animation festival. The harddrive I sent them is currently at risk of being orphaned in Japan due to money-saving festival policies, so if you're attending the conference and you live stateside please get in touch. I need a digital mule. Just think - you can help out an animator and have the pleasure of watching a lossless HD QuickTime of Tower 37 on your laptop as you fly over the Pacific. I'm serious.

Here's their trailer as well:

when worlds collide

2009-11-20T15:09:00.014-05:00

Our house. Pokemon and Magic cards. Some are in piles, others have been built into decks, some are even special enough to be in protective sleeves. We've purchased and inherited some boxes to hold the most precious of sleeved decks, but they are wearing out and we don't have enough of them anyway. So the talk between my son and I for the last week or so has been about embracing our love of cardboard projects and building some deck boxes of our own (we make lots of cardboard stuff at home, like helmets, little spaceships for mobiles, etc.).

So today I was recycling an old PBR 12-pack holder and I realized I was holding the future in my hands. The cardboard was perfect, just like that in our favorite commercial cardboard "Dragon Shield" boxes:

We got two of those DS boxes when we bought sleeves a while ago and they've been the best. But today we took one apart so we could clone it. If you love something, set it free.

In case you want to follow along with us, we first laid the unfolded DS box out flat on top of the unfolded PBR box and traced it carefully. Then, using a utility knife and a ruler (be sure to have something underneath), we cut along all the lines.

The cardboard was too thick to fold cleanly without scoring first, so we studied the creases in the DS box for some inspiration. It looked like they had been scored with a heavy but relatively dull object run along the printed side of the cardboard. We tried ballpoint pens (worked okay, but left a mark), a fork (too blunt and boxy, ripped the cardboard), until finally using some crazy kitchen fork that I think is for lobster. It's a two-tined thing, and sharp as anything, but the back sides of the tines were rounded and about the right size for the score we wanted. Pushing hard against the edge of a ruler worked perfectly. The only struggle I had was keeping the lines perfectly parallel while scoring, but despite my eyeballing it the sides met just fine in the end. I was worried it would be seriously lopsided.

Turning the prepped cardboard into a box requires adhesive on one cardboard flap. We tried two ways of using Elmer's glue on test pieces: straight on the printed side of the cardboard in one case, and in the other we carefully stripped off the printed layer so we were gluing to the rougher cardboard that lives underneath. After both dried for a while, they both seemed strong but we liked the latter approach best. Our final box is drying now, but here's what it looked like just before gluing:

Oh yeah. Green. Crafty. Hip. Geeky. Though I'm not sure I'm ready to let my 8-year old out into the world with it yet.

catch me if you can

2009-11-05T15:32:00.005-05:00

Okay, so it was just over two weeks ago that I blogged about my new Pixelbending class. You'll have to forgive me, that was something of a FlashForward. So it's not that the post is wrong, per se, it's just that it was a few months too early.

My real spring 2010 class just went online today. It will be a departure for me in many ways, but a return to my roots in others. Here are the details:

Improving TheHub (CS 214)

TheHub is a critical online tool supporting the academic program at Hampshire. Not only is it the primary mechanism by which our Divisional contracts and narrative evaluations are created, edited, and shared, but it is also where important aspects of registration and advising take place. Despite its ubiquity and importance, however, TheHub can be frustrating for many to use.

This course seeks to improve TheHub through a unique collaboration between students, faculty, and staff. In addition to learning how TheHub is currently implemented, students will be tasked to identify areas of TheHub most in need of improvement and to propose, design, implement, and test new interfaces for these areas.

Ideal candidates for this one-of-a-kind course will have a background in design (color theory, graphic design, HTML, studio arts, etc.) or programming (PHP, Perl, AJAX, Javascript, etc.) or both. For programmers, concurrent enrollment in CS 272 (Advanced Web Design) will satisfy the programming pre-requisites for this course. Prospective students should bring a current resume and a portfolio of their relevant work to Professor Perry no later than the first class meeting.

Those following my teaching history should recognize that this is another collaborative class, akin to the animation courses that produced Displacement and Tower 37 in the past. Fairly new to me is the domain: although I've worked on large-scale software projects in the past, and of course have a hand in the ongoing development of Helga, interface design for a heavily-trafficked and mission-critical web tool like TheHub is going to demand some stretching. And some smart partnering: I will be co-teaching the class with the original engineer of TheHub, and I'm hoping to fold experienced guests in as we work to meet the challenge of the class.

This class offers a rare opportunity for students to be a part of a team whose work can actually change how Hampshire functions day-to-day. We are not going to be changing policies, of course, but we are going to investigate how our current tool does--and does not--support students and faculty working together.

How you can help now, dear reader, is to tell the most talented designers and programmers you know about this course and encourage them to discuss their participation with me.

And please start thinking about how you would like to see TheHub change, particularly in the areas directly related to the academic program (advising, evaluations, course registration, course listings, etc). Feel free to start sharing them here as comments, or wait for the site we'll be launching in the spring to collect these ideas.

Pixelbenders: apologies for now. I am working to fold that course in to next year's curriculum.

Artivist fest coming up

2009-11-04T21:25:00.005-05:00

Excitement is building for the Artivist Film Festival in LA in early December. Of all the fests Tower 37 has been a part of so far, I think this one has the potential to have the greatest thematic alignment with our film. We're part of a Thursday night Environmental shorts program with four other films. And in other news, there are apparently FREE tickets. That's right folks, free tickets. So drag your friends out to the historic Egyptian Theater in Hollywood on Thursday December 3 and show your support for socially-conscious filmmaking. If you find it hard to show support without coughing up money for tickets, then buy some drinks for the filmmakers afterward and have long conversations about the work. You can also high-five Tower 37 producer Daniel when you're there.

Today, by the way, marks exactly seven months since Tower 37 began its festival run in April in Providence. Given that most fests are annual, we're looking at only about five more months in our festival year. I have been amazed by how our film has been received on this journey so far; here's hoping for five more months of memorable screenings, stories, and revels with the filmmakers we meet on the way.

news I find tragic

2009-11-03T22:26:00.002-05:00

"Strength forged through sacrifice. Never forget."

- motto of the USS New York

So I heard on the news yesterday that the new USS New York warship, now berthed in New York, includes 7.5 tons of steel recycled from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Boy do I wish that material could have been put to a peaceful use instead of being folded into yet another machine of war. And what are the chances that this San Antonio class "Landing Platform Dock" ship will ever drop Marines on a beach in pursuit of Osama Bin Laden or any of the perpetrators of 9/11? Afghanistan is still landlocked. Can't there be a better legacy for those poor victims than more death?

3 in NYC wrapup

2009-10-26T22:19:00.003-04:00

The streets of NYC were crawling with Tower 37 fans these last weeks, that is, if you count me and a small crew huddling down in the rain on our walk to the amazing subterranean restaurant Sakagura on 43rd Street. This was after the outstanding BeFilm New Fall Animation screening, hosted by Signe Baumane, which I mentioned in an earlier post.

Since then, Tower 37 was a part of the Imagine Science Fest, HDFest in NYC, the Austin Film Festival, and the 15 Short Film Festival. I have heard only a bit about some of these fests, and nothing at all about the others! So this is kind of a small review, and in fact, most of it will come from the emails I received from Tower 37 crew member Jasper who was able to attend the two NYC events I couldn't be at.

His review of the Imagine Science screening:

i just got back from the imagine science film festival screening in brooklyn, and i'm happy to report it went really well. the "fantasy, imagination, and experimental" theme made for a very interesting program...a nice mix of about 1/3rd live-action, narrative films, 1/3rd animated shorts, and 1/3rd experimental, mixed-medium films. tower 37 screened third to last, and was very well recieved. galapagos, the art space where the screening was held, has a very casual table and booth seating arrangement, so there was some noticeable chatting and clinking drinks from the bar heard throughout the evening...but amazingly, as soon as tower 37 began rolling, the crowd got noticeably quiet. it was a really exciting effect to see and hear the entire room silent with tension during the film's most suspenseful and emotional scenes. when the credits rolled there was a tremendously positive round of applause. after the screening, there was an informal q&a, which i (excitedly, albeit nervously) took part in. the director and lead actor of the film "the strange rebirth of andre weil" were the only other filmmakers who took part. i got a chance to give a quick rundown of the history and details of the production, squeezed in some mentions of some past and upcoming festival appearances, and then they opened it up to the audience for questions. after a brief (awkward) pause, when it became clear no one might ask a question, a stranger in the front row instead shouted out "we loved it!" which led to another larger round of applause. alexis and kate (artistic director and programming director, respectively), the two organizers in charge, spoke really highly of our film and sent their regards to you. i thanked them multiple times, and congratulated them on a very interesting program and festival. i had a few strangers congratulate our film as i made my way out of the venue. all in all a very good night...sorry you couldn't have seen it, but i'm glad to have the chance to represent the film.

I'm sad to say that Jasper's experience at HDFest was less positive. I'll paraphrase: the film didn't screen until one of the people there asked about it during the Q&A. The moderator claimed a "technical issue" (the details of which have yet to be explained to me) but then said it would screen, and it did, but only after many people left. As a consolation, they said they'd program it in the next night's animation show. I haven't heard from anyone how that went, or if it went at all.

Has anyone seen the film in Austin, or at the 15 Short Film Fest? Sorry to blog questions to the void but I'm hoping (like the Mosaic project in FlashForward - yay JB and DG) that someone will stumble onto this and fill me in about the things I know very little about.

Pixelbending, or CS 222: Digital Image Mastery

2009-10-21T13:50:00.008-04:00

I am very pleased to announce a new class I'll be teaching in the spring, targeted at media makers who want to get the most out of their pixels. Here's the description from the Hampshire course catalog:

Digital Image Mastery: Under the Hood of Modern Filmmaking

With an affordable digital camera and simple editing software, anyone can be an image maker. But what does it take to be an image master? How does one take control over the images and films one makes rather than ceding it to the engineers of the software and hardware?

This course is designed for students who seek mastery over the digital images they create, capture, edit, and/or distribute. The class will expose the foundational core that hides behind the interfaces of digital imaging and filmmaking technologies but which is crucial to using them with precision and finesse. Topics that may be covered include digital image representation, compression/decompression (codecs), frame rate changes, compositing, matting, tracking, color correction, color grading, and more.

PRE-REQUISITE: an evaluation/passing grade from least one digital media production class (film, video, animation, photography)

I blog about classes like this because the descriptions can only say so much. Basically, are you an image maker who feels like the tools are in charge of you instead of the other way around? If you are, and if you want to invert that relationship, then this is probably the class for you. We'll expose the inner workings of modern digital imaging technologies with an eye towards solving visual problems.

Although the language in the description waffles between film making and more general image making, I would guess that about 2/3 of the material we cover will apply to digital image making of any kind. The last third will probably be more directly related to image sequences, aka time-based digital imaging, aka digital film/video.

So I'm on the hunt for tasty exercises that are based on real problems and whose solutions emerge from a clear understanding of (and control over) the fundamentals. Readers of this blog will probably understand why I will be sure to have a frame rate conforming exercise in there. And others who know me will understand when I add a problem related to the plague known as matte lines.

What problems do YOU face that have solutions buried in the foundations of digital media? What was it that you learned about codecs and bit depth and color grading and the like that revolutionized the way you make work?

Feel free to offer your suggestions and/or ask questions about the class by posting comments. I'll respond to them that way as well.

And big thanks to K.C. Line for the real name of this class: pixelbending. More like waterbending than circuit bending, mind you.

0 screens!

2009-10-20T15:26:00.002-04:00

Wonderful world. I think less than 48 hours after my small rant about huge openings, I stumbled into OpenIndie.com, a website that, when completed, will put filmmakers directly in touch with their audiences. Forget about the openings: if fans want to see your movie, they can arrange their own screenings. It feels a little like Netflix meets social networking. Maybe that's an awful comparison, so I'll let you read about it and come up with a better description.

