In the last few days I've had many thoughts related to distributed production. The biggest most productive phases in Tower 37's production were of course when a class's worth of students (and, when available, alums and others) were cranking away on the project. Anyone following the history of this film should know by now that my advanced animation courses at Hampshire are built around the idea of collaborative production, with students in the course becoming contributing creative crew members on a substantial film project.
This is a great model for bringing to life independent animation work that lies beyond the capabilities of an individual, and I have argued
elsewhere for its merits as a pedagogical strategy as well. But this began as a single-class endeavor with my first film in 2002, and has obviously grown way beyond that.
Over the course of this production there have been four periods during which the crew was greater than, say, 5 or 6 people: the fall of 2005, spring of 2006, January of 2007, and fall of 2007. In other words, we've had to adapt frequently to crew changes. This means bringing folks up to speed quickly and ramping them off the production quickly as well. There's been much more of that than I hoped for, and it's taught me a few big lessons.
I can't get into them all here, but a clear vision for the production (as in theme, story, etc) coupled with easy-to-follow standards and protocols equals a fairly low "crew change" cost. These of course are coupled with a set of tools that permits remote work at odd times of day on multiple platforms, which
HELGA already offers us.
Where this is all going comes from answering this question: what if the crew was ever-changing, with perhaps people coming on for
single production tasks instead of long stretches of time?
Check out the
Open Source Cinema manifesto. I wouldn't say that I'm adhering to every point in the manifesto, but I've enjoyed watching
The Basement Tapes grow and evolve as a project and I think there's a lot to learn from this approach.
Anyway, I'm thinking that my next production should be structured so that anyone can jump onto the film's site, grab one of the many production tasks that are available, and contribute. This would require some new HELGA infrastructure to better encapsulate bits of the film into easily download-/upload-able archives. It would also help to use the most ubiquitous production tools possible, with Open Source being perhaps the most desirable.
What's nice about this is that it doesn't preclude the same semester-based approach to production, it simply opens up the project to a larger, more distributed crew. Details would have to be worked out, obviously, such as how people can find assets that are available, get them, work on them, get feedback on their work, and ultimately get their finished assets back into the project.
Perhaps I will be able to explore this approach in more detail during my upcoming
Animating Fast class in the spring.
Note this shot doesn't actually feature the water surface, but it does have some fake caustic reflections which aren't even visible in this frame. Sorry about that. But the water itself in these scenes has been done with a Maya ocean rendered both with the Maya Software renderer and with RenderMan Studio for reflections and refractions. We accomplished the latter by using a MEL script which Brian Kendall started and I touched up that molds a polygonal mesh to fit the displacing surface of the Maya ocean. Each frame of the molded mesh is saved as a blend target so it's easy to animate through the molded surfaces. The final touch is a RenderMan subdiv attribute attached to the poly mesh.
So things are moving ahead very well. We're almost at the point where every remaining shot presents some kind of super challenge, but I feel that our efforts thus far this summer have us primed to solve whatever problems come up fairly efficiently. Next week will feature the film's opening shot, a 1000+ frame monster that is finally poised to finish in lighting after some layout tweaks I made yesterday. Next week also features some underwater shots, including atmospheric lighting effects being worked on by Hampshire College student and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Intern Will Colón. Is that a long enough title for you? :)
