An extra caveat for anyone looking at this and thinking of hiring me. This was student work and some of my working methods were less then thorough and professional. I'm showing this stuff warts and all.

THE LAB
Now that I've said I wasn't going to get technical, here is a quick run down of what equipment and software was used to create the short. All the 3D was created in Maya 3.0 running on an SGI Octane. The lab had one Windows box running Photoshop to do all the file textures (and that meant FTPing a texture to the SGI every time you tweaked it). Fifteen students and only one system with Photoshop! I got around this bottleneck largely by doing all my texture work between 12pm-6am. I remember, with a mix of loathing and fondness, blasting FPM on the stereo, rolling back and forth on an office chair between an SGI and the Windows box, tweaking textures as the evil blue light of dawn filled the empty lab.

IDEAS
I knew pretty early on what I wanted the atmosphere to be for the short. I wanted to create something with the poetic or lyrical quality that many of my favorite scenes in anime and comics had. In particular there was a short scene in the Gainax OAV FLCL of Mimami smoking on a bridge,that had really stuck with me at the time.

Scene in FLCL that inspired TBE. (click to see more)

I'm not a smoker, but cigarettes are great in film and animation. They give characters something to do when they aren't doing anything. Trust me it makes an animators life a lot easier. You try animating someone doing nothing!

So I knew the mood I was shooting for but I needed to come up with a scenario that would: a) stand on it's own, b)use only one character and c) take under a minute. I think that it's particularly challenging to come up with animated shorts that don't have a humourous punch line but are still, at least marginally, satisfying. It's a similar challenge to that many web comic creators face when doing short strips that fit into an ongoing plot (such as Megatokyo).

I can't remember where the idea of using a haiku originated. I think the fundamental goals of haiku are the same as those poetic moments in anime. Both try to capture the mood of a moment, except that one uses words whereas the other uses sequences of images. As a bonus to a student animator, they're also very short.

It occurs to me as I write this that I'd love to see other artists' attempts at animated haiku so if you know of any or created one yourself please send me mail. Hmmmm... Maybe it's time to write a manifesto and launch a new website =^-^=

When I found Graham Huesmann's scifiaku while browsing online it was perfect since the science fiction element allowed me to use imagery a traditional haiku wouldn't have.

    The stars look lovely
    through
    these borrowed eyes.
    - Graham Huesmann

PLANNING

Non linear storyboarding on the cheep. (click to see the whole storyboard)

Concept board to refine some of the shot composition. (click to view whole page).

I had the haiku, and this image of someone smoking, and I knew that I wanted the bionic eye to be revealed in the final shot. The next step was to storyboard the sequence in my head. I imagine there are several fancy programs for doing this now, but really you can get all the flexibility you'd get from using expensive software for the cost of some post-it notes. It's kinda messy looking but you can add shots, remove shots and switch the sequence of shots without having redraw anything.

You can see in the post-it storyboard that the composition, shot for shot, almost exactly matches the final version. However there are some discrepancies, like the main character wearing a base ball cap. It's also very sketchy and messy. If I had been doing this professionally I would have taken the final post-it note version and redrawn it on bristol board so it was fit for presentation. With a solo project, however, you're the only one who needs to be able to 'read' it, so you can play things fast and loose.

Before hitting the next step I did do some more detailed sketches both of the character and the composition of each of the shots and I've included them here as well. You can see the character design starting to get closer to the final version, though the hair still isn't right. Also pictured is an old fashioned radio which didn't make it into the final version.

ANIMATIC

The Animatic (requires quicktime plugin)

On a lot of DVDs you'll see 'storyboard' listed as one of the features, what this usually turns out to be is the animatic for the film. The animatic is essentially a filmed version of the storyboard often with music, sound effects, dialogue and some limited movement. It's a good way to check how long each of your shots will be, that they make sense and aren't confusing.

I was planning to show my Animatic to other people and get there opinions to see if my haiku idea was sound so I spent some time doing inked drawings of all the shots so they'd be nice and clear and easy to read. As you can see they're still pretty utilitarian, not the quality of the stuff I post in my Drawing section. Just something to get across the idea of each shot.

THE MUSIC
I'm a total soundtrack snob, if I like the soundtrack to a movie I'll like the movie even if the other aspects are poor. So I love to pick out music for my animations. Using the animatic, I tried several instrumental jazz pieces (from Cowboy Bebop) and one classical (some sad cello music from Kare Kano) but when I tried Blue Moon with Billie Holiday it just fit.

