The Incident at Tower 37: online!

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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!

fall preview

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.

Laboratory Films shuts down

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.

calling anyone and everyone

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.

a long-awaited Tower 37 (nee Uprising) update

So the 10-minute CG animated short I've written about here before (Tower 37, formerly called Uprising) is actually nearing completion. Which is a good thing, 'cause it's basically its third anniversary this summer. Three years ago I was working on the story and the reel, now we're down to 44 shots left to finalize.

You might get some kind of perverse enjoyment out of reading prior posts about the film, especially those from late summer 2005 when I thought we could actually finish it in just one term. Ha. Well, over the three years it ballooned to 11 minutes, and now has been trimmed back down to below 10. There are 114 total shots as of this writing. But I do see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Bit Films Intern Will is currently leading the lighting/compositing charge, and I'm doing what I can as my other responsibilities allow. I think we are much more efficient with a small crew than with a large one, and I hope to update with some regularity as our number of remaining shots drops.

If you're interested in reading about how I structured a collaborative animation production class around this project, or if you want to learn more about the film itself, you can download a PDF of my MFA thesis and knock yourself out. Or just watch the movie as it stood a year ago when I got the degree. The site hosting the thesis keeps telling me people are downloading it; I'd be curious to hear from those downloaders what they think about it all.

Here's an image from shot u2_01. It is 1/3 of the final full resolution. I'll start adding more images to my posts if this works and if people seem receptive.


For those interested in the technical specs, this film is being made using Maya 8.5, RenderMan Studio, and Shake. To a lesser extent we also use After Effects, the Maya Software renderer, and hundreds of custom scripts (mainly written in TCL).

Tower 37 is using the HELGA system (developed at Hampshire College) for production management and web-based render/comp spooling, asset management, and job tracking. I will update this post or blog with a HELGA link as soon as one is available.