There are some jobs that I have contributed a very minor part. And sometimes even those minor parts were eventually culled from the final work, as was the case with this job. One invisible contribution I had was the procedural light bulb animation at the beginning, and the rigging of the multi-legged robot.
Again, jobs like these are exactly the reason why I’m putting them up. Sometimes, you need to say you were there, you worked, and you participated.
In most jobs, I’m glad to be working in the shadows. There are some jobs that I’m really glad to be in the shadows. This is one of them.
Let me be clear: when I say I’m glad to be in the shadows, I don’t mean not being associated with the ad; I’m perfectly fine with the final product (not to say I particularly like it — I’m just fine with it). What I mean about shadows is this: it’s like being inside a tank while looking at a huge industrial fan and above it, tonnes of horse shit ready to drop onto it. When I see trouble, I try to warn off the people. If people don’t listen, I take cover myself.
And remember that this work thread is not just about what you see, but about invisible things behind the work you see. And in this case, what was behind was quite incredible from a production point of view. And I don’t mean incredible in a good way. But let me only say one thing among many things:
We didn’t have the render hardware and software to render Yeti fur, and that we had to sink lots of money to subcontract our rendering; first in the messianic illusion that is cloud-rendering, and second, when that failed to save, in an old-school outsourcing rendering service. The good news is that after two years of waiting (the job was 2 years ago) we have finally incrementally upgraded our software and hardware. There, I wasn’t being that negative was I? Less is definitely more: when you have shit hardware you have to rely on your smarts to get things done. So I’m not choked up about hardware because it helps me shine!
Speaking of shine, there are those that brought the goods on this project. Louis Desrochers groomed the Yeti fur look, and we devised a way to generate wet maps from Maya, since the our Realflow op couldn’t get wet maps from Hybrido sims at the time. We used a combination of ambient occlusion maps that have an Time Echo effect applied in After Affects; that image sequence drove the Yeti maps; I was the one that wrote the script to bake animated ambient occlusion maps to be plugged into AE.
There were so many other people involved in this project, and contributed their part in it: I didn’t even get to rig the otter! That’s a first! Of course, as usual, I was there to clean up the scenes and troubleshooting the most stubborn of the lot. But when the dust finally settled all I wanted to do is forget about it.
My contribution to this ad is typical of my usual: bits and pieces everywhere, not claiming to a whole lot, and yet stuck on to it like bees in a hive (funny metaphor methinks).
I took HDRs during the shoot and assisted in the vfx supervision. Meanwhile, back in the studio, to the advice of Will Brand, we had laser-scanned reference shells and Terry was busy cleaning them up. Afterwards, I rigged the crab as other work continued on it.
I tracked and set-up most (if not all — can’t really remember) the shots, including the base lighting found in the HDRs. I had only one scene on my name, but, inevitably, at the tail-end of the commercial, when the producer started ending the contractors’ terms, Terry and I were left to fix up the needed bits for the Flame op.
That sort of arrangement is often the case with jobs that require a number of people; as the quasi-core group, a lot of the heavy lifting goes to the contractors who are hired especially for that; when the bulk of the work is done, whatever other technical issues that require sorting often comes down to us, because by that time, the producer has decided it’s costing too much to have contractors hang on (oftentimes I think the reason is that the producer has hired too many guns to begin with). And that’s why it sometimes feels like we’re clean-up men.
About a year ago, a client connected with Toyota requested a bid from the company. Part of that request was a edited compilation of the commercial style they were looking for. It was slick; fast-moving, lots of stylised cinematography. We didn’t get it, and for reasons I never usually know. Yet, it was no surprise; nothing in our company reel resembled anything like it.
I thought — it was not a new idea for me — why not take some cuts from the compilation, and recreate it in 3d or something? The simple thought was that at the end of it, new slick material can be put on the reel. I attempted to do this by creating the road forest scene you see above; this was based on one of the scenes in the compilation, though I had put in more detail and brightened things up a bit.
To be honest, this piece is half-baked, as I was soon overrun with other work and didn’t bother to revisit it, mainly because no one else in the company was interested in making new in-house material.
The song is by Graham Hadfield, whose Carbon album I first heard in a Guardian online article on Arctic drilling. Pretty interesting stuff.
I should say this is a “bit of an odd one”, but then I would sound like broken track record, wouldn’t I?
Yes, it’s another odd one, internally called JAWS, it was abandoned like a mutant, tossed like a hot potato into the hands of the poor soul who needed to resurrect this dying pig… or sheep.
Fortunately, I was not the poor soul, but Richard Falla. Pitying his sorry life dearly, I extended a finger — my pinky, to be precise — to assist his writhing body out of the the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
So I made racist kiwifruit drop from the sky and flags wave. Cool. In the meantime, Richard rescued the job from burning in hell.
This was another sub-contract from Australian vfx vendor. My contribution here was the extension of the trees at the beginning of the ad, which featured apples (real apples either weren’t on season at the time, or that they were apple trees to begin with). We bought some stock trees, I populated them with apples, shaded, lit, rendered in LightWave, and integrated them into the foreground and background areas of the matchmoved footage.
The trickiest bit, actually, was the Australian vfx company. They operated in Nuke, and required lensing data to be piped back to our renders. But while they knew their own process — which involved UV remapping, I hadn’t done it to other vendor’s specs before during post-production, but it turned out all right in the end, as it usually does.