OpenIndie's home page
The KickStarter page where you can help OpenIndie raise $10,000 and get started

Pass the word.

3700 screens?

2009-10-17T10:05:00.004-04:00

I confess that I have a big distaste for absurdly huge opening weekends. Where the Wild Things Are, on 3700+ screens? As excited as I might be (or might have been) about seeing the film, I am certainly going to wait at least a week to let the hubris of that move wash away a little. It's like the guy showing up at the party in a limo. Maybe he's an okay guy, but showing up in a limo is just trying to get attention.

If the demand were somehow there for 3700 screens, then it would make more sense. But does it feel to anyone else like a desperate attempt to cash in early? Why not buy up all the screens and ensure that whoever sees a movie this weekend sees your movie?

In contrast, let me draw your attention to The Adventures of Power. A feature by an old high school friend being released on a super small scale. One week in NYC, one week in LA, one week in Austin, etc. It looks to me like the film is going to build up some momentum and a demand greater than the small screenings can accommodate, then burst on the seen in large enough release to meet the demand. The small shows are parties, events, befitting their relative rarity - not cattle calls like the dozens of screenings of Wild Things this weekend at the local multiplex. Seeing Power is a special event. Go find a screening near you.

On the even smaller release front, Tower 37 was part of a great show on Thursday in New York hosted by Signe Baumane and sponsored by BeFilm. Many of the films were familiar from Woodstock and other venues, but on the new front, I truly enjoyed the Argentinian short El Empleo. There are three other screenings in the coming week, one in North Carolina and two more in NYC. Check them out!

multi-festival wrap up

2009-10-05T09:57:00.004-04:00

The Woodstock Film Festival was outstanding. The crew and I entered the weekend fairly ignorant of the town, the festival, and the laws of the state of New York concerning the transportation of humans and alcohol in the same vehicle (no citations were issued in the end). But we left feeling very much in the know, re-inspired about independent film, and excited to return. From literally our first moments at Taco Juan's where we collided with Bill Plympton and a subset of the NYC animation crowd to our last, eating (more) amazing sandwiches at Maria's, we were surrounded by fun, creative people, lots of movies, and music. Whoa was there music, mostly in lieu of sleep.

Some of animation's finest young talent making music late night at the WFF.

I want to mention some of the amazing films from the WFF, as well as some of the filmmakers who we enjoyed hanging out with. Highlights of the animation show that I hadn't seen before included The Man in the Blue Gordini, Backwards, and The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9. It was also great to finally meet the two programmers, Bill and Signe, whose work I have admired and who have been directly responsible for sharing The Incident at Tower 37 with many new audiences recently. Like the Martha's Vineyard festival crowd. I was pleased to hear from those who attended the MVFF, namely Bill, Signe, and Backwards's Aaron and Lisa that Tower 37 was quite well-received by the audiences there. Maybe Islanders are extra-sensitive to water issues?

More shouts out to other late-night festival friends from WFF: Joey from Sundial Pictures (our adopted tour guide in Woodstock); Joy, Noel (Twins Are Weird) and James who animated the great WFF trailer; and long-time friend J. Markus from RoboFresh who we hadn't seen and jammed with in far too long. Stay in touch, everyone.

The past month also included the Moondance Film Fest, another 10th anniversary festival like the WFF. I regret that my commitment to Moondance was less than it could have been because I was too excited to spend time with my family in Boulder, but I was glad to have seen a few shows and to have spent an evening talking with Ryan and Jonah, the filmmakers behind Living Death Valley. It was an inspired programming choice by the Moondance folks, in my opinion, to couple our animated narrative fantasy with their live action non-fiction "portrait of a landscape" (my own term) given the two films' thematic connections.

Some other Moondance selections we enjoyed were the wild live-action/animation combo short called Elephants and the hilarious live-action dog film called The Littlest Greyhound. I was very happy to hear that Tower 37 was awarded the Moondance Calypso award, the description of which (from their website) is:

This award is to encourage a spirit of enterprise in saving the environment, habitats and wildlife by creative individuals from around the world. The award is presented to the person who expands knowledge of our world, seeks to improve our quality of all life on the planet, and contributes to the betterment of humankind.

You can't beat that! We were also acknowledged as one of the three Audience Favorites for Animation. Thanks to all who came, saw, and supported our film.

I will end this post about the past by looking ahead yet again. Three NYC screenings are in the works for the next few weeks. You all should go. I can't promise late-night music but I am quite sure they will each be outstanding programs.

BeFilm's Fall New Animation Screening, 10/15
Imagine Science Film Festival, 10/17
HD Fest, 10/20

PLUG: "Creating Memorable Images"

2009-09-29T09:22:00.003-04:00

I'm very pleased to announce an upcoming talk by former Pixar colleague and friend Sharon Calahan. I was a student of Sharon's during the production of A Bug's Life, and I have used her teaching materials in my own classes, such as the chapter called "Storytelling Through Lighting" from the Advanced RenderMan textbook.

That chapter appears oddly-situated, a visual and non-technical treatise hidden deep in a book rich with SL programming tips and renderer architecture insights. This talk is similar in its contextual placement: although sponsored by the School of Cognitive Science at Hampshire (and by me, arguably a computer animation professor), it will be very much a talk about live action film visuals. There are no Pixar productions on the long list of films she is drawing from, and I don't think she'll say a word about render times, shadow maps, or RenderMan bugs.

Please don't be distracted by this disciplinary cross-pollination. The tools of computer animation are just another set of tools for making films, after all, so it is logical for someone working as a Director of Photography anywhere to draw from the larger history of cinema. If you've been in any of my classes, you know that computer animators (in the broadest sense) are simultaneously--by necessity--students of image making and computation. I am pleased, proud, and lucky that Hampshire has continued to see value in a program that mixes these disciplines regularly, and I am excited that Sharon is coming to share her insights with all of us.

TALK ANNOUNCEMENT: PLEASE DISTRIBUTE

Sharon Calahan, Director of Photography at Pixar Animation Studios, will be speaking at Hampshire College on Wednesday, October 7th at 6pm.

"Creating Memorable Images"

Why do certain images linger in our memories long after watching a film? Calahan will explore this question using a collection of favorite film images from over 70 years of filmmaking and over 80 films. She will share how she thinks about light and color in the creation of beautiful images that emotionally support the story of a film.

LOCATION: Franklin Patterson Hall, Main Lecture Hall, Hampshire College

SPONSORED BY: The School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Sharon Calahan joined Pixar Animation Studios in 1994 as lighting supervisor on the studio’s first feature film, Toy Story. She then served as director of photography on A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo. She was the director of photography on Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille, which won an Academy® Award for Best Animated Feature Film. Calahan is currently working on Cars 2.

Calahan knew at the age of three that she wanted to be an artist for Disney. She went on to study graphic design, illustration and photography. Following art school, she began her career as an art director for broadcast television and video production. Prior to joining Pixar, she was a lighting director at Pacific Data Images completing commercial work, longer format television, and graphics packages.

Calahan has given numerous presentations and taught many classes in character lighting, shot lighting, master lighting, and, more generally, painting with light and overall composition, both at Pixar as well as outside of the studio.

4 weekends of 37

2009-09-12T09:05:00.004-04:00

Reminder: the Bit Films Fall Internship application deadline is next Monday, September 14th, at 5pm Eastern time! The application information can be found here.

Some Tower 37 screening dates at upcoming festivals have been pinned down (full schedule here):

Martha's Vineyard TONIGHT, 9/12
Springfield Illinois on Sunday 9/20
Boulder Colorado on Saturday 9/26 *
Woodstock NY on Friday 10/2 * and Saturday 10/3

(* we'll be in attendance!)

Unlike most fests, Moondance (Boulder) has our film programmed with a feature instead of with a bunch of shorts. The feature (Living Death Valley) looks like a captivating 40 minute journey through Death Valley, California which I think will make for a great pairing with our short.

Also, a lovely little review came from the folks at the Animation Show. It would be fun to be a part of their traveling program.

more fall details for Valley animators

2009-09-07T21:53:00.004-04:00

I wanted to announce as widely as possible a number of exciting opportunities for Pioneer Valley animators and animation students this fall. There are an unusually large number of unique offerings for advanced-level students this term, a change that I'm quite pleased about.

One quick note: if you want to be kept aware of the most current animation-related information at Hampshire and beyond, please sign yourself up for the animation mailing list that I maintain (go to http://lists.hampshire.edu).

ENTRY LEVEL:
1) Computer Animation I (Hampshire CS 174), Chris Bishop. TTH 2:00-3:20pm.
2) Animation Fundamentals (UMASS ART 297Q), Patricia Galvis-Assmus. TTH 1:00-3:45pm
3) Intro Computer Animation (UMASS ART 374), Jed Mitchell. MW 10:10am-12:05pm

ENTRY or ADVANCED LEVEL:
1) Character Animation (UMASS CMPSCI 397E), Beverly Woolf. MW 7pm-8:30pm

ADVANCED LEVEL:
1) Animation Workshop (Hampshire CS 203), Chris Perry. Weds 9-11:50am.
This class is tailored to 2nd and 3rd year students with animation experience who want to produce their own short animation projects over the course of one term. Think of it as a mini Div-III/BFA experience that will help prepare you for that eventual hurdle.

2) Bit Films Internships (at Hampshire's Computer Graphics Incubator Space). Days and times TBD.
Talented students looking to work on ongoing high-end collaborative animation projects should apply. The official internship posting is up at http://www.bitfilms.com. Application deadline September 14th!

3) TA positions. Chris Bishop, teaching CS 174 at Hampshire, is seeking qualified TAs for Computer Animation I.

As you might expect, there will be competition for many of these positions. Please be sure to contact the individual instructor of a class to find out how he or she handles enrollment, etc.

Feel free to email me with questions, and thanks in advance for sharing this information with your students/friends!

Woodstock

2009-09-05T22:24:00.002-04:00

We have two screenings at Woodstock next month, one late on Friday night and one on Saturday afternoon. The Tower 37 calendar has been updated and you can see the Woodstock schedule for details.

I'm pleased to report that the line up for the animation show includes no films we've screened with before (though some that will be in the Martha's Vineyard program next weekend). I'm also happy with the mix of animation types based on the little thumbnails for each movie.

Some quick scanning of the festival program includes Mighty Uke, a documentary about the Ukulele which I really want to check out. More Than a Game, about LeBron James and his high school team. And Jonathan Demme's Neil Young Trunk Show looks exciting too. And that's just a sampling from the documentary section. I think we'll have a very full weekend.

The awards ceremony is scheduled for 9pm on Saturday night ($75). And the Bit Films party? Not telling.

the fall of tower 37

2009-08-31T20:50:00.003-04:00

An absolutely insane fall is shaping up for "The Incident at Tower 37," with almost daily news coming in on the festival front. The result is that I am drowning in duplicated information: from the press kit to the online calendar to the Bit Films website, I find that it's almost impossible to keep all the documents up-to-date and accurate with screening dates and locations. And I thought having a Twitter account would help. Ha! That's just a fourth place for things to be omitted.

But it's all really good news, despite my bitching. Like today, when out of the blue comes an email saying that Bill Plympton and Signe Baumane have selected our film to be a part of their "Animation Gala" at the Martha's Vineyard Film Festival next weekend. The subtitle of the show: Best animated shorts from around the world. I'm not kidding. I suspect that Bill and Signe saw the film as a part of their animation programming responsibilities for the Woodstock Film Festival (coming the first week of October) and must have liked it enough to fold it in to this other show they're creating.

Speaking of Woodstock, there will be a strong Bit Films crowd making a weekend out of the festival. If you're heading that way, let me know. I suspect we'll be having a little gathering to celebrate the event.