CHARACTER MODELLING AND TEXTURING
For the technically inclined, all the modeling for the character was done with polygons except for her hair which was created in nurbs with an alpha transparency to give them feathery ends. Simple, but it got the job done. I experimented a fair bit with the colour scheme and details on the character. As you can see in the early screen shots below I started with a rather garish green clothing and orange hair combination. I can't for the life of me remember why, but luckily sanity took hold and I changed it to the various shades of purple used in the final version. I follow a general rule of keeping the number of clothing colours to a minimum (ancient wisdom passed down to me as a teenager by the Citadel Miniatures Painting Guide... yes I am a big geek). In this case I took it to an extreme, but less really is more with colours.

Some early versions at various points in modelling and texturing, sporting her unfortunate "Zelda" look.

Early on I tried giving her cyberpunky tattoos (you can see some binary under her eye in the second shot) but it felt kinda cheesy.

Her hair was originally "cut" in the short style I had in the concept drawings but I decided to change it and give her pigtails to make her a little less androgenous. I often tend towards androgenous character designs but if too many people use the wrong personal pronoun I figure it's time to make alterations.

The eyeball was painted in Photoshop and given fake anime style highlights to complement the actual specular highlights in the render.

Almost done! All the texturing is finished in these except for her eyelashes.

The knit cloth textures used for her hat and shirt are both based off of a scan of a friends shirt placed directly on a flat bed scanner. I just changed the scale and colour for each. The face texture was created in Photoshop and given a subtle mottled texture to give it an organic painterly feel.

ENVIRONMENT TEXTURING
The environment textures are all based off of photographs, some I took myself, others I found online and edited in Photoshop till they'd work for my purposes. The brick texture for example was based off one of the free photo textures on the Alias website. Unfortunately their photo tiled horribly, so I had to fix it in Photoshop and created a bump map from scratch.

The blurry city background is a photo of Tokyo at night blurred out of recognition.

Creating a texture from digital photo to tiling image to final render.

The wallpaper textures were based on photographs I took with a digital camera of the wallpaper in my parents' house. It had the old faded colours and design that fit aged look I wanted for the buildings interior. I've included a series of images showing the original photograph, the tile created from it in Photoshop, and how it looked in the the final render (with the brightness turned up a bit so it's easier to make out the detail). I aged it further by adding a wrinkled bump map.

I have to say I love creating file textures since it lets me use all the Photoshop skills I learned from being a web designer for years.

ANIMATION
"The key to Disney animation is to tell a story through moving characters. The key to Japanese animation is to tell the story through not moving the characters." - Hiroyuki Yamaga

I totally admit the animation in TBE is deliberately minimal. Partially this was a stylistic choice but it was also functional. I knew that I'd have to pick my fights for my final, and with the time I had I could either concentrate on something that looked simple with a lot of action or concentrate on the look and keep the animation to a minimum. A situation roughly analagous to Japanese studios working on a shoestring budget. So I decided to use the tricks I'd seen my favorite anime directors use and see if I could pull them off in 3D.

I'm a huge fan of director Hideaki Anno who is known for his long brooding still shots in Neon Genesis Evangelion (at least one of which lasts over a minute). While his style is at the extreme, most anime will minimize animation to some extent, by concentrating on little simple movements: a subtle change in expression, a hand tightening into a fist or hair blowing in the wind. While this was originally done to cut costs it has also become part of the style of storytelling in anime, concentrating more on shot composition and camera pans and less on movement.

A hardware render test. (requires quicktime plugin)

So the animation in TBE is simple, with a few subtle character movements like knocking the ash from a cigarette (the smokers in my class kept telling me she was ashing wrong and so I had to revise it). To make up for this the camera is always slowly panning or zooming just enough to stop things from looking too still. To add further movement I placed things in the foreground and background like the blurry telephone wires which move past in the opening shot and the blinking neon sign.

On a technical note: While I was working at this stage, all the animation was previewed using hardware renders. These are quick ugly versions of the final images. The final renders took something like a minute or two per frame. Multiply that by twenty four frames per second and you see why you wouldn't want to do final renders every time you tweaked the animation. I've included a hardware render created near the end of the project as an example. You'll notice that some things are unfinished or missing. For instance her hair wasn't animated yet so it kinda sticks out stiffly when she raises her head.

FINAL WORDS
So there is a bit of the how and a lot of the why behind TBE. Now that you've spent more time reading about the animation then it takes to watch it, why not watch it one more time =^-^=

And of course any feedback on this article is appreciated, especially since it's the first bit of real text content on Neko Heavy Industries. So should I put more writing on NHI or just stick to putting up lots of pictures? E-mail Me!

FINAL VERSION

[ 10mb MPG Video ]
[ Still Images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ]

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