This is a 3-part ad that ran on digital posters. The concept of the ad was simply to use the Japanese origami style of folding. Terry and I worked on this series, with him doing the first two (left and middle), and me doing the third. Terry consolidated all the shading in V-Ray, so that once the rig or animation was complete, they will all, more or less, render the same.
The rigging was, of course, the most complicated bit, along with cutting up the geometry to make it appear to fold. especially in the section I was working on, as it featured lots of round corners, pipe rails, etc. I found it difficult to translate a generator of the design the client wanted to fold like paper. In the end, I wonder if it looked more like a Transformer animation than folding paper.
Dick. That’s what I did for this short. Yes, I did a dick; a paper dick, a CG paper dick, to be precise. It comes to life after the protagonist draws on a piece of paper; it runs along a man’s shoulder, then up a woman’s skirt, makes a dash for the exit, gets doused with water. That’s about the extent of it. Fun little project for a cool director.
Iteration is the creative process of improving the work in incremental steps. I don’t know if it’s truly a buzzword, but from where I’m standing, it’s always buzzing around. But I think that iteration means something different depending on where you’re standing.
In an advertising agency, for example, the creative team goes through their own rounds of iteration, brainstorming ideas, solidifying them visually through thumbs for internal meetings, then a concept board (if it’s a TVC) to be cleared with client, then upon feedback, work the process up to a storyboard. The creative process is completely internal in that they have full control over their workflow with the client giving feedback. Ask the creative director what iteration means for her workflow, and she’ll tell you “it’s working up the Idea in small steps, making sure, all the while, the client is kept in the loop and making appropriate feedback, which we then apply, and advance the Idea into a final storyboard to be produced.” So far, so good.
In the post-production shop, the process is pretty much the same, only a bit more complex, naturally; we deal with lots of technical elements. So while an agency might have a single pipeline we have at last four going almost concurrently, and those pipelines intermingle with each other. We have models to be made, rigging to be applied to models, animation to be applied to the rig, models to be shaded, shaded models to be lit, whole scenes to render, renders to be comped, effects to be designed and comped, etc. And that’s a standard bread-and-butter job. Let’s not get into things like simulations, matchmoving, rotoscoping, and the like.
Now imagine the same creative director is working with a post-production shop to produce the TVC. Ask the same question, “What is iteration?” She’ll answer, non-verbatim, with this expectation: “I want to see the final product very soon, and iterate that until it becomes better.”
Because the post-production process is unknown to her, she doesn’t realise that we have many final ‘products’ to iterate over: models have their own iteration-cycle, distinct from the animation iteration-cycle; so is look development, so is effects development; and these come together as a ‘master’ development pipeline with a separate iteration-cycle as well. She doesn’t automatically think to apply her own iterative workflow principle to the post-production side because they are uninformed. But because they prefer not to know, they remain at arm’s length from the post-production group, as distanced as they themselves, as creative teams, are to their clients, who are equally indifferent of their process. The indifference is passed down from client to agency, from agency to post-production, generally speaking.
Now, all this time, I’ve been using the agency’s creative director as my example. This is not a fair emphasis, by the way, though it surely makes the point clear, and many agencies relate this way to post-production houses. But you will also find directors, be it art directors, TVC directors, or anyone calling the ‘creative shots’ are just as guilty of this indifference. But the worse of all, it should be noted, is that the indifference occurs within a post-production group, as some of the upper crust only pay lip-service to the very technical nature of their own operation. Though I began with the ignorance of an agency creative director, she is the least guilty of them all.
The post-production upper crust might have done well to learn the internal creative process of the agency. But I think they condescended to think they could be anything but the client, and thus distancing themselves from their own post-production group. Perhaps by assuming the superior client role, they thought can eke something creative out of the ‘headphone-hooded geeks’.
The agency enjoys a creative process that they themselves have built and enforce in order to serve their own purposes because doing so will yield a better product for the client and for themselves. Yet, the post-production group gets served up onto a plate of uninformed demands by uninformed folks, left undefended by the upper crust who are just as uninformed; and it would have yielded poor results if not for talent and lots unnecessary personal sacrifices. But even sacrifices have their limits.
Anyone who demands, “I want you to go hard out so you can get me the final product tomorrow, so I can iterate/nitpick/pixel-fuck that until it becomes better” does not know what iteration means and lacks the discipline of imagination necessary to mix the creative aesthetic with the highly technical processes, which is what this industry is about.
I consider myself a competent but frustrated character animator. I say frustrated on account of people’s bias of me as a technical person, I’ve too often been asked, instead, to rig characters. In this case, the characters of this commercial were completely in 2D, illustrated by Gareth Jensen, who also did a lot of the animation along with a few other animators.
The main difference was that the job was going to be done completely in After Effects, including the rigging. I’m not an AE rigger, nor have I animated a character in AE before. While I’ve seen what mind-boggling AE rigging tools can do, at the time of this commercial, I hadn’t seen any of them yet. So I basically had to do everything from scratch: learn Puppet Tools, create the workflow for swapping assets, expressions to switch drawings, etc.
Frankly, I don’t know if I want to do that again, given the powerful rigging tools available today. I think I’d prefer to animate.