So yes, the fall is sick. If I say the film will be coming to a theater near you, I might actually be right for once! As of this writing, the following cities will be hosting a screening in the remainder of 2009: Linz (Austria), Martha's Vineyard, Springfield (Illinois), Madrid, Boulder (CO), Woodstock (NY), Charlotte (NC), New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Yokohama. And there are still other fests we're waiting to hear from. If you're in one of these places, check out the calendar or email me for screening details.

Yikes. I put zero links into this post. Okay, here's one: the updated Tower 37 page on the Bit Films site, which links to all the aforementioned fests. Enjoy.

fall preview

2009-08-27T17:44:00.005-04:00

I've been deliberately silent. Think of it as an August hibernation. Eating, resting, spending time with friends and family (that's Noe working the T37 hat) before the onset of September and all that comes with it. For those in the academic life, you know what I'm talking about.

This year is a little different from the usual start-of-term, however, because Tower 37 is still very much in play on the festival circuit and that will keep things extra busy. There are already going to be a bunch of screenings of the film with many more fests still holding back on their selection lists. The calendar has the most current details, of course.

There will be a second round of Bit Films Internships, to be announced sometime in early September.

I'm teaching only half-time. My one course in the fall is called Animation Workshop, and for those at Hampshire who are curious about the class you can think of it as a Division III training camp. Or a mini Div III. Basically, I see the course as an opportunity for pre-Div III students to learn the ropes of conceiving of, proposing, pursuing, and completing a project within a finite amount of time. It meets Wednesday mornings. Anticipating a common question: yes, I would be happy for students to collaborate on a project in the course.

The Animation I class will be in the able hands of Hampshire alum, Tower 37 collaborator, and Beijing celebrity teacher Chris Bishop.

I will continue to research and develop the still-untitled feature project that I began this summer, and I'm looking forward to contributing more to Evan and Chris's ongoing short production that's been making great strides in the past few months.

Oh, and Mars isn't all that close tonight after all. So get to bed.

SIGGRAPH wrap-up

2009-08-06T23:10:00.005-04:00

SIGGRAPH was like the anti-Palm Springs because instead of getting food poisoning, I ate like a king the entire time. Red beans and rice late on my first night was followed by crawfish etouffee, chicken and sausage gumbo, blackened catfish, jambalaya, shrimp creole and more. I bought no food at the convention center the entire time. While I didn't go in with that as a rule, I think I'm going to follow it at future SIGGRAPHs. At least the ones that offer brilliant grub just a short walk away.

It was a very unbalanced fest for The Incident at Tower 37, given the two Monday screenings back to back followed by (at least for this attendee) no further animation screenings for the rest of the week. But those two shows were quite good. Highlights included Love_Child, Anima, and Alarm. The Nominees screening was more crowded than the Young at Heart show that followed, and unfortunately there was a lot of overlap between the shows. I think that's largely why I opted out of the festival for the remaining days.

We unveiled some new Bit Films gear, from the stickers to the extra-cool Operator hats (from the film) that Jake designed and ordered. Courtesy of Jake and Taryn, I have the following two images to share:

Watching Bassam and Jarred man the Blender booth all day then stay up doing production all night was painful, but somehow they kept smiling throughout their lack of sleep. I was happy I could swing in periodically and help them wrangle their renders through the Hampshire farm. The last thing I saw as I left the floor was a silent version of the new teaser, and it looked great. No new post about it yet on the Tube site, but I'm sure one will come soon.

Helga was the focus of many New Orleans conversations as well. Brian and I met at the bar of Mulate's to discuss the division of future Helga labors, only to be interrupted by a Laika R&D guy who had been eavesdropping on our talk from the seat next to us. He had some great suggestions -- thanks, Tony! We also connected with Mark from Animux (who also had great suggestions) and look forward to a potential future collaboration with his team.

One other quick note: Please, RenderMan team at Pixar, please inject more images and movies into your presentations for future User's Group meetings. I'm as geeky as they come, but I still had to fight sleep through slide after slide of SL code. Of course the Stupid RenderMan Tricks were, as always, awesome.

This week at the Nerd-O-Drome

2009-07-31T09:19:00.009-04:00

In the hope of increasing the visibility of our little studio, I've asked the Bit Films Intern Supervisors (myself included) to gather some bit of production news from this week of work and let me throw it up on a blog post.

Cornucopia (Perry)

One big piece of news is that we've moved from "untitled feature project" to a acceptable working title. Eric and I finished the first complete draft of the film's treatment, and though it's full of problems, it's exciting to see it from beginning to end. Interns Marcel and Leo have been cranking out beautiful visual work that have really made the environments come to life. I've been working on some simple boards. Here are a few samples for you to enjoy:

a concept painting of the junkyard (Leo)

a concept painting of a growing vine (Marcel)

a rough board from act I (Perry)

Caldera (Viera & Bishop)

Team Caldera had a productive week. the last of the boards were drawn, the first render test was completed, and progress continued on layout and character modeling. Here are some images from the week:

a render of the cove environment (Viera, cove model by Jake)

an act III storyboard (Bishop)

Tube (Kurdali)

Bassam's got his own blog for the Tube project, and he provided a timely post today that covers his team's progress this week.

Other Interesting Stuff

Studio-wide, we also made major advances this week on launching Blender and After Effects renders from Helga. We have yet another new system for launching a general render, and this one seems to be the most functional yet. Heck, it can even handle the annoying stuff that has to happen to get aerender to actually render (please, Adobe folks who might be reading: make aerender actually launch from the command-line without needing any window server connections). More on this as it develops.

Also, excitement builds for next week's SIGGRAPH conference, where at least four of our summer crew will be relocating for the week. So things may be quieter than usual in the 'drome.

pre-SIGGRAPH

2009-07-27T20:53:00.003-04:00

Excitement and frustration both as we prep for SIGGRAPH next week.

The excitement comes with the pending prize announcement (the student prize winner will be announced at the beginning of Monday August 3rd's Evening Theater screening). That same night, watch for the late-night Bit Films party; follow us on Twitter with your phone to catch the late-breaking announcement of when and where.

Be on the lookout for some new Bit Films schwag in New Orleans as well.

The frustration comes in that despite the nomination we have only two screenings during the week, and they're in the middle of the day on Monday. They've been added to the calendar.

TO BE CLEAR: The Incident at Tower 37 will be screening exactly twice at SIGGRAPH, in back-to-back programs during the day on Monday August 3rd.

The first show is a reel made up of all the award nominees (not just the student prize nominees, either). I'm going to guess that it'll be well-attended since it's the only time all week you can catch the nominees at one time. The second screening on Monday is a program called "Young at Heart." I'd like to see it too, but I'd also like to eat before the Evening Theater and the night of parties that follows. It's not unusual for me to be running entirely on fumes by the end of SIGGRAPH; looks like that might start earlier this year.

You may also find it playing in the Autodesk booth on the exhibition floor, but I certainly would try to catch one of the higher-quality screenings on Monday.

fall fest announcements

2009-07-17T22:10:00.004-04:00

The fall schedule is beginning to get exciting. Tower 37 will be in the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, the Woodstock Film Festival in NY, and the Route 66 Film Festival in IL. All have been added to the calendar and will get more specific screening information once it is available.

new Bit Films website, Tower 37 snippet

2009-07-15T09:55:00.005-04:00

I'm pleased to report the launch of the new Bit Films website, with a sleeker design, higher-quality videos, and a short snippet from Tower 37 to satisfy those who keep asking me "when can we see some of the film online?"

The new site also directs more attention toward the best sources for late-breaking Bit Films news, namely, this blog and the bitfilms twitter account.

www.bitfilms.com

Many thanks to Evan Viera, Dan Gilbert, and Ben Fiske for their help making this happen!

Laboratory Films shuts down

2009-07-06T09:15:00.003-04:00

I received an email today saying that the first Laboratory Films production has been shut down. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll have to do some google searching and check for cached pages, since I think the "Pathfinder" (Twowan) for the production has done a remarkable, almost eerie, job of cleaning up after himself.

One part of his email motivated me to comment here:

If this production system does not require monetary capital, it does need great amounts of trust capital (goodwill). We need a massive amount of enthusiasm from a great number of artists right from day one. Being an unknown, whatever I do, I can never generate this amount of trust. Therefore, I would need a partner with an international filmmaking name who would bring credence to the enterprise.

I don't concur with this assessment. I avoided the project not because Twowan was an unknown, but because he worked so deliberately to keep himself (and the project) unknown. What I mean by this is that instead of making the work and himself and the project as visible as possible, it was kept secretive. The whole thing had a deceptive vibe surrounding it, when I think it needed more of a grass-roots, communal energy.

I would have voted for open, open, open. Put the work of the artists online, make it easy for people to see and get excited about the film. SHOW the progress and let the strength of the work do your recruiting for you.

But what about protecting intellectual property? Use an open source or CC license, even one of the most restrictive ones! This would allow for work to be posted publicly without fear. It would be foolish (and illegal) for someone or some corporation to take the work and then try to turn their own profit on it. And it would yell out trust rather than privacy and fear.

I watched the Laboratory Films project closely and with excitement. I'm sorry to see this iteration fail, but I hope there are future versions to observe and, possibly, contribute to.

Palm Springs part 2 (guest author)

2009-07-03T17:16:00.002-04:00

Palm Springs, California...known for it's world class golf courses, it's intense heat, and it's film festival. I had the pleasure of experiencing two of these three things this past weekend along with fellow Tower 37 crew member Andrew Flanagan. It was 112 degrees in Palm Springs when we arrived, which is simply oppressive (I don't care about what anyone says about it being a dry heat, 112 degrees is 112 degrees any way you slice it). So what better way to spend the afternoon then inside an air conditioned theater?

We got our tickets, got our popcorn and got in line for the Amazing Animation shorts screening. The original plan was to come, see the film, and head back to Los Angeles, however while on line I received a call from a festival official asking if I was going to be attending the awards ceremony later that evening. To say this piqued my interest would be an understatement and I graciously accepted the two complimentary tickets to the event they offered to me. The line than began to move and we were let into the theater.

The theater itself was very nice, the screen was a little bit smaller than the one that I saw the film on in Newport Beach but no less nice. Within 10 minutes the theater was filled, not a single seat left empty and after some perfunctory opening remarks from a festival volunteer they dimmed the light and the projector came on. The first thing to come up was the festival introduction video, a whimsical piece about the filmmaking process that could only be described as video mixed media. Check it out here.

The Amazing Animation block of films contained some of the most impressive animated shorts I have ever seen and it was a real honor to be selected to screen alongside them. It was a very international screening, with the nine films screened representing seven countries: Spain, Mexico, Switzerland, France, England, Germany and the USA.

My favorite films of the series were "Alma" a CG animated modern fairy tale about a girl drawn to a mysterious doll that looks just like her (check out a clip here), the film was dark and atmospheric and genuinely creepy. Another great short was "Apple of My Eyes" a whimsical and sexy rotoscoped piece about a woman and the four inch tall man who lives in her apartment whom she is involved with romantically. Then there was "French Roast" (check out a clip here), a very fun short about a rich man at a coffee shop who forgets his wallet and the chaos that ensues as he tries to figure out how to pay. It was very well constructed, playing out almost entirely from the same angle.

Then, there was the screening of Tower 37, which went fantastic. Nothing is better than watching the film with an attentive audience. Laughs and giggles accompanied Operator's big reveal and the dud bomb exploding, they were transfixed as Leed swam around the pitcher, audible gasps could be heard as Operator slipped almost falling on Leed, and an eerie silence feel over the crowd as they watched the tower come down. A brief Q&A followed the screening and I talked about how the story evolved during production and talked about the benefits to having your composer be an active part of your production process long before picture is locked.

