OG’s BLOG

Filmmaker Fabrice O. Jouberts directs “French Roast”, an animated short which explores the many layers of human nature. It’s well designed, well written, well animated. You can watch it repeatedly. Just really great stuff!

OK. This is the kind of stuff we used to watch as kids. Granted, it’s odd, and it may explain a great many things about my generation.

But… Yep. Still funny.

heh heh…

There’s nothing like getting back to basics. I’m sure, if someone really, really wanted to, they could do something charming like this in 3D. But for some reason, they don’t.

It’s worth studying: it’s so simple. Everything happens in one shot. British director Simon Tofield is not cutting in and out for reaction shots and action shots. He’s not zooming the camera around the set. He even decided to do it in simple black and white, and so what? It just works.

Animators take note. Settle down and focus on storytelling, and if you don’t watch out, you just might create something nice.

That Simon’s Cat site is brilliant. Lots of stuff to dig through, and it’s a great example of how to generate a ton of charming, engaging material from a very simple idea. Keep It Simple, Simon.

Link sent to me by UK author Jack Eason. Thanks, Jack!

The Winter Olympics are here once again and STUDIO AKA have produced a stylized Titles Sequence for the event being held in Vancouver February 12-28. This open is called Inuit.

I know. You want your Moon Town. Thankfully you’re a patient bunch. But I wanted you to get a tiny glimpse into what is going on outside of Moon Town, so you’ll understand when I say it will be just a little bit longer.

As you know, I just finished up Payload. And you probably know we just launched our new publishing venture WishTales. You didn’t know that I have a little advertainment work to do, as well as a really nice set of animations to do for a piece of computer based training (see above). Right, two jobs in the same month after months of nothing. It never rains, but it pours.

OK, I agree with you. I have way too much going on right now. Way too much. But, come on – a robot cat, playing with an orange like a ball of yarn in the open cargo bay of a spaceship orbiting Mars… how do you say no to that? You don’t. You put your big boy pants on, you say “sleep ain’t the boss of me” and you go animate til yer eyes bleed.

And so I have, and so I shall continue til it’s done.

I can’t name these projects or show you any more about them than this, though I promise to share them with you when I’m allowed. But consider this: the one with the cat consists of 28 animations ranging from 15-60 seconds long. Yes, it keeps me from my precious Moon Town, but let’s just say it keeps me off the streets at night.

OK. Back to it.

Just showing a bit of love to Shane Acker’s film before it goes live in the UK… For a refresher on my interview with Shane, see HERE.

Just when you think a genre or mode of presenting entertainment has seen its day, something comes along to challenge that thought. Take the case of Machinarium. This is a total throwback, a point-and-click adventure game. I can hear the eyes of a legion of hipper-than-thou RealTime 3D twitch game fanatics rolling their eyes, but this thing is really cool. Besides, Machinarium won the Independent Games Festival, so even the gamesnobs recognize that it has merit.

This game was made by the same folks who brought you Samorost and Samorost2, which were very successful indie games distributed online. But Machinarium jettisons the Photoshopped graphics of its predecessors in favor of beautiful, hand-drawn art (in the words of Peter “Tokzic” Hargreaves, who shared this link with me) “As God intended”. Amen.

Machinarium has charm, simplicity, and an engaging world you can get lost in. This is the kind of thing that turns my gears.

UPDATE: Tokzic writes in to inform us – They have a short demo of the game HERE.

The company will be redoing the site soon as they will release this puppy today. HINT: Download it now.

UPDATE, 10/19/2009: I’ve bought the game, and it’s really fun. I must admit at first I thought it was just sort of scribbly and charming and European, but the more I look at the drawings the more beautiful they are. I’m in awe. I’ve drunk the Cool Aid, but OK. It’s really a good game and certainly worth the $20. HINT: Buy it at the company’s website through a secure Verisigned transaction and you even get Thomas Dvorak’s soundtrack for the game in MP3 format, so you can listen to the game even  when you’re not playing. For instance, I’m listening to it right now. Yup. I’m typing to you. But I’m thinking about Machinarium…

Well, with Toy Story 1 and 2 in a theatre near you (limited release) in Glorious Stereoscopic 3D(TM) it was only a matter of time until everyone learned the real reason those films were re-released…Toy Story 3 is on its way! Whet your appetite with a nice interview with director Lee Unkrich now online, as well as the latest trailer, which at least makes me a little more interested than the teaser, which honestly reeked of Overmilking the Franchise. The new TS3 may be overmilking it, too, but there are at least some nice character moments and the hint of a story that might hold together. The trailer does make it seem like TS3 repeats many of the themes, and even some of the moments, from its predecessors – that shot of Woody on his shelf with the slow pullback as Randy Newman’s song “I’ll Never Get Over Losing You” hits its final notes could have been part of either film. But on balance, I’m hopeful for a good film.

