Voice Recording

It's been busy around here. There's a bit of a transition going on at my job (which could leave me out of one), so that's been on my mind lately. We rounded up a new group of voices and recorded them last week; we're now left with one major role to cast, and one or two supporting roles. Here's the cast list to date: Grace Carreno, Tom Zack, Charles Reeder, Meghan Campbell, Andrew Carlson, and Elaine Clarke. One of these days I'll actually get around to posting the cast photos!

I went and designed much of the main title sequence after having an inspiration one night; I actually started trying to ape some of the typeface and graphics of the old 1930's movie trailers, but settled on something that looks like a 3-D version of something you'd see on late night Chiller Theater. The depth works great, and I'm happy.

I'm currently working on that opening sequence - another shot that has to be split into multiple layers to render without overloading the computer. This is taking longer than anticipated, but at least we're moving forward.

Steady As She Goes

Hit a bit of a setback, as the 20 second shot I was talking about in my last post had to be scrapped after a week's worth of work. It turns out I didn't calculate the axis of depth correctly for the 3D and both right and left eye views had to be trashed. This after rendering out six layers of elements per eye! The shot is now complete, and correctly registered, but talk about trying a man's faith.

I have moved on to other shots in the sequence, but progress is slow. I've abandoned the idea of animating everything and then coming back to render it later, in favor of setting up the animation and then rendering out the dual eye versions. This takes between 2-3 days per shot, and maybe more time will be required later, as the scenes become more complex. I'm doing this to check the final 3D version to make sure everything is correctly registered.

Going Forward...

I have been able to achieve an acceptable level of production from Poser, so I guess that means we're back in business. I've also had to re-evaluate a couple of positions within the last week.

First, since Poser absolutely refuses to produce the opening shot of the movie, I've had to chop it into layers to get it done. Basically I'm doing it in passes - on this pass, we render only the ground; on the next, the kids walking; on the following, the trees, etc. The shot in question is an overhead tracking shot that follows the three children from our story to a grisly scene in the woods. It will consist of at least five seperate layers. Once each layer is rendered, I'll composite them together in After Effects. I did this sort of thing a lot with the final sequences of RAVEN 2.

At this point, the one minute sequence which I animated back in January - and have been rendering out ever since - is done. I'm using this as my test sequence, and have prepared a DVD with the three versions of it for study. Although my wife says that my character animation has improved since the RAVEN days, the overall look of the footage is taking some getting used to. The desaturated color scheme is more severe than it appeared on my PC monitor. In order to accomodate the 3D, I overlit everything - and on TV it looks almost too bright (especially since the scene in question takes place by moonlight).

Due to the nature of interlaced TV fields, the field sequential 3D version displays more noticable jagged lines on objects than I was anticipating. The anaglyph version requires significant tweaking of the TV's color settings to achieve a tolerable effect (it does work, but the depth effects are not as pronounced as the field sequential version, and ghosting is a fact of life). Maybe this could be remedied by including a couple of setup screens on the eventual DVD.

And, the streaking title sequence will probably not make it to the final film. The style is just not in keeping with the tone of the movie. Maybe I can use it in the trailer...

I keep looking at the thin script sitting on my desk and wondering why I wanted to make this movie so complicated. It's scope, in both the number of principal characters and its locations, are much more ambitious than the two RAVEN films. At this point, nearly four months after starting the project, it feels like I'm standing at the base of a mountain, looking up at the summit - and it's beginning to dawn on me just how much work is going to be required to pull this off. I'm toying with the idea of taking another pass at the script and paring it down, striking most of the peripheral characters and making it more of a three character piece: the little girl Leeta, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Wolfman.

We'll see what happens. The computer's time for this week, and maybe some of next week, will be taken up with rendering out right and left pairs of each layer of this first shot. More as it happens...

Production in Jeopardy

It has now been three months since any real animation work has been done on "Frankenstein vs the Wolfman". And now we've hit a snag that may cause the whole project to collapse.
I upgraded my computer to an AMD 64-bit 3000+ processor and brought the system RAM up to 1GB. You would think with the added power, things would work smoothly.
You would be wrong.

Poser is a tempermental program. Although it supports animation, it's really designed for making still images. I've come to this realization because for the past 2 weeks, I've been trying to get it to render out more than 40 frames at a time without crashing with "Out of Memory" errors. This is despite the fact that it's only using a fraction of the total memory on my machine (both the physical and the virtual memory combined). Forty frames is just a hair under 2 seconds worth of animation, and it would take a lifetime to complete this movie at that speed.

