Livin' the dream!

Brian Park's first official outing seems to have been fairly well received by friends and internet peoples. It was featured on the front page of DailyMotion.com and I'm also hoping to submit it to a few film festivals. It probably missed the boat by a few weeks though in terms of making the most of the Football buzz created by the World Cup.

This is the first animation where I've tried to create a deeper story and add some pathos. After all, Brian's silly dream is never really going to come true. I was worried it might be a bit cheesy but it seems to have gone down well. I'm looking forward to continuing the story in Part II.

A big thanks to Chris and David who did a great job on the voices despite having never met, and recording their lines separately from each other.

Modelling, Rigging and Animating in Blender 2.5 went fairly smoothly thanks to the excellent tutorials at BlenderCookie.com which took me through the process step-by-step.

The biggest problem I had was rendering the film, even with two PCs running overnight it ended up taking around 40 hours!

I originally wanted to produce the film in HD but each frame was taking 3-4 minutes to render. That's too long when there are 2,500 frames! I had to reduce the frame size by 50% and strip back a lot of the extra bells and whistles that I'd (Naively!) added on to the render.

I removed Sub-Surface Scattering, a rendering technique that simulates light refracting through objects which adds more realism to the skin. A technique which perhaps I will leave to Pixar and Dreamworks from now on!


I also reduced the Ambient Occlusion which is a lighting method used to more accurately simulate light bouncing off objects. With hindsight I used the wrong kind of Ambient Occlusion which made the scene slow to render. By the time I discovered this it was too late to switch to the right kind so I had to settle for lowering the quality settings.

In future I will definitely be looking at a few of the render farm solutions out there like GreenButton and ResPower. I couldn't use them for this animation as they don't yet support the Alpha version of Blender 2.5.

Next on the 3D animation agenda is finishing Brian Park - Part II. After that I'm looking forward to coming up with something new that really pushes my animation skills further.

Brian Park : A World Cup Dream!

The first Brian Park animation is finally finished! It seems like years ago that I started this bloody animation but in reality it's only been about 2 months. I'll write up a development post-mortem in a few days time when I've had some sleep! But for now....

Focus!

"Use focus. Your best Karate still inside. Now time let out!" - Miyagi

I got a little side-tracked this weekend so there wasn't much progress on Brian Park. In fairness part of the side-track I went down involved some animation for a different project which is going towards a sketch show pilot! More news on that soon.

The rest of my filthy, side-trackery was due to the England/USA game, UFC 115 and good old fashioned bone-idleness.

Next weekend if nothing falls through a group of us are filming my Zombie/comedy sketch. The original script which I posted here a few months back was a little weak, so I've completely re-drafted it and I think there are some much funnier moments in this version. But if not, at least we'll have fun making it!

Voices in my head... and on my hard drive!

I've got the audio files back from the actors now and they sound great! This is one of the big highlights for me, hearing the script performed for the very first time.

I love how someone else's interpretation of a script always manages to completely surprise me. It keeps the project fresh and exciting to have somebody else's input. Luckily for me Chris and David are very funny comedy actors so the surprise is always a nice one!

This weekend I made a crude animatic/placeholder version of the entire film so that I can work out the timing of key events. This is what the quality of the animatic renders look like.


I have to get everything right at this level of quality first because the final version of the film will take approx. 40 hours to render! Which to quote one of my favourite films, leaves little time for dilly-dallying.

Boris Johnson vs 2 Anonymous DJs

This is a very fun video, Boris 'singing' and animated by Aardman animations. There's a very sad story behind this song. Hopefully it will get to Number 1 and raise a lot of money for Macmillan Cancer Support.