Category: A moment in the sun

A comedic animated short I started working on in April 2014. Currently in pre-production.

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Layout gets crazed, Pointy gets chased, deadline gets erased

It’s been 15 to 21 January 2017. This week I started and finished layout work on the chase sequence where Pointy gets chased away by the helper robot. AMITS has never had an action sequence before and it was really good fun to draw.

Quollity practices for quicker layout

I’m working much smarter with layout this time. Here’s some workflow changes I’ve made to get through more work quicker:

  • Instead of leaping straight into drawing the AMITS cast, I’m settling in first with a throw-away piece of unrelated warm-up art. It gets me thinking about perspective, construction, staging and generally gets me in a better mood to draw than starting cold.
  • I’m reusing existing assets whenever I can.
    • I draw my layout images on layers so if a background or specific character doesn’t have to change from image to image, I don’t have multiple copies of it to deal with in case of corrections.
    • If one shot has the same element as another shot except at a different zoom level (e.g. cutting wide on action), I scale and reposition elements appropriately.
    • If there’s a shot setup which is identical to something in one of the older movies, I’ll reuse it out of the old source files.
  • I’m rendering out quick scale references in Blender so that the framing and staging can be more consistent between hand-drawn layout and rough 3D. It’s super useful when I’m struggling with proportioning the characters correctly. I can also trace and tweak the 3D versions more exactly if I’m feeling particularly dumb or tired that day (most days).
Robot, Gronky and Pointy models posed roughly in Blender.
Robot, Gronky and Pointy in hand-drawn layout. Notice how Pointy’s much more panicked, Gronky’s much more tense and the speed trails indicate movement.
  • Finally, I’m heavily using Krita’s G’MIC Colorize tool in interactive mode for making mattes where characters on different layers pass in front of one another. It is a godsend to be able to draw loose and still get fills. Krita demigod David Revoy made a video which explains how to use it.

Like I said a few weeks ago, I push the ideas and expressions in layout hard, sometimes harder than the 3D can cope with. I don’t have a rig yet to capture the utter anarchy of Pointy’s “pose” in this layout drawing, but I have a few ideas. 🙂

A confused ball of Pointy rolling at high speed.

I also started sketching out an introductory scene where we see what Pointy and Gronky are doing before they meet up. I don’t know if I’ll actually use it in the finished film, but it’s a fun little bit and worth recording in some form before I forget I even dreamt it up.

The deadline goes ker-POOF!

I mentioned a couple of blogs ago that the day job was promising to be much more intense this year. It’s turned out worse than I anticipated at least in the short term.

For the sake of controlling my own stress levels, I’m not going to hold myself to the October 2017 target date I mentioned at Blender Conference 2016. The scope and difficulty of “Robot” should mean it’s ready late this year, but if I badly need downtime, the movie will just have to wait for me to collect my wits again and get back to work.

The severity of the situation is a little new so I don’t have any further insights as to how it’ll play out. I’ll keep you posted on how I’m doing, and I’ll keep beavering away on my little cartoon whenever I can.

Thanks for reading!

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Laying out and burning up

It’s been 8 to 14 January 2017. (How many times have you got the year wrong so far? My grandmother gets the actual century wrong, bless her.)

I had to squeeze my layout work around a family event on Sunday, but I did get another scene finished. I spent the rest of the week on miscellaneous things like catching up on unwatched animated movies and getting my sleep schedule back to something sensible. (Sleeping right during the week means having less sleep to catch up on during the weekend – and hence more production time!)

I finally started reading “Elemental Magic”, the standard texts on effects animation by industry veteran Joseph Gilland. The first Elemental Magic book is more “philosophy and approach” while the second is more practical instruction. Despite speaking from the perspective of hand-drawn animation, the author more than touches on CG. Simulations (like hand drawn) should fit a particular look and feel, even when it’s a particle system and mesher responsible for putting something on screen instead of an animator’s pencil. It’s great to get a sense of how an animation veteran observes and approaches their work and “Elemental Magic” is chock full of insight.

Pointy leaves a trail of dust in his wake in AMITS: Sombrero (temp materials)

I’m reading up on effects animation because there’s smoke and fire in AMITS: Robot. I’m not sure whether to go hand-drawn, wrestle with simulation or even adapt the metaball particle based smoke from AMITS: Sombrero – but whatever strikes the right balance between ease, speed, quality and art direction is what will get the movie made. Also it’ll make my layout more meaningful if I can draw smoke and fire more convincingly. 🙂

See you next week!

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A moment in the sun Journals Stuff I made

Chugging along through layout land

Welcome to the new year! Here’s a quick update for the week of 1 to 7 January 2017.

On Sunday, I finished up a whole scene full of layout images and they’re looking pretty good. It’s the last full scene of the film and it’s looking pretty fun. There’s more of a silly beat at the end now. This is nice to have because without it the movie just kind of ends.

What happen? You’ll have to wait and see!

