OG’s BLOG

Tons and tons of great spaceship art appear at Concept Ships, the “Online Animated Spaceship and Experimental Aircraft Art Magazine”. Go have a look!

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.

I love hearing my favorite artists talk about their craft. Up today: Maurice Sendak. Go to Drawn! and hear him talk.

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…

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.

Announcing The Tale of How coffee table book! Following the success of the insanely creative Tale of How animated short (winner of 17 international awards), The Blackheart Gang turned this dark fantasy into a 40 page coffee table book, which includes a DVD with the animation, the print series and a biography of the author and the never before heard account of how The Blackheart Gang murdered the above mentioned author and stole his story. Having just returned from the realm of the dead The  Blackheart Gang will also be displaying a collection of their latest artifacts.

What a great idea! 1884: Yesterday’s Future is a whacked-out Terry Gilliam-looking mishmash of techniques including puppets, 2D and 3D elements, all cobbled together to tell a tongue-in-cheek steampunk past-future comedic adventure story. Little surprise that the Tim Ollive and Dennis De Groot test footage spawned a Real Film Deal, and that the production has landed at Peculiar Pictures where none other than Terry Gilliam himself is Executive Producer.

Thanks to friend of the blog Michael Dowswell for the tip!

Friend of the blog COS from all the way over in Germany has worked up a couple of really fun projects – trailers for films he thinks would be fun to make. They are a lot of fun to watch, and really grip the genre he’s going for in each case. He even let me do some voice acting work on these, and as you know, I’m a frustrated actor, so that was horribly fun for me. Go watch ‘em!

This is the end of the line, folks – the final AnimWatch Podcast. The final part of my continuing series on How to Make Films the AnimWatch Way, and thoughts on what I’ve learned from running AnimWatch. Via con Dios, mi amigos! Featuring music by Tim Larkin.

Why? With all the talent out there why do films like this get made? The trailer for the upcoming stop-motion animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox is up, featuring the incredible acting skills of Meryl Streep, George Clooney and Bill Murray, among many, many other Big Names. I’m only judging from the trailer here, but it sure looks like a complete and utter waste of talent. Horrible. Worse than crappy. Character design – boo. Lighting – oh, come on! Color – you MUST be blind. Seriously. Comic timing – Nope. And you’ve got Bill Murray! BILL! MURRAY!

All those stars and Wes Anderson to boot – unless all those Big Names donated their talents, it’s hard to imagine how the film will earn back its development budget. And I’m sure when it flops, the suits responsible for perpetrating this stain upon the cinema are going to assume it’s because the film was stop-motion and “you know, people don’t like stop motion. They prefer CG.” They probably won’t think for a moment that people stayed away simply because the film did not look like a quality film.

But maybe I’ve got it all wrong and America is primed for an animated animal movie with poor comic timing that looks like it was made by 10th graders experimenting with their parent’s 16mm camera. I’d love to know how these deals get made.