Production notes
The Middle of the Film
I have arrived at the middle of the film! The hump, the pivot, the peak! Of course the production as a whole is well past the half way mark, I’m referring to the character animation.
Being the director and producer on this project can make also being the animator quite difficult. It’s easy to get distracted by all the other aspects of the project (like typing this) and I’m yet to find my own consistent animation workflow.
The animatic has been a great layout tool, but since filmmaking is an organic process I can’t just follow it blindly. I’m constantly trying (and being encouraged) to find better ways to communicate things by experimenting with different actions and camera angles, and trying to make a decision can be very frustrating. While there is no single RIGHT way to do things, there are most certainly WRONG ways of doing things. The latter is what I’m trying desperately to avoid, and differentiating between professional opinion and personal preference is difficult!
To balance out the creative-energy-draining-process of animation I regularly switch to the mind-numbing task of environment modelling. Environment modellers need not take offence, as I’m referring specifically to my task of modelling rocks.
Yes that’s right, rocks. They’re a “must have” when your story is set in a cave in the Swiss Alps. I didn’t want to overlook the environment, so rather than cutting a hole in a slope and scattering a few random “distorted cubes” around, I based it on a number of photos taken in the Swiss Alps and Rocky Mountains.
To cut a very long and boring story short, I searched the internet for photos, collected gravel, and sketched shapes and forms I thought would work well and slowly modelled each rock, making sure they would work from any angle. While they look very simple, they required much more time to make than you might think.
After many nights modelling (a phrase that is often misinterpreted) I had a library of rocks ready to go. Duplicating, scaling, rotating and flipping them increased my arsenal so no two rocks would look the same in any given shot.
So, a quarry’s worth of rocks has provided Gus and his dad with a house; a stylised and believable cave in the side of a mountain. Once the animation is complete I will begin “Set Dressing” and turn this house into a home! (Awww...)