The closing night award ceremony started almost immediately after the end of our Q&A. We moved into a larger theater that was as packed as the one we had just left and Andrew and I found seats in the back right up against the wall. The ceremony started up and they got right to the first award, which just happened to be the Best Student Animation. They started by awarding the runner up, which went to "The Incredible Story of My Great Grandmother Olive," and then they announced the winner...

...THE INCIDENT AT TOWER 37!

Boy, my heart was racing as I made my way down the theater and up to the stage. I know I made a thank you speech....one that Andrew would later tell me was very good...but I can't really remember what I said all that clearly...really, what I remember most of all was crossing the stage to the podium and repeating in my head over and over "don't trip, don't trip, don't trip!"

You can check out pictures of the awards ceremony on the Palm Springs ShortFest website. As Chris pointed out, according to the captions on the photos taken of me at the awards ceremony, the Fest seems to think I am Estephan Wagner, director of the Best Student Documentary. In most situations I would be somewhat annoyed by this, except I appear to be making really goofy faces in the photos, so let the public think that's Estephan.

The festival handed out around 25 more awards that night and screened a few more shorts, including the 25 minute animated film "Lost and Found" which is based on the children's book of the same name. The film tells the story of a little boy who attempts to return a seemingly lost penguin to the arctic. The film was really wonderful. Check out the trailer here.

After the ceremony, Andrew and I headed to the after party which was held poolside at the swanky Ace Hotel. A couple fish tacos later it was time for us to start the long drive back to Los Angeles. Even though I was only there for a few hours, my experience at the Palm Springs ShortFest was fantastic.

Cheers!

(by Daniel)

one half of a Palm Springs summary

2009-07-01T00:14:00.008-04:00

The Palm Springs Shortfest has come and gone, and with it went months of my very own carefully-cultivated stomach bacteria. Yes, I was taken down mid-fest by what I still hold was food poisoning, but which I hear could have been just some bad water. Although the causes may differ, the results were the same. Happily, now that I've returned home I've yogurted my way to a fresh new set of active cultures and once again feel (mostly) human.

This is the dark half of what I hope will be a two-part PS festival review. I am counting on Daniel to provide the brighter half. This will also be the short half, since I made it to exactly one screening (Art Attack, which was awesome, by the way).

What? You didn't even attend your own screening?

Yes, I have to register one complaint with the festival organizers: the policy to release screening dates and times only two weeks before the festival worked against this particular filmmaker's budget and schedule. Needing to make affordable travel plans from the east coast, but being unable to attend the entire festival and thus guarantee attendance at my own show, I had to guess at a reasonable 4-day window and cross my fingers.

Well, when the news came in that our film was showing twice, I was ecstatic. That is, until I scrolled further down and saw that the first screening was a few hours before I was scheduled to land on Wednesday, and the second would be a few hours after I would leave on Sunday. Alas. So once I arrived I asked around about our first show. Steven Vander Meer, the maker of the wonderful film More From Life, had been at the show and said that Tower 37 was well received. He actually joked that this was his third time seeing it, having been at the Humboldt Film Fest back in April as well!

So while I don't have a lot of festival stories to tell, my son Jordy and I did get to watch a few films in the marketplace room (very well-organized though we found it was hard to hold on to a viewing station very long) and we sure got to swim a lot before I fell ill. And I have to note how grateful I was to have Mom show up just in time for me to be bed-ridden. She signed up for a vacation and instead got to take care of both me and Jordy. Sorry, Ka.

I'm going to leave the rest to Daniel. But I have to say, just look at the resemblance between this guy Wagner (from the PS photos pages) and our very own producer! It's uncanny, isn't it?

excitement building for hot climates

2009-06-23T19:28:00.003-04:00

Heading to Palm Springs tomorrow for waterslides, desert heat, and of course the Palm Springs Shortfest. And today the SIGGRAPH crew posted the screening schedule for New Orleans later this summer.

It's the same every night, just with a different order. So, to the Bit Films crew: Monday August 3rd seems like the night to celebrate our nomination. That's the evening when awards will be handed out, and even if we don't get one, it will be great to see the films and share some drinks with the other filmmakers on the first night of screenings. Anyone interested should start looking for a great venue to converge upon after the show and send me your ideas! We'll make an official choice and share the word here or elsewhere.

If you're near Palm Springs this week, come find us.

thanks, Humboldt!

2009-06-11T22:57:00.002-04:00

Got a great prize package in the mail yesterday from the organizers of the Humboldt Film Festival (where we won Best Animation). And yes, in addition to a cool trophy, check, and certificate, it DID come with 400 feet of color 16mm stock!

I am currently entertaining what to do with the stock, since I've never shot 16mm in my life. Maybe I'll donate it to an animation student in the fall? Contact me if you're interested.

Palm Springs later this month

2009-06-08T20:21:00.003-04:00

I'm happy to report our film's inclusion in the Palm Springs International Shortfest later this month. It will be hot and busy and exciting, and even though I'll be in town for neither of our screenings I will be there for many of the ones in between. If you're nearby and want to lounge by the pool or see some films, get in touch.

I would also like to report the creation of a bit films Twitter account (follow bitfilms) which I will also use to update people on the film's (and the studio's) progress.

It's internship start week

2009-06-01T12:24:00.005-04:00

Our crew is growing this week with the arrival of the interns!

Two production updates of note: first, Bassam, Josiah and I got our first Blender renders through Helga! This is a big change, since it required adding support for multiple simultaneous versions of any renderer. So now, instead of Helga supporting one version of Maya, we now support multiple versions of multiple renderers. Here's a pic, which is a preview of one of the character's from Bassam's film, Tube:

Also, Evan and Chris showed a new animatic of their film's first act today. I begged them for an image from it and here's what I got, a shot of their protagonist racing through town on her bike:

I won't spoil any more than that, but suffice it to say we are all building momentum on our three projects and are quite excited to be welcoming the new team members this week.

in the works

2009-05-26T09:00:00.004-04:00

There's a new bitfilms Twitter account you can follow if you want the most breaking news about all things bit films related. No I have not posted to it yet. I'm just waiting for that right first moment.

The Motion Film Festival officially posted their awards, and some extra accolades came our way in the form of screenplay and audio design honorable mentions!

SIGGRAPH has posted their preview video for the 2009 CAF, and though we're still waiting for a schedule it's great to see some of our shots cut in with all sorts of other work:

summer studio week 1 update

2009-05-20T09:20:00.004-04:00

Thanks to all who applied for 2009 summer internships! The deadline has passed and the internship supervisors have already been meeting to discuss the applications.

I've got to say, it's great having daily Bit Films activity going on. We spent Monday cleaning up the studio space. Work began in earnest on Tuesday, with Evan working on concept paintings for Corset Sunrise and Bassam doing something that I can only assume was rigging. Josiah and Bassam had a lively open source/free software discussion behind me yesterday, too. I didn't grasp all of their insights but I could tell they were quite into it. When Blender Nation posted our internship call, we all watched the visitor traffic rocket up on Google analytics (and the application count, too).

I need to get my remaining spring term Hampshire work behind me so I can move onto my project! I will also try and tap the summer crew for imagery (and more) to include in these updates.

SIGGRAPH nomination and Bit Films internships

2009-05-13T09:44:00.006-04:00

Two things to report today:

SIGGRAPH
First, news came in off the wire this morning reporting that "The Incident at Tower 37" is a student prize nominee at the SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival! Congrats to all involved. I trust the screening schedule will follow soon, so that we can all make plans to descend on New Orleans in force.

Here is the press release from the SIGGRAPH 2009 site. I had previously posted a link to it from Animation World Network's Headline News (but you have to wait through an ad to get to it there).

BIT FILMS INTERNSHIPS
Second, our significantly-less-well-distributed and much-less-sexy announcement about Bit Films summer internships went out via email last night. Multiple (unpaid) internships are available for the summer on three different independent film projects. Details are posted at the top of the Bit Films website for now and will be removed once the internship application deadline has passed.

Apply soon! The deadline is Tuesday May 19th.

more award goodness

2009-05-04T17:12:00.004-04:00

A packed and pleasing last 24 hours:

The USA Film Festival gave Tower 37 a Special Jury Mention, and the Motion Film Festival awarded us Best in Show and Best Animation!

As of this writing there are no online announcements of these awards, both came via direct contact with the festival organizers/juries.

Newport Beach wrap up (guest author!)

2009-05-04T08:19:00.001-04:00

Please enjoy the following from Tower 37 producer Daniel Inkeles.

This past Friday night I received some very exciting news. The Incident at Tower 37 won Best Animated Short at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Nothing could beat getting to make that phone call and be the first one to tell Chris the news. It's a great honor from the festival and it was just the kick in the pants I needed to get me to actually finish my write up of my personal experiences at the festival.

Thursday April 23 was an uncharacteristically overcast and dismal day in Los Angeles, the whole city had a green/gray/yellow tint to it. However, that sickly film started to wash away the moment I passed out of Los Angeles County and into Orange County. An hour and a half after leaving LA I arrived in Newport Beach. Clear skies, clean air, opulent estates, countless yachts, and plazas full of some of the most upscale shopping and dining establishments I've ever seen outside of Manhattan and Beverly Hills; it truly felt like I had walked into an episode of The OC (which, after all, was set in Newport Beach). I would spend the next three days in this playground for socialites, taking in ten feature films, numerous shorts, attending nightly after parties and hobnobbing with other filmmakers, industry professionals and press.

When I arrived at the Edwards Big Newport Theater for the opening night film, Lymelife, the line to get in was already running around the block and the press were swarming around a red carpet that had been laid out in front of the theater for VIP guests. I quickly found the filmmaker check in where I received my filmmaker pass, and got in line for the film. The wonderful thing about wearing a filmmaker pass (beyond having the ability to walk in to any screening or party) is that it announces to the world "I'm not from around here, but if you talk to me I might be able to tell you something interesting." A delightful couple behind me in line immediately struck up a conversation with me about Tower 37...they even had me circle it in the festival program. This scenario would repeat itself countless times, whether it be standing in line to get into a film, sitting next to a stranger in a theater, meandering outside the theater (where a very articulate 11 year old girl asked me a number of pointed questions about the film) or while standing in one of the ungodly long lines to get drinks at one of after parties.

So, let's flash forward to Saturday afternoon and the first Tower 37 screening. I was a little nervous going into our screening. I was the first person in the theater (a very nice theater that could easily seat at least 200 people) and suddenly this wave of terror washed over me and I thought that I was going to be the only person to show up. For some reason, the festival programmers had seen fit to schedule a free seminar/panel on animation at the exact same time as their block of animated shorts were screening. Then a small group of young filmmakers came in, all wearing clothing bearing the name and logo of their production company. I introduced myself and learned that this was the team behind the film Escapism, which also screened with us at SENE. Slowly people began to trickle in, and that trickle soon became a flood and before I knew it the theater was nearly full. The audience was a great mix of young and old and as I scanned the seats it was a real joy to see that so many of the people who I had spoken to about the film hadn't just been humoring me when they said they were going to try to make it.

After a brief introduction by one of the festival staff they started up the projector and up came the grand festival logo, a great little animated piece in and of itself which I suggest you check out. Eleven films screened in total, ranging from high school student productions (Escapism) to shorts by animation veterans (Bill Plympton's Hot Dog). On the whole we were in great company.

Tower 37 played about 2/3 of the way through the series. The film looked gorgeous and sounded amazing. Up until this screening I had only ever seen the film played off a DVD or on a computer, so getting to see the DigiBeta was a real treat for me. Nothing beats getting to watch the film with a fresh audience. The film seemed to really score with the crowd; they laughed, they were silent in awe, and they were tense and worried as the film propelled itself to the climax. The applause following the film lasted well into the credits.

