M dot Strange's Heart String Marionette Teaser
HEART STRING MARIONETTE teaser trailer #1 from M dot Strange on Vimeo.
I posted one of this guy’s youtube videos a few months back. I found his site through searching for 3D tutorials on youtube/google. M dot Strange has almost finished his 2nd feature 3D animated film and has published his first teaser trailer for the new film online today. Check it out.
You can also watch his previous film, ‘We are the Strange‘, in it’s entirety on youtube. Impressive.
Other Workings and Youtube Account
This is from another project not Porbeagle as there’s no guns in the script. This was created by creating a path in Illustrator then using the lathe tool in 3D and texturing using only the built in gradients and noise for bumps which I’m pretty happy with. I copied from a photo and think I’m definitely getting better at texturing from playing around a lot, which is a bit of a relief.
So I started a new Youtube account the other day. I’ve made a start uploading some of my videos from Qemic.com (just looking for all the big files on other hard drives). i’ve always had a scepticism of youtube, and a hypocritical one too because I regularly watch videos there, but a scepticism about publishing videos there. I never thought that the sort of abstract video experiments I had been making were a bit too out there for 14 year old myspace kids, and really couldn’t be bothered with the hassle. I’m trying to broaden my mind as suspend judgement before using it for a while as there is some great content on youtube and great content that is solely on youtube.
Here’s my channel, please subscribe or friend me: Qemic Youtube
Also earlier in the week on the train home from work I had a story idea that I liked and scripted 9 pages of that story upon arriving home. I think it’s quite good, very different from Porbeagle, it’s more of a black comedy and the dialogue’s a bit snappier. It’s been good practice for the first week of May which is my writing retreat week (and birthday) at my caravan to tune up everything.
Plodding along and new deadline's set.
So I’ve had a decently productive weekend. I managed to do some big edits to the script, including one of the scenes (a dialogue one) that I wasn’t very happy with. I’ve been watching a lot of odd and unconventional movies lately I want to try and take inspiration from those and make the script as a whole more ambiguous and open to interpretation, or just maybe not hammer the plot points so hard, let there be more of a subtle experience to it all. So the current draft I was working on is now done and I just want to look at the script from some other perspectives and see how I can really make what I want, something that I could still be proud of in 20+ years. This next draft will be the one where I’ll be going over with a fine tooth comb and asking myself what I want and don’t want, what is my goal and intention for the story and getting there. I’ve set a deadline for May 8th for that draft. Once that draft is complete I’m going to move forward with both showing the script around to a select few and creating the animatic as I wrote earlier.
This weekend I’ve also been keeping up with more 3D tutorials and putting into practice some of the things I’ve learned, mainly modelling and concepts to do with modelling, getting comfortable with starting with a primitive shape such as a cube and turning it in to a set piece, or anything imaginable. There’s this tool called Zbrush which is a modelling application that I’ve seen a lot of lately, it allows for really easily creating characters, props and so on that can be imported into your 3D program of choice. I saw this cool mini tutorial which shows how you can set up different facial expressions inside of Zbrush and then link them to sliders inside of Cinema 4D. Now as a workflow of creating expressions and phonemes. It really looks achievable with a little bit of upfront effort and basic learning of Zbrush. I think I’m getting to the stage where I put the lessons into practice and create from scratch a simple 3D character that can do basic things such as walk and talk and render out a short 30 second test clip. I think I need that exploration and practice as a jumping off point. Things can be made gradually and in an ‘as they’re needed’ situation, when a scene calls for a prop or an ancillary characters (not that there’s too many of each) they can be made when needed and a lot of animation can be produced beforehand with what is already at hand. It’s cool to learn about cheating too, for instance, I’m not gonna waste time modelling an entire object if I only ever see the said object from one angle, this can really cut down a lot of wasted time and detail on something that is never seen by someone other than myself.
Concepts #2 First Cintiq Drawings
Here’s a few initial sketches I’ve done this week using the new Cintiq. Have just been experimenting with colours and styles to further figure out the style possibilities (not that there’s a plan to stick to one). Really enjoyable to use, I’m looking forward to start focusing more on realising locations and finalising characters over the next couple of weeks. I’m also testing an animatic creation workflow which I will be preceding with soon too. Which will be great to finally see the story as a kind of preliminary animation and see how it flows and will be able to make some smarter decisions on final changes through that. Should be fun.
Hardware All Acquired
I’ve never had a budget for the film set in place, but I had made a list of what things I feel I needed to purchase in order to make my life a lot easier when creating the movie. These are the expensive things on the list (hardware) so have since 27th August 09 have been saving then buying, saving then buying things off the list of my ideal hardware set-up. Today I crossed the final one off the list. I’ll have to do a video or something on my set-up once in production as I’m pretty proud of it, it’s starting to look like NASA or something. Anyway the final thing on the list after the new MacPro, monitors etc… was a Wacom Cintiq – which is essentially another monitor that you can digitally draw on. I’ve been using Wacom tablet’s for years now and have been drooling over one of these for a while. I’m looking for my computer drawing to improve exponentially through using it. I will probably set myself daily challenges in order to really sharpen up, some of which I will post online.
Most other items on the shopping list are now software based, such as plug-ins, some which are function based, others are purely for visual tricks which aren’t as important at this current juncture. Have spent this weekend following more 3D tutorials, I find a lot of the theory as well as the technical applications of the software really help from certain videos. Something I heard which I though was particularly insightful, is to initially build the bare essentials in terms of rigging and then add controls as needed. This little bit of advice was really helpful as I always looked at it from the point of making a finished prop to be used throughout. This way takes a lot of the pressure off and allows to not learn everything all at once, but instead in more easily digestible chunks.
