Best to just watch it at blip. It’s bigger.

Here’s the obligatory YouTube video for those who enjoy shit quality:

Characters, animation, rendering, and editing was completed over the course of three months, from May to July. Many shots took several days for the computer to render.

I am considering this the jumping off point for a full-blown adaptation of the first issue to be released online as a miniseries.

Characters and story by Rob Schrab.

All voices provided by Alex Weitzman.

Only seven days until the deadline for the Scud short film competition, I show some Jeff animation, stills from the short, introduce my blog, and talk about the numerous obstacles thrown my way over the last few months, including an overheating computer, astronomical render times, and having to do my real job.

Sorry about the shit sound quality. I know it’s hard to hear me over the music. YouTube apparently didn’t like my audio compression and I don’t have time to fix it.

If you like comic books or have any taste for the surreal (which, if you found this blog through my Scud stuff, I’m guessing you do), go watch it.

I’ve long maintained that no movie could ever do right by Watchmen. It’s too much about being a comic book, too specific to its own medium. It would be like turning Citizen Kane into a graphic novel. The most they can hope to do is tell the story. But on the other hand, I don’t have any real problem with that. I just don’t expect the same transcendent experience.

Alan Moore is, of course, still prickly about the whole thing. I like that he sticks to his guns but I’ll never understand the ambivalence towards adaptation, not just of his art, but all art. I’m much more in line with Mike Mignola’s philosophy. If any artist wanted to re-interpret my work, I’d be totally flattered and excited. Provided they weren’t trying to make a soulless cash-in, I think I’d be very pleased.

Not that I have to worry about anything like that. But, you know, hypothetical.

I’m of the mind that Frank Miller, as much a fan as I am of Sin City and DKR, hasn’t written anything worth reading in over a decade. Reading his latest Batman (aka, The Goddamn Batman), it’s hard not to wonder if he’s completely lost his mind. But this is a very cool trailer. It should be interesting to see if this turns out to be any good.

I think Joss Whedon’s problem is marketable premises. Ten years ago, you never would have convinced anyone who wasn’t a regular viewer or a fifteen-year-old girl to watch this show. Today, Buffy and Angel are regarded critically as some of the best stuff ever on TV and even a decade later, it’s not hard to see why. These shows were doing season arcs, character development, long-spanning mysteries, and grand plans before The Sopranos or Lost or any of the big favorite serial shows were a glimmer in anyone’s eye. I know Buffy’s hardly the first but it came along years after this kind of television storytelling fell out of favor and I don’t think we’d have the shows we do now without it.

But go back to me, fifteen years old. I was watching the show. Mostly digging it, though the subtext blew right past me. I was in love with cheesy horror, still am, and Buffy filled the hole The X Files left. But… would I admit to it? Saying you liked Buffy, you might as well have said you liked My Little Pony for all the difference it made to anyone not watching. This was back in the early high school years, before I figured out how little such a thing actually mattered but, what can I tell you, I was dumb.

Joss, man, you’ve really got the writing thing down. No doubt. I can’t wait for Dollhouse. But for the sake of keeping a show on the air, you might want to look into crime scene investigation or boring teenagers falling in love somewhere in California. And hell, it doesn’t have to be all bad. Lost hits you with the most insipid idea for a show ever, people stuck on an island, but it’s the best thing going right now. Basically, what I’m getting at is what I’m always getting at: People are afraid of new and interesting things. You have to trick them into liking something good.

I was just explaining to a lay person how 3D works and figured, what the hell, I’ll throw up my musings here.

Where does anything start in 3D? Polygons. So you build the polygons. It’s best to avoid polygons with more sides than four, as they deform oddly in animation. So you’re building something out of squares. You can’t use too many because you don’t want to make things unnecessarily hard on yourself or the computer. So you have to figure out the “flow” of things. How to make a face, for example, with squares but not too many, that will animate easily? How do the corners of the mouth flow into the nose? How do you make that work?

Once that’s done, you’re into colors. Texturing. You have to unwrap your model, which is sort of like ripping your skin off and laying it down flat on a table, then painting on it. Long process. You also have to consider how your textures will react to light. Skin, for example, is more translucent, so you might have to make two or more textures for the different layers, then apply a shader and adjust it until it looks right. You have to determine which areas are more reflective than others (a nose, for example, is more shiny than a cheek) and create a texture for that. There are a lot of considerations. These are just a few.

So you have a model with textures, now what? Bones. What does a basic bone setup for your character look like? On top of this, you need to decide how you’re going to animate it. Does the shoulder drive the arm or does the wrist? Both? You’ve just introduced a new problem to solve. What about how one bone affects the movement of another bone? What about muscles? Do you want to animate every knuckle of every finger individually? Or would you rather create an automatic function for it so you could grab the top knuckle and make a fist? Or come up with a way to do both? It goes on like this.

And then, once your rig’s finished, you have to skin it to the character, make sure all the right points are affected and that joints stretch where they’re supposed to. It’s not automatic and it takes goddamn foooorreeeevvverrr. I hate skinning.

The software instructions are basically useless beyond learning the fundamentals of how the software works. I read them. They suck. A good instruction manual would be around a thousand pages and very, very boring. I learned mostly from classes and tutoring DVD’s I found on the Internet, which do a great job of showing you how to implement concepts to specific needs. You watch enough and you start to understand intuitively how everything works to where you can mix and match. A lot of Jeff’s rig, I improvised from ideas I picked up from other sources.

No screens yet but I am re-rendering my turnarounds, as well as working on a walk cycle as we speak.

How’s that for a happy medium?

My feeling was, I generally don’t like to see super-bright primary colors in computer animation. It’s 3D, it’s that little bit closer to reality, and nothing in the real world is that bright. So that was my thought process changing the purple to a light pink fleshy color, to have a color that’s at least somewhat subdued but that still works in a cartoon reality.

We were throwing Photoshop adjustments back and forth. I think if I do change to purple, the shade in the second picture below will be what I aim for. Not in-your-face purple but still… purple.

Original up top, hypothetical adjustments on the bottom. I’m on the fence. Changing it means I have to re-render what little animation I already have. So I want to be sure. What do you guys think?

Animation… soon.