Of the films that screened my favorite, by far, was the short The Bridge. A co-production between Belgium and France, this beautiful stop motion film tells the story of a young boy and his father who live in total isolation from the rest of the world. Despite the father's best intentions, as the son grows up he is drawn to the outside world (in this case, the flashing lights of a distant city). I could only find one clip of the film online, but do check it out. The film floored me on both a visual and emotional level.

There were a number of other good shorts, including Because You're Gorgeous, a very funny animation from South Africa about a vain warthog whose attempts to get his hair just right eventually lead to him losing all of it. It had a really great old-timey cartoon short feel to it. I also really enjoyed a short from Ireland called Granny Grimm's Sleeping Beauty in which a grandmother recounts the story of Sleeping Beauty to her terrified granddaughter. Granny alters the story to be about how a scornful elderly fairy who was not invited to Beauty's christening takes revenge on the young and beautiful people who were invited. The scenes of Granny telling the story to her granddaughter were in 3D and everything was colored these wonderful dark blues and grays while the Sleeping Beauty story world was 2D and full of bright oranges and golds.

Following the screen I was invited up in front of the crowd for a Q&A and was joined by the directors of Escapism and Heart Attack. It took the crowd a little while to get warmed up, but I fielded some excellent questions about the inception of the film, the challenges of production and the programs we used to make it (which allowed me the opportunity to really plug Helga). After Q&A a number of people came up to me to tell me how much the enjoyed the film and to tell me how beautiful it was, it was a great experience and I only wish more of the crew that made it all possible were there to see how warmly their hard work was received.

Of the 400 films playing at the festival, Tower 37 was one of only a handful that played more than once. On Sunday morning we played during a series of Earth Day themed shorts at a local cultural center that was having an Earth Day event (music, artwork, informational booths, kids activities, food...the works). When the screening started there were only five or six people in the audience, but more people came in as the screening went on, and lucky for us, we were the last short to screen. By the time the Bit Films logo came up there must have been about 30 people there. Once again, we screened with The Bridge, this time we were back to back, which made for one of the most depressing 25 minutes of animation I have ever watched. There were a lot more parents with kids in this screening and I have to say, I was really impressed with how attentive the kids were to Tower 37, the visuals seemed to have them transfixed.

We screened with a very cute short film called Goldfish about a young girl who decides she is going to free all the goldfish in her elementary school class. The girl ends up flushing the fish down the toilet, thinking that they will be returned to their families in the ocean. She gets the idea because in Finding Nemo they say "all pipes lead to the ocean."

Following the shorts, a documentary called Blue Gold was screened, which is all about how water is becoming scarcer and the dangers of privatized water. It really was the perfect companion piece to Tower 37 and I am so glad they were screened back to back. After the screening I spoke with the director, he had missed Tower 37, but I made sure to get a screener in his hand which he was very excited to watch.

And that was my weekend in Newport Beach. Here are a few other selected highlights of the festival:

* While hanging around the Filmmaker Hospitality Lounge (eating free food) I struck up a conversation with the Festival Organizer of the Delray Beach Film Festival in Florida. I told him about Tower 37 and sight unseen he said he'd like to put it in their festival.

* The after parties was crazy. After walking the red carpet to enter the opening night ceremony I was greeted by complimentary food from Newport Beach's premiere restaurants, free drinks provided by festival sponsor Absolut Vodka, a fashion show put on by Bloomingdales, and a very racy performance by Cirque de Soleil. The after party on the second night was held in the showroom of the local LandRover dealership, Danny Masterson (Hyde from That 70s Show) was DJing while scantily clad girls danced on tables. The third party was probably the craziest, held both inside and poolside at a local fitness club, a DJ inside and a live band outside...it was the quintessential SoCal party. I briefly crossed paths with actress Bai Ling.

The funny thing about these parties is that, like geeky kids at middle school dances, all the filmmakers seem to end up together in a corner, just discussing their films and watching the craziness unfold in front of them.

* I attended a directing seminar in which honorary festival chair McG (Charlie's Angels 1 & 2, Terminator Salvation) talked about his experience directing films in Hollywood. He then showed the entire audience some footage from the new Terminator film, however when the footage started to play there was no sound. Quickly jumping into action, McG started narrating the entire piece...truly some of the best improvising I've seen in a long time.

* Saturday morning I took a yacht cruse around Newport Beach with most of the other short filmmakers. We all noshed on breakfast pastries and exchanged contact info and screening times. We were all asked to take out shoes off when we entered the yacht, and all the carpets will covered in plastic...it was really funny, it reminded me of visiting my grandparents house when I was young.

* If you get an opportunity to see any of these films, do: Lymelife, Adventures of Power (directed by an old high school friend of Chris's, Ari Gold), Answer Man, and Poundcake. I saw a number of great films, but those were probably my favorite features.

Well, thanks for reading. Hopefully I'll get to see some of you at some of the next batch of exciting festivals we will be playing in.

~ Daniel

a new home for the blog

2009-05-04T07:19:00.001-04:00

I have moved this blog from my own server to bitfilms.blogspot.com. I hope this will allow me to make the archives easier to access (in a few days). I'm sure a few links will be bad for a while, but I will try to fix them soon. If you let me know about broken links that would be terrific.

an award from Humboldt

2009-04-29T22:41:00.001-04:00

I'm very happy to have heard from two different sources today that we won Best Animation at Humboldt. Thank you, Damon Packard! Sorry we weren't there to receive it in person.

My recollection is that the former year's awards included film stock. If anyone knows what film stock is, please let me know.

just kidding

IFFBoston wrap up

2009-04-27T21:55:00.000-04:00

IFFBoston was like a summer thunderstorm. On a day that was as hot as blazes, it came and went in a hurry. But it was spectacular, memorable, perhaps a tad frightening. And there was a lot of water.

My trip began with a solo drive across the state to scoop up my dad at Logan. It was something like 90 degrees most of the way there. We managed to get lost on the way out of the airport (driving mishap #1) but then did manage to find our hotel near Central Square. I threw the keys to the valet in a hurry so as not to have to fret about driving for a while.

We emerged from the T station at Davis Square face-to-face with the Somerville Theater, crowds of people hovering outside it like flies, festival staffers wearing headsets yelping to stand in this line or that line. It kind of blew me away. What a contrast to Providence! Not only were the film crowds there, but everyone was simply hanging out in the square, loving as I was the long-absent sun and warmth.

We literally had to weave our way through crowds inside to get to the filmmaker's lounge at the theater (awesome), pick up credentials, etc. I almost immediately encountered Brendan Toller, one of the early editors of Tower 37 and an accomplished independent filmmaker in his own right, who was there for his film's screening at 7. If you witnessed our interaction you would have assumed that all the schwag and special treatment and crowds were day-to-day occurrences for us. It was like, "hey - how's it going?" instead of, "holy crap did you see the lines outside and all this free food?" But, you know, when in Rome. We both signed the big poster and moved back upstairs.

Dinner kept me from the festival until later, but my cell phone was abuzz throughout with texts from the descending Tower 37 crew members and friends: Will. Taryn. Kevin. Evan. Jake. Jeremy. Nick. Bassam. I was also catching updates from Daniel out in Newport Beach about the Saturday show (update to come on the left coast, I promise). We hopped in line early and amassed quite a circle of people. As dorky as it might sound, it was great to be in line, outside, just anticipating the screening and talking shop.,

Helga sidebar: Will flashed his iPhone at me in line, happily showing that he was monitoring his renders at Hampshire while waiting. Love it.

The show was packed. Almost a full house, if my memory serves me. Airplane-like, they asked us all to sit down so they could count empty seats and let others in. For a 10pm animation show! We all got our ballots on the way in but I once again didn't cast mine.

I was pleased from start to finish. The entire program was excellent and I am pleased that Tower 37 can keep such great company. The group that hung out later seemed to concur that Undone and Skhizein were both particularly outstanding. The HDCAM tape of our film looked great (thanks, Creative Group) and sounded great, even though it wasn't the full 5.1 mix.

The Q&A session afterward included myself and Hayley Morris, the director of Undone. It took the crowd a few minutes to warm up, but then the questions flowed. We were a fairly interesting contrast up there, me representing a large crew that animated on computers over 4 years; Haley did her film entirely on her own, in-camera, stuck in a little room for 6 months. Wow.

After the show we hunted for a place to hang out, finding Redbones BBQ and lashing together a raft of tables to accommodate our big group. Ending the night over beers and buffalo wings was perfect. There was lots of talk about how to make it to New Orleans in August without spending too much, and of course a continued debate about the films we saw. We finally got kicked out of the place, and I was down for the count by 2 am.

Got lost driving again on the way back to Logan on Sunday, but thanks to Kevin and his phone we still made it on time. The drive back west was again hot, the festival and its craziness already becoming the stuff of legend in my mind. A refreshing storm, to say the least!

another review from Newport

2009-04-27T18:14:00.000-04:00

See this blog post by Julian Ayrs about shorts at festivals, along with a Helga plug and some nice words about our film. Excerpted:

Tower is a beautiful well-crafted piece of animation featuring eye-catching images that resonate and touch the audience.

The plot is intriguing, too.

Day in and day out - almost ad nauseam - a lone manager at a water tower monitors the operations clueless to the fact he is slowly destroying an entire ecosystem.

4 stars for this one!

a great review

2009-04-26T23:25:00.000-04:00

Here's a short and sweet review from Amanda Ondretti at Moving Pictures Magazine, who saw the film in Newport Beach.

running commentary on the big fest week

2009-04-23T23:06:00.000-04:00

TD Jeremy is at the first IFFBoston show right now, and I hope will have an update for us all soon.

I caught a positive review of some of the other shorts playing with Tower 37 in the comment stream here on a /Film post, which has me hopeful for an exciting program on Saturday.

Last night's Humboldt screening was attended by at least one friend of the film (thanks, Michelle!) who texted from the show itself and followed up with a great phone message earlier today. The film reminded her of an Ursula K. Le Guin short story titled "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" which I am now very much looking forward to reading. And it sounds like great company to me, even though I'm not familiar with the tale yet.

It also looks like Michelle will be the first participant in the bitfilms-hat-for-festival-program exchange! wooo

Finally, we got a nice local plug from the Boston Herald's Film Junkie site on Tuesday.

a big week ahead

2009-04-21T14:30:00.002-04:00

Welcome to Tower 37's week-long coming out party. Seven days, seven screenings at five different festivals all over the country (see the calendar for specifics). We go from Humboldt tomorrow to Somerville for IFFBoston on Thursday, then a day off before the three-in-one Saturday spanning Newport Beach, Athens Ohio, and Somerville again. Sunday is another Newport screening, and then Tuesday there's a show in Connecticut at the Hollywood East fest.

I will be representing on Saturday in Somerville, and producer Daniel will be covering things in southern California. I think he'll have more parties to go to than I will.

We're excited to hear your feedback. If you're able to see the film at one of these venues, and if you happen to visit this blog, please send us a story. What films screened alongside Tower 37 that you liked? How was Tower 37 received? Be the first to mail me a festival program from Athens, Humboldt, or Hollywood East and I'll send you a black bitfilms winter cap in return, modeled below by Kevin at the SENE fest in Providence.

the joys and pains of changing frame rate

2009-04-15T22:23:00.000-04:00

If you're not planning to print your carefully-constructed movie project to 35mm film, but if you want to work with approximately 24 frames per second, then I recommend working at 23.976 frames per second. It seems that as of this writing, HD digital video standards all seem to privilege 23.976, which means a frame rate change is inevitable if you want to put your 24fps work to tape.

"The Incident at Tower 37" was produced at a native fps of 24. When it came time to stick it on DVD, HDCAM stock, DigiBeta, etc., we needed 23.976 (which I will refer to from now on as 23.98).

23.98 and 24 aren't so far apart. What gives? Why is this such a big deal?

