I've had to make a hard decision recently to replace Ryan Wummel, my longtime composer, on Frankenstein vs the Wolfman. Ryan started with me on my filmmaking hobby back in 1998 by doing songs for my vampire(?) opus Gothik, and then providing the scores for both Raven movies. As we were working on Frankenstein vs the Wolfman, it became apparent that the score would have to be a more "classical" orchestral score, which ended up being at odds with Ryan's background in Trance, Techno and loop-based music. Currently, Ryan is working on ads for Nike, if you can believe it, with a production outfit based out of Chicago.
I've tapped Andrew Kalbfus for FvTWM. Andy was recommended to me by my producer & brother-in-law, Andy Carlson - and thus, will hereto be known as Other Andy. We had a pretty good initial meeting in which we discussed what the music should do, influences and generally determined where the music was going to be present in the movie. Other Andy tells me he's always wanted to do a movie score... so now he gets his chance. He promises me that the music for the trailer will be done by the end of August.
Now that everything, sans the score, is virtually in place (a few sound fx remain to be recorded), I've been spending time watching movies and playing videogames. It's almost like a vacation from the rigors of animating. I've been playing Bioshock for the Xbox 360 this week, and it's very cool - taking place in an elaborate, Art Deco underwater city (circa 1960) with some of the most realistic water effects I've ever seen.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
The Science of Screaming
Leeta and Milo's ADR has been recorded... Grace and Amanda came over and spent some time whimpering, breathing heavily and shrieking into a microphone. Grace had some trouble screaming for us, so it sounds like we'll be using a scream double for Leeta.
In other news, the DVD cover is pretty much finalized. We'll be printing out a stack of them soon.
In other news, the DVD cover is pretty much finalized. We'll be printing out a stack of them soon.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Audio Commentary Recorded
I sat down in front of my little PC mic yesterday and recorded an audio commentary for the Frankenstein vs the Wolfman DVD. Hopefully it'll prove insightful to those of you who actually want a copy and choose to listen to it. I've been doing a bunch DVD programming, creating DVD menus and working on the DVD cover. I've had a couple of proofs done of the cover art and am making corrections to it (mostly in terms of highlighting certain items and brightening the image overall.)
Over the weekend I was also able to lay in Chuck's Wolfman vocals to the movie and they sound pretty good. I had to do a substantial amount of EQ-ing and applying some filters to make his natural tones sound more bestial and ragged, but now the Wolfman has a personality!
We're set to record some more ADR tomorrow - Grace Carreno is coming in to do some Leeta gasps and whimpers, while Amanda Pearson is coming in to do Milo, one of the other orphan heroes.
Over the weekend I was also able to lay in Chuck's Wolfman vocals to the movie and they sound pretty good. I had to do a substantial amount of EQ-ing and applying some filters to make his natural tones sound more bestial and ragged, but now the Wolfman has a personality!
We're set to record some more ADR tomorrow - Grace Carreno is coming in to do some Leeta gasps and whimpers, while Amanda Pearson is coming in to do Milo, one of the other orphan heroes.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Special Features Intros Shot
This week, a colleague from work came over and shot a couple of intros for the various DVD special features. We shot the video in my basement using a Panasonic DV cam and a pro light kit. Thanks to Brent for the assist!
I took another crack at the opening title, this time using 3D Invigorator. When checking my last attempt, the parallax gap between the left and right images was too far apart so everyone that I showed it to complained of seeing double images. We'll have to see if this new version works any better.
I am set to get the audio recordings of Chuck Reeder's wolfman performance this week and will cut them into the movie over the weekend.
I took another crack at the opening title, this time using 3D Invigorator. When checking my last attempt, the parallax gap between the left and right images was too far apart so everyone that I showed it to complained of seeing double images. We'll have to see if this new version works any better.
I am set to get the audio recordings of Chuck Reeder's wolfman performance this week and will cut them into the movie over the weekend.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Making the 3-D Composite Part II
So, I made an anaglyph 3-D version of the movie, described in the process here and played the thing back on my TV. Although it works quite well on a computer monitor, it doesn't work so well on the television... what I end up seeing is a substantial lack of color and double images. Looking through the blue filter of the glasses yielded a clear, single image but looking through the red lens revealed the problem: not only is the picture significantly darker through the red lens, but the double images originate there.
Thinking that this is likely due to the fact that the red channel is so dark, and therefore not reproducing at the same color as the red lens of the glasses, I went back to After Effects and raised the red gamma of the left eye from 1.0 to 1.5 and re-rendered the movie.
