Infographic

[mottosso]

Production began yesterday, here's a summary of where pre-production took me.

Reference

The key thing here is not to look as good as possible, but to look as good as possible as created by a single person with 1 computer in less then 2 weeks.

The style that inspired me the most is from the game Another World/Out of this world (Europe/US), due to it's minimalistic shapes and animation.

Making good use of silhouettes, it's conservative in the amount of visible information, spending resources only on parts that matter to the story and thus forcing our minds to fill in detail where none is. Effective and requiring very little technical effort. Also note the use of shaded backgrounds against flat foregrounds.

Then there's Grand Central, from students at Gobelins.

Their work is minimalist, yet slick with gradients covering most of their flat-shaded surfaces. This adds scale and visual appeal without too much overhead.

There might be time to add gradients to the flat-shaded nature of things, but it will have to be a last and optional step. Shadows will be modeled, if any.

For the full gamut of reference, visit the Dropbox directory or GitHub repository

Shading & Lighting

Shading and lighting involves quite an extra bit of work which may not necessarily add to the value of the video. Remember, the prime purpose is to communicate how Pyblish works at the highest possible level, using the assembly line as an analogy. Anything that takes away from that message is harmful, and anything that accentuates it is good. Lighting does neither or harm; in that it instead forces the audience to spend valuable thinking effort on how pretty/ugly the video it.

Other than that is of course my own inexperience with shading; what you see in the above screenshots is close to how far I am able to go, and even though I can get assistance from others, rendering is still a computationally heavy process which ultimately kills creativity and perhaps most importantly - time.

The goal is to have this video finished before the end of the year (that's two weeks, including the Christmas time-sink). This includes modeling, rigging, animation but also music, sound effects and typography/motion graphics for the text-based narrative. I got an interesting comment on the proposed style - "With a style like that [flat-shaded] I would guess you could finish the video in a week". Sadly, shading is only a very small portion of a finished film and doesn't account for time taken animating.

Environment

I had some ideas for an environment, but alas modeling it in a flat-shaded style turned out to be more difficult that I had anticipated.

Tomorrow I will skip ahead and get on with modeling the character, as above, in a flat-shaded style, but also including a hip and legs, for shot 190 in which the argue in full-frame. Modeling will also include 3 different character, each with his own personality, as reflected by their alternate "folds", as they will all consist of origami polygons.

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Pre-production summary

Finally, based on all of the above, this is what we've got to work with.

Styleframe

This styleframe is meant to encapsulate the look and feel of the main character(s) along with a potential shading. The final shading will most likely not contain linework however, merely shapes with a limited palette of colors.

Animatic

(click to play)

The animatic, including temptrack for music. The intro is yet to be decided upon, the purpose here is to move from "an actual feature film" into how the main character then is created throughout the assembly line. The key thing is impact for viewers coming from Facebook and Youtube - whose attention span is < 3 seconds.

Shading

The model will end up looking something like this; flat, simple and made out of origami. Origami adds another level of detail that would otherwise be difficult to achieve with such simple characters as seen in the animatic. Another benefit of animating in 3d is that we're free to add this detail at very little cost to neither modeling nor articulation.

Animation

Finally, animation tests - each one taking about 30 minutes from start to finish, the goal being to figure out whether to go for producing the film in 3d (Autodesk Maya) or 2d (TVPaint).

It's a tough call, they both add something valuable to the mix, but I ended up going for 3d as I'd like the animation to be smooth and realistic-looking, to counter-act the otherwise flat and 2d-looking shading.

[mottosso]

Character Design

The three involved characters have certain traits. We need one who makes the mistake, and one to find it and blame him for it, and finally a neutral character who's in the middle of it all.

Discovery

First off, let's go discover some interesting shapes, following our origami-look from the reference hunting above.

For the one who makes the fault, let's call him Jon, I think I'd like him to be a young, thin fellow. Someone who looks likely to make a mistake. The one who finds the fault should be the opposite; a veteran with little patience for fooling around. A tank. Let's call him Arnour. Finally, the centerpiece is neutral, does her jobs well and isn't easily surprised. Let's call her Cassandra.

Let's find these three characters now.

Those should do. Let's clean the up a little.

Refinement (animated fade)

Jon, Cassandra and Arnour.

Color

As they will be flat-shaded, we'll need to assign colors to their inner silhouettes so as to make it appear as though they have depth, even though we aren't allowed to use shading.

[mottosso]

And here's what the models looks like.

They each got a color per personality, as opposed to the varying shades of colors in the original concept art. I think it will make more sense as the camera moves between the three, as their slight differences in shade might otherwise get lost in the overall motion. Or worse yet, look like sloppy color matching.

[mottosso]

As it happens, the current look and work required to maintain this look isn't what I had hoped.

