The first post to this new topic (was: "Old Man Character") will be the Woman/Death/Rebirth. She appears with the sunrise, and the Old Man finally abandons the world of the flesh (symbolized by the Flesh Bunnies), to join her. I didn't model her face, my co-creator Dushan (it's his story idea, after all) did that, but the rest is mine.

She isn't perfect, but will do; she isn't on-screen too long...
(she is slightly out of proportion, since she is not actually human...)

ps..as with the Old Man Character topic, this too begins with tragedy; my favorite aunt died after a routine surgery. I have to stop doing this end-of-life-metaphor work; it seems to invite tragedy.

Looking forward to seeing more of it!

Neat...cant wait to see more.......

Michael

Okay, did some tweaking, and reduced the render time per frame from 5 min to 1...

...can you tell the difference (aside from resolution and slightly different pose)?

...and here's the pivotal scene where the Angel/Woman/Death gets frustrated with the Old Man struggling to reach the peak of the mountain and hauls off and cracks him with a nice right hook...

Okay, okay, so it's not in the film, I felt puckish...

Good news! As of twenty (20) minutes ago, rendering was began on Scene One, Shot One, of The Mountain project. I'll post the first frame tommorow morning. All modeling is done, all test renders are done - from here on out it's final production work all the way! Yay!!!

Started on the 2nd shot of the first scene, currently waiting for the cloth to simulate on the old man's over-coat. Man, I did some calculating, and it takes approximately 15 minutes to simulate 1 second of animation with the current cloth setup! *Whew*

Thank goodness the film is only ~5 minutes long, as it is there will be about +/-75 hours of time spent running cloth simulations for this behemoth.

If it didn't look so darned good I'd give up the whole sim and animate by hand, but I actually think that would take even longer. I love technology.

Will be posting a frame or so from the next shot as it completes.
Thanks to everyone who has been so supportive throughout this whole beautiful mess!

A clip of roughly 44 seconds of the opening to the film, compressed to an insane level. (Halved the frame rate, zipped the Quicktime, etc.) But it gives you the General Idea.

Extra Note: In the past, artists would find it neccessary to aquire patrons for themselves to assist with daily expenses whilst they completed their works. My patron has inadvertantly become the federal government, who decided to withold WAY too much for my taxes last year. This means I can comfortably go on as officially "unemployed" for the duration of this project. (Well, a couple months more at least.) It won't be all champagne and cognac, but this is my dream life: holing myself up for a good bit of time with no worries except an animation project to work on!

You appear to have natural talent andf instinct for this kind of work. Nice way with a color palette too. Looking good.
Ed

Great opening shot, I love the pallate. Where is the music from? It really sets a mood.

Nice work!

I'm glad to hear re-assuring comments about my color choices; I'm always thinking I tend to choose over-dramatic & saturated hues, thank you for the feedback, good or bad =D

The music...yeah we made the decision early on to set the whole story to this piece, which, sadly, we don't have the rights to, but since this is personal project, not a commercial endeavor (mostly to see how well D. & I can collaborate) it will be ok. Should it turn out really great, we will either go about obtaining rights to use it, or have one of my more musical friends write new music with a similar feel and meter.

Fortunately, it is extremely similar to most of the classical requiem pieces, so finding a royalty-free or inexpensively licensed replacement will be a piece of cake should the need arise.

In the meantime, this whole film is just a serious bit of fun for D. & I and a way to cut our teeth on a meaty project before getting down to more like it.

(Oh, and if anyone should be curious and wants to check out some earlier me-working-alone stuff, and see how much my style has matured, you can see them here... Garrett or Sound Bites #1)

No, the project has not been abandoned; merely working thru some personal issues (like still working on finding a job *sigh*). A new frame from the film... yay:

[attachmentid=14804]

~1 minute of the 5 min short is complete! *Whew*

WOoahh

I really like the opening shot, and that old man character looks just perfect, for the style that he is!


Nice job


Ben

Hey Jesse, I love where you are going. That bone bunny clip was great -- and disturbingly funny, haha.

Just for fun, the old man does a rather acrobatic forward flip. Just having a bit of Fun in the middle of Not-Fun. (Job hunting).

Excellent. I know it's just for fun, but just to polish the flip, I'd recommend switching to IK during the downward movement, so you can constrain his hands to the floor.

Also, he sort of levitates during the somersault and then abruptly floats forward, which doesn't look quite right. See if you can get his center of gravity (more or less his hips) to travel in a parabolic arc.

The elaborate secondary movements are quite nice. Thumbs up for going the extra mile.

Well, I wanted him to have a sort of "slinky"-ish movement, and it was about 10-15 minutes of work, and I am slightly sauced (yay..martinis)..Thank for the crit tho, I appreciate any and all suggestions! (This is why I love this forum; no matter how silly, I always get serious critiques on my work!)