This version worked significantly better. The biggest draw back is that now we're pretty much dealing with a black and white movie. If I would have planned better, I would have incorporated more purples, greens and yellows as they seem to retain their color even through the 3-D glasses. All other colors are drained down to a kind of purplish netherworld. However, the 3-D works! Ah, the tradeoff. Looking at the image on the TV without the glasses, the whole thing looks reddish and the red/left color appears really bright.
Some of the effects work well (a shovel handle during the opening credits protruded well into my viewing room,) whereas I could percieve more off-the-screen action when characters were reaching towards the audience when looked at on the computer monitor.
In other news, I completed the end credit sequence last night. The movie's final run time clocks in at 19:56.
Thinking that this is likely due to the fact that the red channel is so dark, and therefore not reproducing at the same color as the red lens of the glasses, I went back to After Effects and raised the red gamma of the left eye from 1.0 to 1.5 and re-rendered the movie.
This version worked significantly better. The biggest draw back is that now we're pretty much dealing with a black and white movie. If I would have planned better, I would have incorporated more purples, greens and yellows as they seem to retain their color even through the 3-D glasses. All other colors are drained down to a kind of purplish netherworld. However, the 3-D works! Ah, the tradeoff. Looking at the image on the TV without the glasses, the whole thing looks reddish and the red/left color appears really bright.
Some of the effects work well (a shovel handle during the opening credits protruded well into my viewing room,) whereas I could percieve more off-the-screen action when characters were reaching towards the audience when looked at on the computer monitor.
In other news, I completed the end credit sequence last night. The movie's final run time clocks in at 19:56.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
DVD menus
I'm still working on the DVD features... now I've moved on to the menus. I'm repurposing animation already done for the promotional campaign and retooling it - the main menu opens with some video previously featured in the teaser trailer (only color corrected to match the hues of the film, and the Monster's coat has been replaced with what he wears in the movie), then segues into a shot of the foggy woods. The menu options come flying up from the bottom of the screen (courtesy of 3D Invigorator) while electricity snakes over the logo above. I'm using claw marks as the highlight selection.
The Special Features menu is a shot of a graveyard that was used in the discarded opening title sequence. Unfortunately, although the old title sequence was rendered in 3-D, I seem to have lost the right eye sequence so you'll only be able to see this one flat. The trailer, the teaser trailer and the Raven 3-D trailer will all be viewable in either 2-D, anaglyphic 3-D or field sequential 3-D.
I've also been giving some thought to the eventual premiere of the movie. We'll likely do it somewhere here in Rockford, but I was trying to figure out if there was a way to project it in color (polarized) 3-D. The only methods I could work out were using two projectors and somehow synching up playback of the movie on two laptops (a method fraught with timing difficulties), or rigging up some kind of beamsplitter rig. I made something similar when I was a kid that involved projecting a side by side version of the movie toward a clipboard containing two mirrors held in place by bookends, glue and a hinge. The way the rig worked was you would project an inverted, mirror image of your movie at the mirrors with one image falling on one mirror and one in the other; one mirror would be on a hinge so you could fold the on screen pictures (which fall on a silver screen 45 degrees and across the room from your projector) on top of each other. You'd have to put some kind of polarizing filters on the mirrors or on the projector lens for this to work and you'd be unable to tilt the projector to get a good angle at the screen. Needless to say, this approach is also a minefield of problems - so maybe the old red/blue anaglyph approach is the way to go.
The Special Features menu is a shot of a graveyard that was used in the discarded opening title sequence. Unfortunately, although the old title sequence was rendered in 3-D, I seem to have lost the right eye sequence so you'll only be able to see this one flat. The trailer, the teaser trailer and the Raven 3-D trailer will all be viewable in either 2-D, anaglyphic 3-D or field sequential 3-D.
I've also been giving some thought to the eventual premiere of the movie. We'll likely do it somewhere here in Rockford, but I was trying to figure out if there was a way to project it in color (polarized) 3-D. The only methods I could work out were using two projectors and somehow synching up playback of the movie on two laptops (a method fraught with timing difficulties), or rigging up some kind of beamsplitter rig. I made something similar when I was a kid that involved projecting a side by side version of the movie toward a clipboard containing two mirrors held in place by bookends, glue and a hinge. The way the rig worked was you would project an inverted, mirror image of your movie at the mirrors with one image falling on one mirror and one in the other; one mirror would be on a hinge so you could fold the on screen pictures (which fall on a silver screen 45 degrees and across the room from your projector) on top of each other. You'd have to put some kind of polarizing filters on the mirrors or on the projector lens for this to work and you'd be unable to tilt the projector to get a good angle at the screen. Needless to say, this approach is also a minefield of problems - so maybe the old red/blue anaglyph approach is the way to go.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Making the 3-D Composite
I'm using After Effects to do the final 3-D mix of the movie, so for those of you who are more video editing/technically oriented, here's an explanation of how I'm doing it:
1. Rendering out right eye/left eye versions of each scene from Poser. Each shot is saved in an AVI file format with a sequential, numeric labeling system - i.e. 0101, 0102, etc. The right and left eye files have identical names but are saved in separate folders, Right and Left.