Think of it this way: after your film has played for 100 seconds, you'll either be on frame 2400 or frame 2398 depending on your frame rate. That's a 2 frame difference. After another 100 seconds, you're going to be off by 4 frames. These small deltas matter if you have sync sound. If you don't, then stop reading here and work at whatever framerate you want (though keeping the DV standard rates in mind is probably a good idea).

Okay, so take Tower 37. It has carefully synced sound with cracking glass, foot falls, a gunshot, etc. It runs just under 10 minutes long. For the purposes of this post, let's call it an exact 10 minutes. 600 seconds. At 24 fps, that's 14,400 total frames.

If I just play the 14,400 frames more slowly, at 23.98 instead of 24 fps, the film runs 600 and one half seconds. This means that any sound synced to the end of the film will hit a half second early, which is very noticeable. In other words, I've got 12 "extra" frames beyond the duration of the sound.

Let's also assume that the sound is locked and cannot change. Given my limited mastery of audio tools, this is more than an assumption. It's a given.

So to solve this problem I need to play the original frames more slowly AND somehow toss 12 frames along the way. And do so in such a way that preserves sync as much as possible.

When you retime a QuickTime movie with Compressor, you are given choices in how you should create the new frames. The fastest is simple: just choose the nearest frame. What this means is that Compressor keeps track of what the ideal frame should be, presumably as a fractional number, and then it rounds it in some way when choosing which frame to present. Think of it this way: at 100 seconds, Compressor needs to pick a frame from our original movie to use for frame 2398 of the new 23.98 fps movie. The most logical choice is 2400, since frame 2400 was exactly at 100 seconds in the original movie. So that's an easy choice.

But what about frame 2397? Some simple math shows that frame 2397 would correspond to frame 2398.999 from our original movie. But there was no frame 2398.999 in our original movie, was there? There were just frames 2398 and 2399. I think that all of you would probably choose 2399 as the "closest" to 2398.999. That's what Compressor does, too.

Keep going backwards. At what frame of the new movie will the ideal frame lie 50% between two frames from the original movie?

(go ahead, take some time and try to figure it out)

Basically, I compute that at every 600 frames Compressor is going to have to make a harder choice. So I guess my answer is 1800. Let's see:

frame 1800 of new movie * (1/23.98fps) = 75.0626 seconds into the movie
75.0626 seconds into the old movie * 24 fps = frame 1801.5

Yes - so what should Compressor do now? What's the better choice for frame 1800 of the new movie? Frame 1801 or 1802? No matter how you pick, you can probably see that somewhere between frames 1800, 1801, and 1802 of the new movie we're going to skip a frame of the old movie.

This is good: it keeps the picture in sync with the sound. It is the method by which we periodically drop frames in order to keep the sync throughout.

It is also bad: if the frame dropped just happens to be in the middle of a smooth camera and/or object motion, you will perceive a jump. When I first did this with Tower 37, I noticed about 4 jumps. The other dropped frames happened to occur where the motion was so subtle I didn't catch it.

The other Compressor options don't please me. They end up making new frames by averaging or blending or warping old frames, which is slow to do and/or looks bad. Cripes, I'm looking to lose 12 frames out of 15000, I don't need to do much.

So what did I do?

I dragged two versions of Tower 37 into Final Cut Pro, the version that has every frame but plays at 23.98 fps (and therefore runs long), and the 23.98 fps version that Compressor made which syncs to the sound but drops frames in bad places.

I made the longer version partially transparent and walked through the film, finding (every 600 frames or so - of course) where a frame had been dropped to make the shorter version.

What I did was instead of cutting out a frame at that spot, I'd find the next nearest edit point and drop a frame there. This seems so easy to do I cannot believe it's not a default option in Compressor. People have been detecting scene breaks for a long time now, it should be a fairly simple algorithm to connect the two and I suspect others are already doing this. Please comment if you know of a publication that mentions this approach.

So I spent the better part of an evening walking in 600-frame jumps through the movie, chopping out frames from scene breaks until I had eliminated exactly enough to keep the audio synced. I wrote this while waiting for the final movie to export!

Fun, wasn't it?

a few key phrases to guide curious web searchers here:
conforming 24 fps to 23.98 fps
conforming 24 fps to 23.976 fps
changing frame rate from 24 to 23.98
changing frame rate from 24 to 23.976

codec buster

2009-04-15T10:01:00.001-04:00

A technical digression...

Apple's ProRes codec has been doing great on "Tower 37." Once Schuyler told me about it, and once I started working with it, I decided to use it for final editing. So while I do have thousands of TIFFs lying around, it's the ProRes movies that I'm editing together and calling my master copy.

Trying to get the film looking its best for SIGGRAPH, I've returned to clean up old pops, aliasing artifacts, etc. All those changes have been made and no one but I will notice them (but I sleep better). But there's one I can't beat: banding on one particular shot.

The shot is u4_15 (does anyone care?). The bands are on Operator's hands when he grabs Leed. This JPG doesn't really do the situation justice, but believe me, in that gradient of light going from bright white (top of hand) to dark (bottom of hand), we get bands. And they're the kind of bands that, when the shot is moving, look worse rather than better.

This is the only place I can think of where I'm compromising by using ProRes. The alternative is to final with a TIFF codec, but that would be unmanageable in size, wouldn't play back at speed on any computer that I know of, and heck - it's only this shot that troubles me. One moment out of 10 minutes of moments. I hope you all don't even notice.

a dash of non-fiction animation

2009-04-12T22:55:00.001-04:00

Here are two films that hit my inbox recently which I enjoyed and which share a familiar stylistic approach (I am reminded of Creature Comforts). From what I can determine, rather different techniques were used in actual production. Enjoy!

The Lost Tribes of New York City
Product Placement

triply newsy

2009-04-09T19:55:00.001-04:00

I've been holding off on sharing the biggest news of the season, namely, that Tower 37 will be a part of the SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival! I am very much looking forward to hanging out in New Orleans again, and knowing that there will be very high-quality projection in place, I'm fixing the small things that have bothered me ever since I saw the film on the big screen at R&H back in March.

Historical note: My first SIGGRAPH submission attempt was 15 years ago, a short called "Tesselation Software Not Included" which featured my M.S. fire synthesis work. I just put it online 'cause it still makes me laugh.

News item #2: SENE was not quite done with us. Fresh in my inbox was a note saying that we won the Audience Award for Best Animated Film!

Finally: The Hollywood East Film Festival in Connecticut has also decided to fold us into their program. Sadly, it appears that the show has been reduced from an April weekend to a full-day Tuesday. I'm sure there's a story behind that. We will be in familiar company (see the screening list here), including some of our friends from the SENE animation block (see previous post).

SENE wrap up

2009-04-06T09:18:00.002-04:00

Apologies to all who hail from Providence, but I found it a very odd town.

A respectable crew turned up for the SENE screening of "Tower 37" on Saturday night including Evan, Bishop, and Kevin who hipped and hopped their way down with me via car, Jeremy via train from Boston, and Jake who drove on his own. We got comfortable in the hotel room before walking to the Cable Car Cinema to get our bearings. Not a human being on the street. It was like someone took this nice city and just asked everyone to stay inside for a few hours.

We hunted for food after finding the theater, and a woman at an enormous (but also empty) bar steered us in the right direction. Thankfully, that direction was away from her own basement-of-a-fraternity-smelling establishment.

A massive Indian meal, complete with celebratory toasts and the requisite telling of humiliating stories, primed us for the 7:00 screening of live action shorts. At SENE the audience got to vote via a creative little square of paper which you would maul in the right place to identify your selections. Anyway, the theater was great (every other row had comfy couches) but the show was a mixed bag. Our crew reached easy consensus behind the two foreign films, Uriasul and Land Gewinnen, with the latter being our favorite of that block.

Tower 37 was in the 9:30 block, along with 8 other shorts that were animated in some fashion. If you count puppets as animated. Throughout the first screening, the projectionist would correct the DVD/projector settings to accommodate the authoring of the various DVDs (so that a 4:3 or 16:9 disk would properly fill the frame). That guy was absent during our show, which we sadly discovered when Tower 37 played. The film was both too quiet and was zoomed too far in, so we only got to see the middle 70% of the frame.

I credit the young and friendly director of "Escapism," which is also showing alongside Tower 37 in Newport Beach later this month, with the most savvy line of the night after I told him of our projection mishap: "Yeah, I was going to say that was some pretty daring staging." It took me at least 5 years of teaching before I could say stuff like that off the cuff! I was impressed with his maturity (and sense of staging - our film looked way too claustrophobic, alas).

The crew had a more lively debate about this batch, one that continued into wee hours of the night and even on the drive home. We all did love "Symphony" for its impeccable craft. I didn't actually cast any vote for Tower 37 because I was morally conflicted. Well, I also had my ballot taken away and cast by Bishop while I was chatting with other filmmakers. But I'll take the moral high ground.

Another slow wander through a still-dead town led us to the after party. Okay, one drunken passenger in a passing car did actually stick his head out of the window and ask us for directions to a strip club. When we said we had no idea, we had our sexuality questioned in a way that could only be considered grade school. With grade school so far in the past for most of us, it was much more funny than intimidating. And with such limited contact with the people of Providence (if they actually do exist, since this guy was clearly from out of town), we took what human contact we could get.

The party was loud, probably because it was on a relatively small mezzanine near the speakers in a fairly skinny bar. We loved that the chandelier right near our table looked like the harp from "Bohemibot," but we suspect that it cost a lot less to produce. The founders brought a mic and a bunch of awards, and while we didn't get the $1000 prize (kudos to "Larry and Roz" for that), we were the happy recipients of the SENE Founders' Award. Here's the cell phone shot I sent to producer Daniel right after receipt (the cool plexi thing was too hard to shoot, I'll see if Evan got some versions of it on his camera):

Note that I've tried to properly punctuate Founders' appropriately in this post, even though I think their apostrophe-free version on the award is much cleaner looking.

The night that remained took place in the hotel room. There were ongoing debates about the best and worst moments of the two screenings we caught, some musical improvisations, Kevin pitching his latest short idea from a perch high atop a bed, and finally sleep. We left town the next morning (still no one outside), and almost had to return, but thankfully Jeremy's people skills allowed him to borrow his way to a train ticket. Hope you find your bank card, sir.

It was a memorable festival and I hope the SENE folks have continued success in the future. I'm sad now that I can't attend all the festivals, but I am excited for our upcoming local screenings at IFFBoston and Hollywood East, I'm glad that Daniel and Andrew can attend Newport Beach. There's another fest on the horizon that's likely to be a similar reunion/party/celebration that will merit its own post soon.

seeds starting to sprout

2009-03-26T11:16:00.000-04:00

A very exciting last 24 hours, which has brought Tower 37 three new festival appearances:

MOTION film festival (Tampa)
Humboldt Film Festival
Athens (Ohio) International Film and Video Festival

Two of them are in April (5 festival showings now in April!) and MOTION is early May.

some screening times pinned down

2009-03-21T23:55:00.000-04:00

Came home to updates from IFFBoston and the Newport Beach Film Festival. "Tower 37" will be showing twice at each fest. I've updated the calendar with the details, but for detailed answers take yourself to each fest's website.

la weekly

2009-03-21T18:33:00.000-04:00

Four screenings and talks in LA last week, each with its own flavor.

The Tiki Room at Rhythm & Hues on Tuesday. H264 full-res version on a projector with probably the worst audio of the series, but the screening was really just meant as an introduction to Helga. So the quality was perfectly acceptable. Had the wonderful opportunity to speak with developers at the studio about Helga and about their own in-house solutions to similar problems. I found it notable how the scales at which they work so dominate the decisions they need to make; to wit, our browser-based system would quickly be crushed by the volume they have to support. At the same time, our single-system solution has its attractiveness. Audience of 12-15.

