Hat's Off To Howie
Steve K
Posts: 3,233
I work almost exclusively in Carrara Pro and probably 98% of the time I use imported Poser format items. They almost always work fine, but usually there is some adjustment necessary - textures, lighting, etc. Not a big problem, but its always nice to remember how easy it is to use Carrara format items, like the landscapes by the great Howie Farkes. I just finished this short animation using his "Yule Cottage" and "Secret Lake Seasons" (the winter season, of course). I think it came out nicely, many thanks, Howie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxcbh71VUlg&list=UUlMEK10oWdfqx6NaNAGJtFA
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Comments
Love it.
That's incredible Steve! Love it! How did you do the aurora borealis lights? They looked fantastic! This whole animation made me smile, I wasn't very different than that when I was a kid. Heck, I'm not that much different now :)
Thanks, Chickenman and Jonstark, I enjoyed doing it ... for once I was not trying to do a five minute animation in two days for the 48 Hour Film contest. This is one minute animation done at a leisurely pace while I unzipped a bunch of stuff bought over the previous ... long time. I mean, it was on sale, right, and I'll use it ... someday ... :P
The aurora was done with Particle Illusion, a 2D effects program that can overlay any still or video and has many, many free presets that can be tweaked in many, many ways. Although I used the aurora preset as is (there are several in the June 2003 free download batch). More here (its now owned by Wondertouch):
http://www.wondertouch.com/index_2.asp
The aurora "emitter" (preset) got some discussion long ago by a couple of PI heavyweight emitter creators, Deane and Rabinowitz:
https://forums.creativecow.net/archivethread/23/601279
That is excellent, Steve! Love it!
Thanks, Dartanbeck. Coming from you, high praise. :wow:
Steve K - long time subber of your channel anyways but just wanted to say another winning production.
As well as the graphics your use of sound f/x particularly the EQ on the voices adds a real sense of authenticity. Well done, here's to the next one.
Thanks, SFF, especially for noticing the little things. I've mentioned before that I don't like dialogue, partly to avoid the lip syncing in the two day contests. But also because this is a visual medium, so we should be "showing", not "telling", right? As I've mentioned before, director Stanley Kubrick is one of my heroes, a favorite observation:
"At some point about halfway through 2001: A Space Odyssey here's what everyone should be thinking: 'WTF Stanley Kubrick? There's no more dialogue in this movie? I hate you.' No one thinks that because the film is a complete transfixing masterpiece. Kubrick has about 10 movies that good, and each is completely different from the rest."
http://gizmodo.com/5864704/film-nerds-are-drooling-over-stanley-kubricks-incredible-early-photography/
I've read that Kubrick would take a screenplay and cross out lines of dialogue, saying the actor should convey the message with motion, facial expression, etc.
:vampire: <= sound effect smacking lips. Deleted line: "I vant to suck your blood!"</p>
SteveK
You've made some good points. I don't enjoy lip sync. For one it never looks right, and condemns your piece to amateur 3d-land, and secondly getting close to being right takes a lot of time. I too cross out lots of lines when it comes to it - through necessity, there is never enough time.
Also as a lone animator you are limited as to what you can realistically achieve. I've been rendering at 1080 but I'm thinking of going back to 720 and even 12fps. That would overcome the rendering headache. It can always be rendered at full quality and frame rate in the future as computing power improves.
You made me re-think - which is good - thanks :)
Even the animation greats like Harryhausen avoided it. Off the top of my head I can't think of any of his own stop-motion animation that had spoken dialogue.
"For the cyclops have no speech. It [the magic lamp] is useless to them." :)
And great job, Steve.
"For the cyclops have no speech. It [the magic lamp] is useless to them." :)
And great job, Steve.
Thanks, diomede64. I don't remember if I mentioned this here, but I did get some animator (and wife) feedback for the first pass and did a second pass, something not usually possible in the two day contests. It really did help, no surprise.
Just to mention the exception that proves the rule, a great movie (7.7 at IMDB) is "My Dinner With Andre". Per Roger Ebert (RIP):
"Wally and Andre meet, sit down, talk for almost two hours. ... It should be unwatchable, and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted."