2. Editing the left eye sequence in Premiere. The project file is saved as FvTWM_Left.pprj. Then, I rename the "Left" folder as "~eft", so when I reload the project in Premiere, it asks "where is the file 0101", etc. By pointing it to the "Right" folder, and since the clips have identical names, it loads up the right eye version of the movie with all the edits to the left eye version still intact. I saved this as FvTWM_Right.pprj.
3. In After Effects, I import both projects. Then, I use the Layer>Pre-Compose feature to flatten all the clips into one layer for each eye, giving me a Right layer and a Left layer.
4. Create a new comp in After Effects which contains both layers stacked on top of each other. To the Left layer, which is on top, I apply the Set Channels filter - taking the Green channel from the Left layer and combining it with the Green and Blue channels from the Right layer. Now, in a perfect world I should be taking the Red channel from the Left layer, but since I wasn't planning ahead when I made the animation, I made certain clothing and prop items red. In the red channel, these read as bright red, but when you look through the blue lens of the 3-D glasses, it reads as black. This produces a flickering effect, known as retinal rivalry.
To compensate for this, I'm extracting the Green channel from the Left layer, which alters the color of the scene and makes the reds appear dark in through both the red and blue lenses. Unfortunately, it also saps more of the color from the movie, so the anaglyph version of the movie looks a bit purplish. Yellows and greens retain their colors ok, but every other color becomes a muted version of itself.
The HQFS (high quality field sequential) version of the movie will be a bit easier to do in this regard, as it simply means applying After Effects' 3-D glasses filter to the Left layer and selecting Interlaced. However, there's another challenge to overcome there, as the movie must run at 29.97 frames per second for the interlaced effect to work, and the movie is rendered out at 24 frames per second. I'm assuming that I'll have to find a way to compensate for problems with audio sync.
1. Rendering out right eye/left eye versions of each scene from Poser. Each shot is saved in an AVI file format with a sequential, numeric labeling system - i.e. 0101, 0102, etc. The right and left eye files have identical names but are saved in separate folders, Right and Left.
2. Editing the left eye sequence in Premiere. The project file is saved as FvTWM_Left.pprj. Then, I rename the "Left" folder as "~eft", so when I reload the project in Premiere, it asks "where is the file 0101", etc. By pointing it to the "Right" folder, and since the clips have identical names, it loads up the right eye version of the movie with all the edits to the left eye version still intact. I saved this as FvTWM_Right.pprj.
3. In After Effects, I import both projects. Then, I use the Layer>Pre-Compose feature to flatten all the clips into one layer for each eye, giving me a Right layer and a Left layer.
4. Create a new comp in After Effects which contains both layers stacked on top of each other. To the Left layer, which is on top, I apply the Set Channels filter - taking the Green channel from the Left layer and combining it with the Green and Blue channels from the Right layer. Now, in a perfect world I should be taking the Red channel from the Left layer, but since I wasn't planning ahead when I made the animation, I made certain clothing and prop items red. In the red channel, these read as bright red, but when you look through the blue lens of the 3-D glasses, it reads as black. This produces a flickering effect, known as retinal rivalry.
To compensate for this, I'm extracting the Green channel from the Left layer, which alters the color of the scene and makes the reds appear dark in through both the red and blue lenses. Unfortunately, it also saps more of the color from the movie, so the anaglyph version of the movie looks a bit purplish. Yellows and greens retain their colors ok, but every other color becomes a muted version of itself.
The HQFS (high quality field sequential) version of the movie will be a bit easier to do in this regard, as it simply means applying After Effects' 3-D glasses filter to the Left layer and selecting Interlaced. However, there's another challenge to overcome there, as the movie must run at 29.97 frames per second for the interlaced effect to work, and the movie is rendered out at 24 frames per second. I'm assuming that I'll have to find a way to compensate for problems with audio sync.
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