Thursday night at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood for the Hampshire Alumni Reel. A little too much last-minute projector tweaking for my comfort, and even then it was less vibrant than I hoped it could be. DVD. Big ol' screen in a room that held 160 or so. Not sure the surround sound was working. Audience of just over 50. Great seats, great fun catching up with alums and crew members. Jordy's 8th birthday, too!

Friday noon: DreamWorks. In some room that doubles as a mocap stage. DVD again, but a nice bright projector. Small screen. Stereo sound, but nice and loud. Full house of approximately 50, shared the intro speech with producer Daniel. A very welcoming crowd with lots of questions. Hated getting there on the 405 (LA traffic! Oh how I did not miss it!) but the campus was idyllic and the lunch was tasty.

Friday pm: screening at the end of the R&H company meeting. A brief intro to the film followed by the biggest projection of the week. The screen and image were beautiful (I think they have a TI system). The sound was, sadly, a few frames ahead of the pic. Guess there was a delay. But I saw every bit of detail, including every little flaw that I suppose only a few of us still see. But it was big, bright, and a fitting ending to the week. Probaly another 50-80 at that screening.

Time will tell why the hell I'm bothering to blog these screenings. Right now I'm just remembering them fondly and hoping that they will help promote the film, Helga, and what we're doing at Hampshire.

west coast, here we come

2009-03-10T20:36:00.000-04:00

The Newport Beach Film Festival has just given the nod to Tower 37, and the screening is on the calendar (April 25)!

more laurels!

2009-03-01T20:37:00.001-05:00

The fest runs from April 22-28, but as usual, please watch the calendar for final screening times/dates/locations.

we are done

2009-02-27T16:01:00.000-05:00

A pair of talks and screenings in Amherst and Tribeca this past week have marked the completion of "The Incident at Tower 37." Yes, I handed off the final picture and sound today to Creative Group in NYC and they will be making our HDCAM SR master. Any exhibition copies that aren't DVD or Blu-Ray will be spawned from that tape. So the film is out of my hands!

It was great to celebrate with the crew members who could be at one or both of the screenings. I thought it was a fitting tribute to the work of Evan and the rest of the sound team that the first question after both screenings was about the incredible soundtrack. I was not prepared for another question that came up in both venues: what's next?

For now, I'm going to keep my eyes on the festival situation and try to get the film seen as much as possible. I was particularly aware during both screenings of the laughs and gasps and other uncontrolled reactions people had to the film. The moments we dreamed up, engineered, and executed over the past years are finally connecting with people in many of the ways we hoped. This is an exciting phase, studying the efficacy of our choices on first-time viewers. The next scheduled screening is in March in LA, but I'm also hoping to schedule another Valley screening at a bigger and better venue sometime this spring.

Congratulations to all who worked on the project!

Tower 37 screening schedule

2009-02-08T21:57:00.000-05:00

Tower 37's first festival acceptance* has prompted me to produce a handy-dandy calendar so you can plan your year around public screenings of the film. Since this is an embedded live calendar, I'm debating whether or not to make a new blog post for each new screening announcement. Any opinions from regular visitors?

* The Southeast New England Film, Music, and Arts Festival running from April 2-5, 2009.

Career Q&A, part 2

2009-02-03T09:01:00.000-05:00

Q: How do I get a job in the field of computer animation?

A: This IS the big question, isn't it.

1. RESEARCH

To begin, you probably have a lot of research to do if you're asking this general of a question. Computer animation is all over the place, and though the tools and techniques are similar, the work can be very different. Take, for example, these four big pieces of the industry: feature animation, special visual effects, commercials, and games.

In my previous Q&A post, I write a little bit about the difference between working for an outside client (which happens generally if you are in VFX or commercials) versus working within a feature animation studio. That is certainly one concern. But what about the jobs themselves? Do you want to be working on jobs that turn around every few weeks or months (commercials) or longer term fare (games, movies)?

Do you want to be in a smaller studio, which means you could wear multiple hats more easily, or do you want to be a specialist in a larger organization?

Here's a big one: do you actually know what this or that studio actually calls the job you want? You might answer my questions above with something like, "I'd like to work in a small games company." Okay, so what kinds of jobs do people actually have in the companies that fit your description?

A while back, every studio had a different name for the same job. Depending on which company you were looking at, you might be applying for a digital artist position, or you might be applying to be a lighting TD, or something else entirely. Things are stabilizing a bit more, as far as I've seen, and TD (technical director) is a fairly standard term for non-character-animators who work on production. Of course, as I write this I'm sure there are "camera artist" jobs at one place which would be called "layout TD" jobs at another.

Comb the job boards and try to get a picture of what the actual positions are. See if representatives of the companies you are interested in have sponsored speakers at conferences and/or schools, see what they had to say and how they described themselves. You may find that you want to do position X at company Y, but the same job at company Z is called something else. At various points in my animation career, I have been referred to as: production support programmer, developer, animation software engineer, TD, generalist TD, shading TD, lighting TD, effects TD, tools storyboard artist, and director. My responsibilities while wearing many of those hats were the same--it was the hats that changed.

In short, know what you're aiming for. Know the places and the people, and know specific job titles to watch for.

2. INTERNSHIPS, APPRENTICESHIPS, RESIDENCIES

My second piece of advice is to try and find internships. I've written about them before, but their importance in the hiring process is truly under-appreciated. Some studios hire half of their interns to full time jobs, whereas those same studios get 100 resumes and reels a week. I like the intern odds much better.

Think from the studios' perspective: they want good people, but 1) it's hard to know who's good and 2) they have production needs that fluxuate. So they don't want to over-commit to someone who might not work out for any number of reasons. Internships and other part-time arrangements are strategies to get people in the door at a very low-cost and with little risk. If it doesn't work out after 3-6 months, goodbye.

There are internships, typically for current students and sometimes for recent grads. Some places have apprenticeships. Some have residencies (or the equivalent). Cast a wide net early on and see what you can find out. For most studios these programs peak when they have a lot of work coming up (they need more bodies, after all), and they may vanish when times are tougher. So you may need to be flexible and agile, ready to respond quickly if and when these things are posted.

3. APPLICATION MATERIALS

The third thing to keep in mind is your materials. By this I mean your reel, resume, reel breakdown, cover letter, and possibly letters of recommendation. There are lots of pieces of advice about these things online (I particularly appreciate Pixar's How to Create a Demo Reel webpage), but the thing I'll mention here is the cover letter. I don't really know how important the letter is in the scheme of things (I do think the reel is king), but I know that if I were reading a letter I would want it to be clear that the applicant has done his or her research about my company. In other words, given the variations between even the feature animation studios, you want to be sure your letter is tailored to the place you're applying.

For example, I just peeked at openings at Pixar and DreamWorks (PDI). There is a "Technical Director" position in both. At Pixar, based on the description, the TD generalist can be expected to do modeling, articulation, shading, maybe some software, some effects, etc. At DreamWorks, the TD reads as more of a production support programmer role, focused more on tool development. However, it does say that the TD supports and works with multiple departments too. These sound close, but are they?

You should know the answer by the time you are applying so you can target your materials to the job that they are actually offering. I think the best way to find the answer would, of course, be to actually speak with TDs from both organizations. What do they do each day? What are their responsibilities? This is where conferences, presentations, and the web come in handy.

4. PEOPLE/COMMUNITY

When you can actually speak with people in the organizations, and preferably in the positions, that you are considering, you will be the best equipped to apply for those positions. They can tell you what good reels in their areas look like, they can tell you what points you might want to emphasize in your other application materials. They can tell you what the jobs actually are like and help you understand whether or not you actually want those jobs.

The annual SIGGRAPH conference is a terrific way to chat with industry folks in a relaxed atmosphere. You can actually thumb through a book full of presentations and pick the things you want to see by the name/title/organization of the people giving the presentations. There are evening parties, gatherings during the day, etc.

I think that the SIGGRAPH student volunteer gig is the best way to get folded into the SIGGRAPH community. You spend half your time working the conference, the other half hanging out with the other students and the industry folks you've met, going to talks, screenings, etc. The deadline for student volunteers for the annual summer conference is generally in February; watch for it.

This career thread came up on a mailing list I maintain recently, and I wrote more there about the importance of building community, aka getting to know and work with people. Former colleague and now Imageworks TD Eric Wilson has kindly posted his comments and mine on his own website, so instead of elaborating here I'll refer you to that page where my comments can be found after Eric's.

Good luck.

Animating Fast to its own home

2009-01-28T16:06:00.001-05:00

With the beginning of this spring's Animating Fast class, I'd like to introduce a new blog: Animating Fast. The class members and others interested in the search for faster ways of working can use this as their home.

Dynomix

2009-01-24T12:23:00.000-05:00

Evan, Bishop, and I felt like stars on Wednesday and Thursday. Took a trip down to NYC for a Tower 37 celebratory dinner and, more importantly, an audio mastering session at Gary's Chop Shop, during which Gary took the audioscape of the film to the next level.

The mastering itself was more of a behind-the-scenes kind of thing; to wit, when we visited Gary on Wednesday night he had already located most of the sounds in space (surround is awesome) and Evan's soundtrack sounded all the more magical for it. We spent most of Thursday working on leveling and adding a bunch of Foley, not to mention laughing and hanging out and generally enjoying the feeling of being in some very capable hands. Gary dug into his libraries for sweet glass cracks, wood splinters, and sloshing water sounds. Oh! And the breathing. Op has come alive with the subtlety of that brilliant addition.

Can't figure out how to share the results of the session with this audience, at least not yet. But hopefully the festivals will respond positively and you'll get a chance to hear everything as it sounded when we left.

counting on two hands

2009-01-16T09:34:00.001-05:00

Had a fun time last night teaching my son about non-base 10 counting. After he learned that counting past 10 on your fingers requires some form of external memory (you know, some reminder that you've counted this many 10s before you start over on the fingers), he figured out that we could count base 5 (he meant 6) and use two hands. Neat idea.

We played this one out a little bit. Your right hand represents the 1s place, and your left hand the 6s place. Once you've exhausted the five fingers on your right hand, count one finger on the left and go back to a fist on the right. Keep going, and you can count up to 35 on two hands.

So then we took it to binary. Each finger is a bit and they have an order, least significant on the right (your right pinky or thumb, depending on how you hold your hand), most on the left. If you're careful about it, you can count up to 1023 this way.

Night of the living geeks.

Anyway, if you find yourself with just your hands and you need to count higher than 10, try one of these methods!

the trailer for 9

2009-01-06T22:03:00.000-05:00

Relatively recently, the trailer for Shane Acker's 9 went live. I just love the story behind this film being made, at least the little bits I've gleaned from the web. A young director rides a short through the festival circuit, gains a fair amount of notoriety, and catches the attention of Tim Burton. Without any perceptible delay, they've got a feature going! There's a nice interview here though it's a little old.

Here's hoping it will be as exciting as it looks. And if so, that will be marketed better than Delgo. Anyone know what it will be rated?

year's end, and all that ends with it

2008-12-30T23:28:00.002-05:00

I am pleased to report that "The Incident at Tower 37" has, thus far, been submitted to 16 festivals worldwide. Shortly that number will be 18. Producer Daniel and I have been carefully planting these seeds; for the next two weeks or so I will be tuning out and letting them (hopefully) take root. Many thanks to Evan as well for his continued support in all things sound-related.

With all this planting I hope to report on many sprouts in the spring, though I have to confess that if it goes really well we're going to be scrambling come March to get exhibition copies where they need to go. Let's hope that's the kind of trouble we encounter.

Still trying to secure some audio mastering help with the film. I've got a call out to one shop in NYC but since we don't have something on the books yet I'm open to suggestions. My hope for mid-January is to get the mastering completed, make the final color corrections, and get the transfers made to all the formats that we might need.

Have you had any great/awful experiences at particular festivals? Please share. We are going to continue submitting throughout 2009 and would like to target those fests that may be particularly interested in our film.