EDIT: I am very sauced. Why else would I be so possessed to make the Old Man do a flip?!

EDIT #2: I have decided to turn my bit-o-fun into a SimCloth-Torture-Test. I will post the results as soon as the sim and render is complete. Thus far, it seems SimCloth is holding up to a very dynamic character animation...wowee...more ASAP

Okay, put SimCloth to The Test.

It passed. With Flying Colours. If this doesn't peg SimCloth as The Coolest Feature of 2005, I don't know what does! Hooray for the team at Hash!!

Thanks to their hard work I now have no doubts as to whether or not the cloth sim will hold up for all aspects of our "Mountain" short.

In a startlingly silly move, I decided to alter my Old Man; added a bit more detail. Now I'm stuck re-rendering ~40 seconds of animation. Sometimes being a perfectionist sucks. =P
The new, more detailed Old Man:

http://jaysonkerrick.com/themountain/oldman_hirez_one.jpg

Oh well it will be worth it. (There are some advantages to not having a deadline...)

Great! Kind of a low-res JPEG, though. Hard to see the new detail.

I posted a link to CORRECT hi-res file. Sorry bout that!

Summary of changes ... changed pants colours/texture, added leather texture to boots, added a ropely belt to hold up his pants (complete with fuzzy hair bits sticking up from it), and added a bit of fabric sticking out from the top of it to separate it more from his torso. The original was solid color from pants to boots and had no separation from pants to torso except colouring. Also, added nice detailed wood texture to his walking stick (was just a solid colour.)

Totally random...(and completely off topic of the film)

Had our Old Man pose with one of his creators...now we gotta get him to pose with both of us!

It's so difficult working with imaginary people, especially those who are part of a narrative metaphor.

Is this production a CG/live combo or all CG?

All CG. I just got bored. I do that. =) What, like you *never* posed with one of your characters? [grinz]

that's cool how you got his shoe reflection on the floor. My bro did something like that a wile back

http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/5409/nigelphotohuge3sv.jpg

I got bored and did the same thing myself with one of my friend's familiy pictures. It's fun .

ok, the production on this piece is officially re-begun. I finally found a job, so I can stop worrying about ... eating and stuff.. and work on this. (about damn time.)

well she of course is closer to the camera other than that no

Congratulations on your new job. Waiting in anticipation of your WIP updates

Thanks. Yeah, it has been a good while since I've posted anything resembling progress...

...my co-creator Dushan & I have been fairly busy hammering out some camera angle/shot details.

Obsessively.

Anyhow, in between that and my day job, I've been refining the "look"; lighting, colouring, etc. So, in satisfaction with what we have accomplished so far, I'm posting a new frame that hopefully will end up in the finished film because I have totally fallen in love with it. More to come as more occurs. (This project is turning out to be more mountainous (pun intended) than either of us ever dreamed.)

Well, after a bit of tweaking, decided to post a link to the tenative opening...the new one. Many changes have been made, and we both think that it is for the best.

Enjoy!

(Keep in mind, that as a WIP, this is all still very rough and fluid; subject to change.)



http://jaysonkerrick.com/themountain/mount_test.mov (about 3.85 MB, 320x240, 24 fps, very compressed)

Nice helicopter shot, and the music's got me going.

That scene puts me in awe !

The music, the colors, the old man, all seem to fit so well together.

Makes want to see more!

Great job.

Thanks! I originally had some mis-givings about that new opening "heliocopter" shot, with the extended tracking/pan, but my co-creator/co-director insisted, and now we are both loving how things are looking so far.

The scale/detail was my big concern, but I am now gtting really psyched (again!) about this project! (I actually added some more detail to the path about ten (10) minutes ago, and now things are really flowing.

Thanks for the feedback. It's the excellent feedback that keeps us both going in spite of jobs/time constraints/creative setbacks.

Thanks! Couldn't have done it so well w/o you guys' software.

Okay, well, now, unfortunately, after the agonizing over every little detail of the opening shot, things get incredibly more challenging...don't get me wrong, I love this (I wish I was able to do animation for a living.)

...BUT....

The next part of the film deals with...

...the Flesh Bunnies (Capital F, Capital P!)

I don't mind them particularly, except that the story, (thank you Dushan, for this) at one point, calls for HUNDREDS of these bunnies. This will require some creative/technical flip-flops, on my part, as my computer is not the fastest I could build, today, given unlimited resources.

I sincerely hope I can pull it all together with a combination of flocking, layers, and compositing!

Anyhow, I started with just three.



