Currently the animatic is set up a little weird!
We’ve linked in scenes from every blend file into a master timeline in the video sequence editor (making significant use of the mapping cameras to timeline markers)- which is both cool and not-so-cool. On the plus side, it gives immediate updates. Whenever anyone updates an animation or a model, all we have to do is update SVN and bam! It’s in the animatic.
One of the things we learned from the kickoff project was that animating the parameters of modifiers for a bunch of objects can be very, very time consuming. So we asked Sergey if he could make a button that copied the animated parameters of the actively selected object to the whole selection. 5 minutes later he had fully working feature that did exactly that :)
And here it is!: ModifierTools.py
In the image above you can see an example of how I am using the script to make fractured shards look more organic (less straight). This is good for mid ground fragments.
This week was spent on a lot of modeling and testing efficient ways to recreate photo-realistic parts of Amsterdam. How much to do with photo/footage projection? How much is real modeling here? A lot depends on the final shots of course, but it’s crucial to master the art of recreating realism in Blender asap, before actual filming. The tests I’ve copied above are just first trials, it’s research in progress. As soon as good results or conclusions can be shown it’ll be here on the blog within a day. :)
We’re also very happy to have the help from production designer Romke Faber for the sets! Ian produced an extensive briefing. Together we should visit the studio asap to inspect the possibilities there.
For next week the main question to answer is “Are we going to film the bridge breakup scene in Amsterdam on location, or in a studio with greenscreen?”. Lots of factors to weight here, including financial ones!
Oh: anyone knows where to get the best quality chrome balls to photograph reflection maps?
-Ton-
This week we received two times great news!
1) The Amsterdam Cinegrid consortium – researching 4k media distribution and creation – grants us support of 20k euro. That’s to encourage us to at least use a 4k pipeline for filming, storage and conversion, tracking and keying in our studio. This makes it possible we deliver (parts of) the film in 4k, but this depends on factors we will only know in a few months.
2) The Netherlands Film Fund today confirmed we get a wonderful grant of 30k to support the filming process, and another 30k for the animation/CG side of our project.
With both subsidies, our current sponsors, and the ongoing DVD sales (yes, we still need you!), it means our project now is financially being covered in a decent way; allowing us to hire a good film crew, good hardware, great artists, and of course development time!
-Ton-
Here’s the robot hand. Still not finished, but you can see where it’s going. The plan is to integrate this on a live hand.
Yesterday we had the chance to test the Sony F65 at Camalot (who were very nice and helpful). It was very exciting to see such an enormous camera in the hands of our DP. But even though the whole process is digital all the way, getting hold of the data is not as easy as you might think (see yesterday’s post).
So, after getting the data out of the camera, safely transferring it to the Blender Institute and plugging it into the computer, the question is: Now what? We have been shooting in Sony F65 Raw format (.mxf), which generates enormous files. 10 seconds footage are 2.68GB of raw data, unreadable unless you install the Sony F65 viewer app (of course only possible after the annoying registration of all your data!) (Plus a not very user friendly interface. But hey, you can even write emails with it!).
From this app, for which I wasn’t able to find any documentation, you can export to EXR, DPX and MXF (again, this would not be readable for FOSS). The DPX are also for some reason un-readable, so we go to openEXR, as planned. (Just in case someone is interested in that, here’s a patch for DPX. http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?group_id=9&atid=127&func=detail&aid=27397. Any developer willing to have a look into it?)
Today we have been testing the F65 camera at Cam-a-Lot.
It looks quite okay and is probably worthy delivering the footage for Mango. :)
Joris, our Director of Photography, seemed to have enjoyed it very much!
We shot all kinds of tests with it, more stops, less stops, green stuff, grey stuff, Ian, me and even some action scenes!
But: we can’t see it yet! It is stuck in a black box with green blinking lights from Sony. At the moment I am still sitting at Camalot and waiting for the data transfer to be finished. Having 4k footage is nice, but copying it is not very nice. Maybe there are still some bottlenecks so it might get better.
Basically, as far as I understood it, it works like this: You shoot 12 minutes of footage, then you have filled up a 256GB SSD card. This card you stick into a closed black box with blinking lights. You can access the footage on that card through network with a webbrowser. From there you can dump the Sony F65 raw footage as MXF files onto harddrives, one main, one backup. These harddrives will be hooked up to a Mac or a Windows machine with the F65viewer app on it. That can then be used to export the OpenEXR sequences and proxy videos onto the server. Then we will be finally in the save and open haven of linear image sequences.
I hope that soon I can grab the drive with the footage and bike home to the Institute to take the next challenge, the file-conversion. After that we can finally test the whole workflow and see what we can improve. So, no footage yet today!
More to come the next days!
Tomorrow we’re going to do tests with cameras from Camalot in Amsterdam. I’m very happy that we can also test (and most likely use) the new Sony F65 camera, which made everyone in the industry drool! More news & original frame samples will be posted here tomorrow.
-Ton-
Rob Tuytel invited the famous Dutch film maker Dick Maas to check on our work. He immediately accepted! This morning he showed up and spent an hour with us. He saw the full animatic and storyboards (“You should add more wide shots” – duly noted) and had a short demo from the artists (“Is all of that Blender? Amazing!”). I then spent some time with him on production stuff in general, how to organize & finance features efficiently here. I noticed he’d be very interested to direct a 3d animation film once!
He left with a huge pile of Blender training DVDs, we’ll be hearing more of him I bet :)
After three weeks we already have a first version of animatic! Things went fast the first 3 weeks, with 5 weeks of time left still to tweak & refine (before filming starts). We also had the first designs in for the costumes! Casting info is still unknown, have to hunt the Casting Agent this monday. As weekly visitor we had composer Joram Letwory.