Also, I'm so close to this project I've lost sight of what the outside world might want to hear about it. If you're reading this and would like to see or hear anything from the past three and a half years of production on this film, let me know. And, of course, when I can be sure that posting it online won't impact its festival status I will do that. But for now, I can't offer the film itself. Coming soon to a festival near you, I hope!

See you all in 2009.

perched on the edge

2008-12-15T22:54:00.000-05:00

One of the curiosities that comes with living close to Smith College is the periodic screaming that I get to hear. I'm not talking about individuals, nor a little post-party crew making its way back to a car parked near our house. I'm talking about the whole quad lighting up with the shrill and fierce yells of what can only be women in serious pain or pleasure. Since it's the heart of final exam time, it could be a little of both.

Anyway, tonight I feel a bit like joining in the chorus. The pleasure part. 'Cause as the shrieks rail out I'm finalizing the festival screener DVD for Tower 37. The last touch for the DVD was the credits, which now seem pretty firmly in place. Tomorrow I should be trying to convert the HD Apple PRORES version into something watchable on a standard def DVD.

By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, we're going with "The Incident at Tower 37" as the official title.

One other interesting thing going on these days (now more on the pain front): I've been following the release of Delgo with serious fascination. Here we have an independent animated feature out of Fathom Studios in Atlanta that took somewhere between 9 and 12 years to make (articles online seem unable to concur on the date the film was begun, ranging from 1996 to 1999 in what I've read).

Since I've of course thought a hundred times over about how the Tower 37 production process would scale to a feature (yes, I'm considering it), the fate of Delgo is one I will follow closely. The biggest issue I see is that while Delgo is an independent animated feature, it had a production budget (according to wikipedia, today) of around $40 million. So independent it may be, but it's heavily dependent on a massive box office revenue if it wants to recoup its costs. As of today, that's not looking very likely (boxofficemojo reports a half million on opening weekend, despite it appearing on over 2000 screens).

My latest back-of-the-envelope calculations (based on Tower 37) project a production budget an order of magnitude lower than Delgo's for a 90-minute feature of the same quality and complexity of T37. Yes! So, agents and production studios, if you're looking to invest in an independent animated feature that doesn't have to win the lottery at the box office to succeed, you should contact me. Bitfilms is your spot.

And if you don't contact me, please don't hang up on me when I try to contact you.

the last shot!

2008-12-05T21:25:00.002-05:00

Well, the final shot is rendering this weekend. u5_14, the big crowd shot and the one that will keep our linux farm warm for at least the next 24 hours. Probably more.

Here's a sample of the in-progress lighting:

There's still lots to be done even once the expensive layers are rendered (by expensive, I mean the ray traced reflection, refraction, and shadow layers for the thousands of creatures). Specifically, I know we need a better terrain treatment in the back, plus, the grime and water will need some re-painting to not overlap with the creatures (and to feel more thoroughly dirty).

For this curious, this shot is a combination of 3D rendered elements, 2D paintings projected onto 3D geometry, and pure 2D elements. The camera move is a slow boom down that ends with the framing you see here.

Some of the creatures are hand-animated, others are archived RenderMan RIB files from a long tread cycle sequence.

Next week we will be doing credits, and then festival submissions will begin the week after. It looks like there will be a wrap party in NYC in February, perhaps one in Los Angeles in March as well. If you're crew, watch for an invite! I also expect that once the first DVD is sent to a festival I'll be having an impromptu wrap party here in Northampton. Or many. This has been a long time coming.

A small lighting challenge

2008-11-30T22:21:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd share a challenge that I'm giving my Animation I students in class tomorrow. Inspired by a similar exercise I was given back at Pixar University, the task here is to take the starting scene file and light the scene to match the target image. No shader changes allowed!

The target image isn't anything fancy, but matching it does require one to be comfortable with some very important basics of digital lighting. I'm thinking in particular of three-point light setup, using light linking (or whatever your software calls it) to direct lights to shine on only certain objects, creating soft shadows, making lights cast specular independently of diffuse light, and a few other things I'll keep quiet until the exercise is over.

The starting image (i.e., if you poke render after opening the scene file):

The target image:

The starting scene file can be found on my course website.

Please try it yourself if you're curious. Post your results and discoveries, too.

white noise podcast II

2008-11-20T22:48:00.000-05:00

Need free soothing sounds for crying baby (or babies)?

Sleepless parents, we are back.

Here you will find an hour of computer vent fan noise, lovingly recorded* and looped by me to soothe your child. Or yourselves. Or your Thanksgiving guests.

This has NOT been tested on any children at my house, but it's hopefully a nice alternative to complement the vent fan noise from my last podcast post.

The 82 Megabyte MP3 file can be found here.

Please let me know if you find these useful, curious, or just plain weird. Any suggestions for future recordings?

* confession: Lovingly, yes, but it was a quick-and-dirty recording. If it isn't up to your standards for quality, apologies.

Today's mail, and some Catch background

2008-11-13T19:37:00.000-05:00

The TriggerStreet prize for Catch came today, and it is a lovely modern little thing. Compact. Solid. Heavy. Here it is next to the Sevincer prize I mentioned a few days back:

I love the contrast. Two prizes as different as the festivals themselves. And they're both great.

The TS recognition has me thinking about Catch again for the first time in a while. So I thought I'd share some of the film's history while I still remember this stuff.

Did you know? I made the original model of the girl's head in Sculpey on top of a Corona bottle:

I never really thought about preserving the sculpt, yet it's still mostly intact. She's hardened up and has lost half of her hair, but she's still sitting atop that bottle.

The tree was based on an awesome gnarly (as in, gnarled) tree I drove by in Amherst:

The squiggly line treatment that outlines her during the second half of the film was done in the following, rather involved way: Once the shots were animated in Maya, I rendered a high-contrast version in black and white in addition to the colored pass that you may recognize from the film. Then, I printed out the high-con images frame by frame, flipped them over and traced her outlines in pencil on the back of the sheets. Chris and Dan helped immeasurably with this work! Then, I scanned the drawings back in and composited them on top of the color pass.

Here are images from each of those steps:

The high-contrast output from Maya.

The pencil, re-scanned in (but not yet registered).

The "paint" pass (for the character).

The final composite frame.

What's up with CS 286, Animating Fast?

2008-11-11T10:15:00.000-05:00

Pre-registration for spring courses is now well underway at Hampshire. I was hoping I could spend January focusing on the syllabus for my new class, Animating Fast, but the pre-reg flood of questions has forced me to begin sooner.

This post offers information for potential students of Animating Fast that I fear was either missing from (or ambiguous in) the posted course description:

The tools and techniques of three-dimensional computer graphics (CG) have supposedly ushered in a new era of animated filmmaking. However, computer animation remains prohibitively slow (and therefore expensive) compared to its real-world counterparts of film and video. As a result, instead of seeing an incredible variety of CG features, the last decade has provided essentially only two types: the high-budget visual effects blockbuster and the high-budget children's movie. Why? Is it really impossible to make computer animated films quickly and cheaply? In addition to answering these questions, this course seeks to identify, develop, and use tools and techniques that provide order-of-magnitude efficiency gains in computer animation. Topics covered will include machinima, various forms of performance and motion capture, interactive digital sculpting, machine-assisted proceduralism, and others. Prerequisite: one or more courses in computer animation, computer science, and/or electrical engineering. This course satisfies Division I distribution requirements. PRJ, EXP

MEDIUM

The course WILL focus on 3D computer animation. That is, we won't be studying 2D cel animation, Flash animation, claymation, etc., except for how they might inform our investigations into doing 3d computer animation more efficiently.

THE KIND OF STUDENTS I'M SEEKING

My goal for this course is to assemble a group of focused, motivated students who share a common interest in "debugging" the current practices of the computer animation industry. In fact, the techniques I teach in my own animation curriculum are exactly those that we will put under the microscope.

This is not the class for a student looking to learn more about computer animation. It is expected that if you come to the class as a student of computer animation, you will have substantial animation production experience behind you. In other words, you will already be a mature computer animator. You will have a fairly solid generalist's understanding of production, and you will know how and why it is "hard."

I am also teaching Computer Animation II this spring. Many students are seeking to take both Animation II and Animating Fast. Except for very few exceptions, I think that being enrolled in both courses is a mistake. Take Animation II first (and/or come talk with me about your case in particular).

The class will involve a substantial amount of group work and will rely on engaged discussions (that's why it's happening in the afternoon). If you are not comfortable participating in discussions, this is probably not the right class for you.

I will not be lecturing about the topics I list in the description, instead, we will build our reading list as we go based on the results of our conversations and investigations.

Some of you caught on to my use of "machinima" in the description. I'll tell you now, this will not be a machinima production course. Yes we may study some of the ideas and practices of machinima, but it will likely end there.

I seek to mix engineers and artists together. If you don't have a strong track record of working well with others, this isn't the class for you.

If you come to the class from the engineering side, it would be great if you also had some background in computer graphics and/or animation. If not, then it's even more important for you to be a very competent and independent programmer who can comfortably work with new languages and systems as necessary.

SEMESTER OVERVIEW

The jumping off point for the class is the aforementioned collection of animated features for kids and visual effects blockbusters. We will use our knowledge of them, along with other films we unearth, to define the visual and narrative space of the medium as it stands today. We will then use our understanding of the industry pipeline to identify all the places where we could increase efficiency within that space. Finally, we will collaboratively and creatively innovate to directly address some of the inefficiencies.

For me, the most exciting part of this class lies in the previous sentence. I want artists and engineers to be putting their heads together in the service of something that would seem impossible given the time and/or resources we have available. For example, "animate 60 seconds of a naturalistic 3D character (with lip sync) in one evening." Yikes, right!? Yes. WHY does this seem like an impossibility to many of you? WHAT makes it currently impossible (or not)? Could we do this if we were to throw away our existing 3D production pipeline and make a new one? That might be exactly what we have to do.

CONCLUSION

I think you can't make an informed decision about this class unless you know what we're going to do and what will be expected of you. Hence this missive.

More people signed up than I thought would sign up, and I honestly don't see the qualities I write about here in everyone who did sign up. This course will fail if people walk in expecting to be spoon-fed information, it will fail if people expect to work in their own little holes, it will fail if people don't come in energized to explore, discuss, identify, experiment, collaborate, create, and solve.

Please consider all the above and re-assess your participation in the class. Anyone interested in discussing their possible enrollment with me is encouraged to do so! The sooner the better.

An accolade for Catch

2008-11-07T10:34:00.000-05:00

It was well worth the wait. A year and a half after TriggerStreet.com announced Catch as a finalist in their (now called) 2008 Short Film Festival, they announced the winner, a great little documentary named Parallels.

It surprised me to find that unlike the last festival, they added a first runner-up award. I learned that Catch took this one when I got a simple email from the TriggerStreet operations team with the subject line of "Congratulations!"

Upon hearing about this, my son smiled and proudly bellowed out, "you got second place again!!" He was referring to last year's 2007 Sevincer Animation Festival in Brattleboro, Vermont, in which Catch received the Sevincer Prize. I really need to post a picture of the trophy (by Cynthia Houghton) because it was the coolest trophy I ever received. I haven't received the TriggerStreet award yet, but in all honesty Cynthia's prize will be hard to beat.

Anyway, I think it's interesting that a site like TriggerStreet, primarily populated by narrative fictional live-action short films, has once again awarded its highest honor to a documentary (another Canadian documentary at that). I also feel a great sense of pride (wow, it's been a prideful week) at having our films be the only animated films that made it to the "festival nominee" phase in TriggerStreet's history.

"Our" films: yes, it's too easy to give all the credit for a film like Catch to the person whose name appears in these articles and on the awards. So thanks again to Evan, Chris, Dave, Dan, and Ryan for their work on this project.