The day job is promising to be much more intense this year than last year. It could be that I just use Sundays and public holidays to create Gronky and Pointy’s first outing and reserve weeknights for keeping myself sane. Or maybe it won’t be that bad. Or maybe it’ll be worse. Who knows! Either way, slotting in movie-making alongside a full-time day job is part of this long journey so I’ll keep you posted! 🙂

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A moment in the sun Journals Stuff I made

A quick Xmas break

The week of 25 to 31 Dec 2016 slots neatly into the end of the year. No split year entry, hurrah!

It would be nice to say I’ve been hard at work on my week off from the day job, but I’m having a quick gaming break instead. I’m really happy that Blender doesn’t crash as often as Fallout 4 does otherwise I’d probably give up on 3D animation altogether. So frustrating!

The new layout images started this week. Gronky hears a noise behind him..

This week I started drawing layout images for AMITS: Robot. I’ve already got a sheet of rough thumbnail images with dialogue and action which map out the story. During layout, these rough thumbnail images are fleshed out into clearer images like the one above.

The layout images serve multiple purposes – they make my pitchamatic and story reel much clearer, and once I start rough animation I use them for a blocking and staging reference. They’re almost key pose drawings, but not quite…

A comparison of layout and rough animation from AMITS: Sombrero.

But this is 3D animation! you may wonder. Why not go straight to 3D and skip all the drawings nobody will see?

For one, the right expression is much quicker and easier for me to find with line drawing, whereas 3D character animation is an ongoing battle against the character rig’s limitations. A good character drawing is a tangible visual idea which gives that battle a focus and an aim. With that tangible idea in front of me, I can concentrate on the task of bringing the character to life; without the tangible idea, there’s potentially too much for me to invent out of thin air.

In short, experience has taught me I’m happier and more productive when I’ve figured out what I’ll be doing before I open up Blender, and layout drawings are a key part of that planning process. Also, funny drawings are more interesting to look at than words on a page. 🙂

This week I also experimented with Blender’s new micro-displacement feature for the desert ground cover. It shows some promise but I feel like I’ll end up using a mixed solution with procedural shading and geometry, especially in the foreground. Here’s a sneak peek at the ground cover in progress.

That’s about it for this year. Here’s to a tolerable 2017, hopefully made actually nicer by me finishing an actual movie for people to watch.

Now, back to hiding from Super Mutants and wishing I’d put more points into melee..

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A moment in the sun Journals Stuff I made

Funny signs and Making Time – the quollism version

18 to 24 December 2016 has zipped by. Things are very definitely getting summery here. We had a stupidly hot 42.4C day on Wednesday, there’s bushfires all over the place, and I’ve finished up at the day-job for the year as of yesterday afternoon. It’s been another fairly light week for AMITS activity.

I made that “do not bury” sign I was talking about last week and slapped it all over the bus stop. I’m liking it. As long as I can convey that the signs are specifically for Gronky, it has the making of a good ambient gag and it has merch potential too.

The new bus stop, complete with instructions for Gronky not to bury it.

Aside from tweaking the action in the bus stop scene, figuring out how to fix broken file references and a false start on building a pitchamatic, that’s about all I got up to this week. Lately I’ve been summer-tired and super distractable – learning the open-source stenography system Plover has been nifty but time-consuming, and the day job had an end of year ramp-up before booting me out of the office over Christmas for the first time ever. I’m hoping with the coming week away from the day job I can get some more planning work done and recover some momentum.

Jason van Gumster’s excellent Open Source Creative Podcast spent its latest episode talking about making time for personal projects and it’s well worth a listen. Much of what Jason talks about I’ve done myself over the last couple of years.

Making time to make a movie

The time to make A Moment In The Sun is very much consciously set aside. I don’t watch a lot of TV and when I do it’s half-hour episodes of light and fluffy stuff instead of something heavy and long like Westworld. I go months between gaming, then I binge on something hard for a week or two. (The most recent one was Grand Theft Auto V back in September.) Gaming or watching TV and the odd movie pass the time just fine, but actually making stuff is a more fulfilling use of my time and energy.

As a night owl I tend to work late into the night instead of waking up early. I also need more than five hours of sleep a night (unlike Jason) so if I work a few late nights, I make a point of catching up on sleep over the weekend. This is easier to get away with in summer because the days are so hot that I can do laundry later in the afternoon and it’ll be dry by dusk.

My working hours depend on the stage of production I’m at. If I’m writing and playing with ideas, the work is more nebulous so I’m less strict with myself. As soon as the tasks get more concrete and tangible, there’s spreadsheets and lists of things to do and that makes the path ahead much clearer.

On weeknights I try to start work on AMITS by nine o’clock and finish up by midnight. (If I’m really inspired and enthused, I may even get straight to work once I get home.) On Sundays, I like to have started by midday and I’ll keep going until late evening with a long meal break somewhere in the middle. I’m fairly militant with my family and friends about Sundays being my movie day, which means any shopping and laundry and other life maintenance gets squeezed into Friday night or Saturday.

Every day I log time spent and activities performed so that I have a record of what I did and when and how much of it I did. Among other things, it makes writing these little weekly updates much easier because there’s less to remember. 🙂

Enthusiasm is also a massive factor in getting work done, but that will get a blog post of its own. Bye for now!