Also, another interesting thing happened to me regarding the Flesh Bunnies. I realized that I wasn't exactly up on my rabbit-locomotion knowledge, and decided to do some research. I ended up getting kicked out of a major-chain pet store for trying to photograph their rabbits in action. The manager acted like I was planning something unmentionably perverse in the area of rabbits. (It was thoroughly amusing.)



Here's a test-shot so far...

I have to agree - great music - and that sequence realllllllyyyyy makes me want to see more. A loud Noooo issued from my mouth when it so abruptly stopped.

I realize these are just test shots - but lighting (or color contrast) is too dark - I mean, I want to see them blue flesh bunnies stalking that old man.

By the way, Blue-Man-Bunny-Boy - Is that your photo on the "10 most wanted" poster hanging at my local Petco?

Could be, could be. I am notorious now. Forever branded as an illicit-photgrapher-of-bunnies.

I'd buy a bunny for study but I couldn't guarantee it a home after the short is done, so that's a no-go.

As far as the lighting/colour...yeah, we are far from being happy with the visibility, although the bunnies do start off as indistinct shapes in the shadows...but more is revealed as the sun rises (and inevitably vanquishes their sorry-evil-fleshy-bunny-arses.)

Off to a long night of faking bunny-hops for me!

Took a quick break from the flesh-bunny work (although I finally got some rabbit locomotion references down on film in my mind by chasing local rabbits to exhaustion, mine not theirs), as there was one last piece that needed to be re-animated/lighted/tested from the first sequence.



http://jaysonkerrick.com/themountain/mount_test.mov



It's mostly the same but we changed the following...



1. The Rocky Ground has been finalized.

2. The Lighting was enhanced to allow for better mood/visibility/etc. and finalized.

3. The Helicopter Shot was "cleaned up" motion-wise and finalized.

4. "The Sigh", final sequence shot was re-animated and Finalized. (Fixed the eye & camera motion, mostly.)



So, now those shots are ready for final renders/compositing/scrubbing. YES!!!! (soooo excited)

And now I go back to work on Flesh-Bunny mayhem.

Man! What a haunting scene. And that music.... where'd you get that music?

Awesome job dude.

Alrighty...before I have to travel for a weekend wedding in the damned pits of Iowa, I figured I'd post the latest thing that we've been working on. That's right, it's the Angel/Death woman. Yay. Her shading has been changed (she now is more ethereal with an iridescent shine), and I added eye-lashes. Dushan did the head/face, I did the rest. It's his story, so this is how she was visualized. Next project we are so doing one of my stories. (Go whimsical morbidity!)

Anyhow, here she is:

wow dude your getting to the top another great animater to add to the club lol anyway great job man your great at what you do keep us posted

All right, here's a (mostly) finalized version of the Woman/Angel/Death. Fixed some face/mouth problems, and perfected the post-processing to give her that ethereal glowing look.

Project is still in production, just finished moving (*whew*) so things have been chaotic , to say the least. And there was yet another death that came out of the blue - car accident this time, for variety. (2005-2006 has been a great time for deaths of people I care about.) My computer also took a nose-dive and wants re-building.

But the project is not, I repeat, NOT abandoned.

More to come as I get re-situated in this new, large, old apartment.

You have my condolences, Jesse. I'm glad you're still working on this.

cool dont give up yet man get it done

My main computer is, unfortunately, quite Dead. (Need a new motherboard.) As soon as technology is restored, the work will continue, but for now, finances restrict me. Updates soon.

Okay, I am alive, and fortunately...so is my (new) computer.
The film project is also alive. We had a complete re-structuring of how this thing was going to be produced, organization-wise. From here on out, we're just blocking out the shots with quick & dirty positioning, animation, and lighting. After all shots are completed, refinements/changes will be made, kind of like an animatic on steroids.
This change in working style was to due to mounting frustrations and clashes between creative forces out here =)
Also, I now have oodles more time to structure around getting this beast D O N E as I have a new job that gives me evenings and weekends off - finally. So nice to have a set schedule. But I digress...
So, here I have a clip of the newest shots we've roughed out...just to prove things are still going.

http://jaysonkerrick.com/themountain/mount_test.mov

The clip is super-compressed and half the frame-rate for file size reasons. (about 1.75 M, still)
It blocks out the beginnings of the multiplication of the evil flesh bunnies as they start to stalk the old man as he meanders up the mountain of his life. In the next few shots, that follow these, he will stumble and fall as they dance around him to the wailing in the music.

More as it gets finished.



-Jak

Yayyyy!!! Blue man bunny boy returns!

Excellent blocking, fabulous camera angles & music - Quel terrific twisted mood!

very good.

YEAH dont worry i went away to im glad your back bunny killer anyway welcome come i want this topic to keep going!