Instead, I'll have a look at what would be required to get this project made fully in 2d. A number of obstacles come to mind.

• Performance
• Camera motion
• Vector animation

Performance

As the look and feel of this project is to be flat-shaded, rendering in 3d is real-time regardless of resolution and fps. In a raster-based 2d animation software as the one I will be using, performance relates to size of project and number of images per second.

Project	Dimensions/FPS	Size	CPU Load	Can Scrub?
v011.tvpp	720p@12fps	28mb	20%	Yes
v011.tvpp	1080p@24fps	80.5mb	66%	Yes
v011.tvpp	5200x1300@24fps	117mb	73%	Yes

Resolution

The resolution of the project will have to be determined prior to commencing any work, as each stroke is bitmapped and locked into whichever dimension they are drawn in. Ideally, we'd be looking at a 1080p, as it will unlikely need to go higher for the lifespan of the video, and can always be rescaled to a smaller size depending on the distribution media; e.g. 720p for web versus 480p for phones etc.

However, as the resolution is directly tied to performance, it might be make the overall experience sluggish and less flexible therefore.

The animatic was a good experience, chipping on at 720p with no lag or memory overruns for the full duration of the film, including a number of layers.

Images Per Second

Like with resolution, fps also takes a toll on performance but more importantly, it has a major impact on the amount of work involved. Ideally, the project would run at 25 fps. The animatic runs at 12 fps.

An FPS Compromise

It's quite allright to have camera and overall animation be at different rates; e.g. having smooth camera motion at 25 fps whereas leaving the rest of the animation at 12 fps. It does appear a bit sluggish during extreme moves, but we aren't having any of that anyway. It doesn't alleviate the added CPU and memory consumption however.

Camera motion

The camera is important in this film, yet 2d and cameras isn't a little tricky. For one thing, camera motion is achieved by first zooming into the canvas, and translating it. This means that the canvas will need to be large enough for the full motion of the camera, and in our case the camera will be moving from an upper-body shot covering three workers horizontally.

Considering this, regular 720p and 1080p resolution must be increased horizontally to accommodate for this motion, weighing in at 5760px wide @ 1080 and 3840px @ 720, plus margins to remain flexible with this motion.

Vector Animation

There is an alternative to animating in 2d which involves animating with shapes as opposed to raster images; the most prominent example that comes to mind is Toon Boom.

This would remove much of the hassle involved with resolutions and cameras, as it would be resolution independent. However, as I have no experience with it, using this would require also getting to grips with new software and considering our short timeline, this may be unfeasable.

Summary

In summary, completing this film in 2d as opposed to 3d does have it's benefits but as we've seen it also carries some baggage. I'll run this path for now and see where it leads me. Roughly extrapolating the time required to finish this in 3d is about 5-6 weeks, including margin for error and unexpected circumstances. This should take no more than 2 weeks from now. Time will tell whether my guesstimate is accurate, fingers crossed.

[mottosso]

Using the animatable camera turned out to have a few quirks of its own. Mainly, the canvas size, but also:

1. As I'm looking to have the puppet essentially stay still in the middle of the frame during transitions, I'll have to animate the the transition both in terms of camera but also within each frame, to compensate for the movement. This means that the motion will be doubly animated, once for the camera and second for the compensation, meaning we're loosing out on the benefit of using the camera to begin with
2. Secondly, animated motion blur isn't as intuitive, as we're essentially animating the characters sitting still. Here we're also forced to animate the transition into the frames, loosing the flexibility, but also loosing the feedback from transitioning, making it more difficult to get good looking motion blur.

Overall looking good

I'm happy with the interactivity so far, the feel of animating and think that the result will end up looking great. Here's a work in progress.

[mottosso]

Working Within Limitations

As with many things so far, things weren't as simple as they seemed and a number of unforeseen problems have appeared along the way; mainly that 2d animation is not easy and takes a long time. So, the next step is to reduce and work within what is possible. Once animation is finished, there is original music and sound-setting to worry about - both of which are as creatively demanding as this and require discipline and time.

Line Weight

As part of reducing goals, let's explore how we can take what we've got and make it as appealing as can be. First one out is to darken the background; staring into whiteness cause strain on at least my eyes and white-on-black is a little more appealing both visually and creatively.

Thick lines

One option is to keep the lines thick; this leaves less empty space on-screen and hides the fact that drawings are hastily made. It does however look rather blobby and "unprofessional".

Thin lines

If we turn it around and instead draw more lines of thinner width, things start to look a little more interesting. Now, the amount of detail remains the same but the perceived detail is up. Making it look like there's more detail then there actually is, as out brains compensate for lines heading the wrong way or not aligning with the overall picture. The fact that they flicker over time to keep life in the drawings then adds additional information.