So, yeah, you can have a lot of dialogue, but it better be really good dialogue. Ebert again:
"Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of clichés. I thought for a moment, and then answered, 'My Dinner With Andre.' ” (this for two hours of conversation)
Too many shows take this approach from "Star Trek" (TOS):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0yXqU-w9U0
:ohh: :ohh: :ohh: :ohh:
I have had several discussions with the local 48 Hour Film contest producer about this. She has been very helpful, and has the perspective of seeing lots of videos that must look good on a theater screen. After all that, I have decided to stay with 720x480. She agrees that when I label the video as such, she can make it look OK on the screen, i.e. the correct proportions (3:2). The last couple of my entries have looked fine on the theater screen. I do use 30 fps, I dunno about lower frame rates.
720x480? I use this resolution for animation test rendering. Sure you can upscale it, but modern cinema is 4K! Even on a 1K display it looks like an old video tape, expecting it to look ok on 4x the resolution again - wow - that's pushing it I would have thought.
720x480? I use this resolution for animation test rendering. Sure you can upscale it, but modern cinema is 4K! Even on a 1K display it looks like an old video tape, expecting it to look ok on 4x the resolution again - wow - that's pushing it I would have thought.
This is my 48 Hour Film contest mentality, a five minute animation in two days.. "Every second counts ...", including render time :P
It actually doesn't look too bad on the theater's screen, the audience (mostly other 48 Hour contest team members) seem to enjoy them.
720x480? I use this resolution for animation test rendering. Sure you can upscale it, but modern cinema is 4K! Even on a 1K display it looks like an old video tape, expecting it to look ok on 4x the resolution again - wow - that's pushing it I would have thought.
The projector that the theater uses is most likely not the 4K projector they use for feature films. More than likely it is a good quality digital projector that can handle 1080P videos or lower. Probably it is normally used to project local or in-theater advertisements before the actual show. The real advantage to Steve's group is being able to project the image onto a large, reflective screen, the seating capacity and the audio/acoustics in the theater.
I forgot to mention this before Steve, so please forgive me. Your video was great!
I benefit from this debate on the formats of images to put a question: when one render in maximum quality with a resolution of 0.5 pxl, can one does say that one can double the resolution in an edting program ?
I always see that my animations are a lot better than traditional HD and I render at 1050x576p.
Ok thanks for straightening me out there guys.
If it was 1K projector that would make sense, as I say from my own experience those ratios you can get away with as it would look like VHS quality which is acceptable in some cases.
Also I agree every second does count for productivity reasons.
So far I've taken the other approach. Render at 1K and be patient. This has cost me in that the time I can give to editing / animating is reduced. So we wait (impatiently!) for technology to become cheaper to facilitate the quality in a reasonable time frame.
DUDU - I guess you try all the combinations until you are happy. I don't know the answer but I use my eyes as the final guide.
I don't think we disagree, its just different situations. I also suspect the 48 Hour contest does not use the feature film projector, so the low res entries like mine look OK. It is interesting that they require the Quicktime codec DV/DVCPRO-NTSC, and say that if your ~five minute video is less than 1 GB, you've probably done something wrong. Some of my video making friends think that sounds crazy, way too big, but I somehow submitted a much smaller file a few years back and it looked bad in the theater. For uploading to YouTube, I typically render a Windows Media Video (*.wmv) format at the highest quality, and it is way smaller ... and looks OK to me.
Steve K
Ok thanks. Re youtube I also upload wmv to youtube vs mp4 files which are much larger and seem to miss a few of the colours.
Over Youtube, I don't hesitate any more to uploading some uncompressed .avi files, it make an excellent conversion itself.
The mp4 files are compresses and if you do it wrong, it would look bad. I'm not sure what CODEC scheme you're using for the wmv. I've had some hit and miss luck with my mp4 settings, but generally a higher bit-rate per frame and a two pass encoding will get you better results. I haven't found the size to be larger even with a two pass encode so that may be another issue.
It is normal for color data to be discarded in compression. Videos may even look darker or muddier. Basically, when you compress your file and upload it to youtube it is getting compressed twice. The first time by you, and the second time by youtube. The least amount of compression you can use, the better results you'll get after youtube applies its own compression.