I’m a Pixar fan as well as a Toy Story fan, so I’ll be seeing it anyway.

What do you get when a group of South African artists blend Eastern art, extinct creatures, a huge, tentacled monster, and a white mouse named Eddy the Engineer as an unlikely hero? You get something very unusual. There are Creation Myths that explain the mysterious and the grand. The Blackheart Gang, on the other hand, has given us the “Tale of How”, which tells the legend of something a bit different.

This insanely detailed and bewildering film features mythical creatures in a mystical underground realm who owe their existence to soapy water. It’s the story of how the Parana Birds (that’s “Do-dos” to you and me) are rescued from the Tentacled Monster Otto by Eddy the Engineer, in a realm called The Household. The main order of miraculous business in The Household, of course, is to purify our bath water and make our soap.

Say it sounds odd, and I say you don’t know the half of it. In fact, The Blackheart Gang would say you don’t know a fraction of it, because this film is actually only the second part of a three part story. That story in turn is part of a larger, more ambitious epic which tells the complete legend of The Household.

“We really hope to inspire people,” says Jannes Hendrikz, Compositor and Creative Director for the BHG. “This project was about beauty, sincerity and passion. We want to share that. And hopefully, for just a moment, pull people out of the chaos they have grown so accustomed to.” The tool these artists have chosen to pull us out of “the chaos”? Four minutes of chaos of their own design.

The team was greatly influenced by old Eastern art, and wanted to capture that ancient illustrative look in the film. But it took them an awful lot of work to get it.

First, illustrator Ree Treweek drew all the elements with pen on paper, scanned them, and coloured them in Photoshop. Then, Hendrikz built 3D environments in After Effects, animated Treweek’s 2D elements, and composited live action elements, like splashing water, into the scene. “We spent a lot of time blending the 2D elements and live action to create a living world with depth and dynamics. Environmental elements like caustics and volume light, helped to achieve this look,” says Hendrikz.

The 3D elements came next. The team used the Photoshop and After Effects elements as a background plate, and animated the 3D bits to match. Justin Baker, who oversaw the 3D work in Softimage XSI, modeled all the birds and developed shaders to look like Treweek’s drawings. Then, Hendrikz composited the 3D elements back overtop of the plate. For their rendering and digital work, the team was fortunate to have access to the equipment at Blackginger Visual Effects and Animation, where Hendrikz works as a compositor and designer.

The decision over which elements would be 2D, 3D, and live action, was not a trivial one because of the illustrative look the team sought to keep. The birds and the tentacles, for instance, were good candidates for 3D because of their complex animation, whereas the live action splashes of water added to the visual free-for-all. “We wanted to maintain an authentic illustrative feel, so it was important for the 3D elements to look as 2D as possible.”

Like the monster in the Tale of How, the project itself was huge and all-encompassing. The team cites two main obstacles they had to overcome in the making of this film: time and sleep. “We ignored them. We didn’t have a life for nine months,” says Hendrikz. “Put it this way… each scene had about 300 layers to animate.”

The team learned a lot during the production of the film, as well as their earlier film, “Ringo”. But Hendrikz says it’s hard to list just what they did learn. The main thing seems to have been learning how to make a film in and of itself. None of the core team members were formally trained in art, so they simply learned by doing. “We just went with the flow. Of course we learned a lot. Looking back it’s difficult to say [just what], because the stuff you learn just becomes a part of you.”

The visual results of all this work are set to a wonderful, operatic score written by the third core team member of BHG, Markus “Wormstorm” Smit, and recorded by a talented team of voice artists. The soundtrack is more than just a musical backdrop furthering the look and feel. Its lyrics, also written by Smit, provide the narrative thread.

The team has great plans for the future, and continuing their mythology. The first installment of the team’s Household chronicles is called “Old sleepy Monster”, which tells of the creation of Otto, the antagonist of “The Tale of How”. The third installment is surely on the way, provided the team stock up on caffeine and sleep while they can.

“We see The Blackheart Gang as a lifelong project,” says Hendrikz. “And the Household epic is huge, with many branches. We will probably be working on it for the rest of our lives.”

Find out more about The Household and Tale of How at the Blackheart Gang’s website. This article originally appeared in 3D World magazine issue #79.