Funny, but with 512MB on my previous machine, I could get Poser to output between 100-140 frames before giving up the ghost. Was it too much to expect that additional RAM would allow me to render more, and not less? The upswing is that it renders faster, but it hardly seems an even trade.

I'm not defeated yet. There are a couple of ideas I have for tweaking some of the system settings, hopefully to coax the program into better behavior. But, if I can't get results better than 40 some frames before a crash, then I'll be shutting down the movie.

Stay tuned...

Casting Underway

Last week was a pretty productive week. Andy arranged to have about half of the voice talent come in to the studio and perform their lines; once casting & recording are complete, I'll post cast names and character photos to the Characters page. We've only have 2 leads and a few secondary characters yet to fill. This gives me enough material to begin animating characters.

Unfortunately, this week has been slowed to a stand-still. I've been trying to work on some animation, but my PC resisted. The current file that I'm working on takes up 726MB of system memory, draining the system resources and slowing the computer to a crawl.

So, as seems to happen each time I make a movie, we had to upgrade the computer. The new beast chugs along quite nicely, and is rendering a test frame from the troublesome scene as I write this.

Main Title Animation

What makes a memorable 3D title sequence? I've been looking at some of the title sequences created for 3D movies of the past in search of inspiration. In the 1950's, the titles didn't actually shoot at you - instead, they appeared as static three dimensional block lettering, hanging just infront of the screen.

During the 80's 3D wave, a company called Celestial Mechanix dreamed up the memorable 3D title sequences that streak toward the camera in JAWS 3-D, FRIDAY THE 13th PART 3, METALSTORM and THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE. I was reading an interview with them in an old Cinefantastique magazine that revealed their method of composition was to start the title at the screen instead of (dimensionally) behind it, and then to have it zoom towards the audience, with the streaks going back to the screen plane as a reference. Apparently, without that reference, your eye has trouble determining just how far off the screen the titles appear.

I have also examined the titles to SPACEHUNTER, (done by R/Greenberg associates, most famous for the SUPERMAN titles and the inviso-Predator effect), AMITYVILLE 3-D, and TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, most of which start behind the screen before zooming toward the audience. Only SPACEHUNTER's title graphic makes use of the streaks, and in direct comparison, Celestial Mechanix's philosophy seems to be the simplest and most direct, producing the best results. (As a comparison with modern 3D titles - Robert Rodriguez's SPY KIDS 3-D title graphic starts behind the screen and streaks up to but not past it.)

After searching around (with no luck) for an After Effects plug-in that would create the streaking title sequence, I decided the best way to go about it would be to just create 3D object text in Bryce and animate the title graphic extending toward the camera on the Z axis, producing a long streak. The background of the sequence is a CGI cloud shot that I generated in Photoshop and After Effects, and composited in position of depth a few inches (or feet, depending of the size of your display) behind the screen. The inital credits - "Daredevil Films presents", etc - actually appear on the screen plane, but seem to hang in 3D space due to the fact that the clouds appear so far behind them. Then, the composited title logo materializes and shoots out toward you, and the dimensional effect is pretty dramatic.
The sequence runs about 20 seconds in total. It may not be the most original thing in the world, but hopefully it serves as a homage to those great 3D title sequences of the 1980's.

New Entry and Minor Site Update

Posted field-sequential 3D versions of the two gallery photos for those of you with LCD shutter glasses for your PC (again, if you're into 3D TV, field-sequential systems are the way to go- Razor3D has a single pair (wired) for $39.95).

I just discovered the first legitimate, feature length field-sequential 3D DVD is now available - it's Full Moon's THE CREEPS, which I caught theatrically in a one-night only 3D showing a couple of years back. The movie itself is the same kind of B-movie stuff Full Moon has been cranking out for years (they're the compnay that brought you the Puppetmaster & Demonic Toys movies), but the picture quality is better than the bootleg features available on eBay. Hopefully, if this disc sells well, it may convince other studios to release field sequential versions of their library titles.

We are currently recording voices for Frankenstein vs the Wolfman; as of this writing we've got one part in the can, with others scheduled to be recorded in the following weeks. I haven't really been doing any new animation while I wait for the voice work, but our home PCs are hard at work cranking out final renders for the completed scenes.

Also, I've done a test with Lipsinc's Mimic software, which is a program that analyzes sound files & automatically generates Poser lip and expression data: I fed the Frankenstein Monster a line and have seen him talk for the first time. The surprise discovery was how much life the program gave to the facial features while the character talks - much more than just simply matching lip movements to words. Very cool.