My Backstory

To celebrate the order of my physical Kindle that would not ship for the next two days back then, I got me the Kindle Reader software for my computer which came with some public-domain eBooks such as Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, Aesop’s fables and, well, Treasure Island. Since I always wanted to catch up on a novel I had the impression of being the ultimate adventure-story, I started reading immediately and after ten days I was through. While I was reading, I did some research about book and author because I’m a geeky guy and eventually stumbled across more than 400 reviews of the book on Amazon.

It was then when I learned that the book was and still is part of a majority of US elementary schools. As a tutor and teacher I was flabbergasted: Who would consider such a book age-appropriate?! So that’s the beef I have with this book being mandatory reading in 4th grade or so:

The Story

Yes, the story is quite okay. Written from the perspective of a boy who in the end keeps saving the day over and over again for reckless risk-taking and not thinking his actions through more often than not. In the it oftentimes is dumb luck that saves him. Personally I found it at first very engaging and straight forward, losing momentum towards the middle and creeping onward towards the oh-so-predictable end. There were only two or three occasions where a twist in the plot did surprise me. No, the story is not very complicated, it is only obstructed by intricate descriptions of details that are littered all over and, my opinion again, do more harm than good. Yes, descriptions cater to a dense and atmospheric environment, but when they hinder the action and progression of the story it just becomes a bit bothersome.

I think the pretty linear story and the adventurous pirate-theme is what keeps this book still in every English class in the US.

The Language

The first thing that struck me after I picked it up was the language. Yes, it is a bit different from what we’re used to nowadays, no problem there. Yet there’s an awful lot of dialogue in dialect, which might be interesting for any linguist or even researcher of the jargon of ill-educated English sea-folk: The grammar is off, the phrases are oftentimes peculiar to the point of being (at least to me) uninterpretable or, as quite a number of the Amazon reviewers state “Makes no sense”.

Consider this: The book was written 130 years ago, further the novel is set a hundred years before that still, so today it is almost a Renaissance text. no wonder an average 9-year old finds it “boring”; no doubt, it must be extremely frustrating when it’s hard (if not impossible for them) to understand and follow!

The Vocabulary

As mentioned before, the grammar and language hits you pretty hard at first if you don’t expect it, but after a few chapters you should have grown accustomed.
But the one thing you will need desperately is a good dictionary: Robert Louis Stevenson had an interest in traveling and ships and so the book is crammed with as many technical terms for various parts and equipment of a vessel there is! Almost on every page in the book I had to consult my dictionary at least twice, and sometimes I even didn’t find an answer in it.
Sometimes the frequency of those unfamiliar words was so high, that I had no idea where on the ship a scene was talking place for all the plentiful descriptions were bristling with naval-lingo that was occasionally even used in analogies. Whew!

That’s pretty much the deal-breaker why I wouldn’t force a kid to read this book: If you have to look up almost every word in the dictionary and, once you got hold of their individual meaning, you still need to puzzle out what the hell they all mean together. And if you don’t happen to be the child of a seaman, shiver my timbers, you’re pretty much fucked. It’s incredible that there still are kids who went through with it and didn’t burn their copy of the book along with their English teacher…

The Portrayal of Conflict

Oh boy, pedagogically this book is really outdated, or might even hadn’t been up to date ever: Jim Hawking’s mother, the only woman in the book, by the way, is in fact more often mentioned than actually portrayed and even that only in the first few chapters. What we learn about her character in total is that she loves her son (of course) is stubborn to get the pay for the rent, even if in a dangerous situation, easily faints and worries a lot. That’s all about it. If you’re a girl having to read the book, you will be repulsed to read it even more than boys¹

So one day the mutiny is raised and essentially divides the crew into two camps. There is not so much the question of how to deal with the situation that a compromise could be reached or even how to avoid mindless killing, no, it is tolerated with a mere shrug. That’s what you get, “it’s us or them.”

And the big bounty, the treasure everybody is after: It is the life’s savings of a cruel and merciless pirate captain, stolen from countless pillaged villages and merchant vessels. Yet, even for the protagonists it is out of question that the treasure could be restored to their rightful owners, once found ². No, everybody (friend or foe alike) sees the treasure as solely their easy fortune. Not a though is wasted on the blood that was spilled for it.

The message generally is: “If some grown-ups are doing bad things, it’s okay to do bad things to stop them, too. Take the initiative, even if that gets you in danger or everybody else because the luck is always with you in the end.”

Well, so that’s it from me. I never had to read the book in a mandatory fashion and it wasn’t a “bad book” or a “stupid book”; it was a book that was a nice challenge to read, occasionally even entertaining and sometimes a bit hard to follow. I’d fire 6 of 10 possible cannon-balls at this book — and I’d do so to at the schmucks who thought (or the schmucks who still think) Treasure Island is age-appropriate for 9-year olds. Give them something (anything!) from Neil Gaiman to read instead and the would would be a better place. Especially if your world consists mostly of mandatory reading, homework and playing ball in the yard.

Director and friend of the site Russel Rocheleau recently released his music video for the song “I Want To Report A Murder” by Otto Kinzel. The Song is from Otto Kinzel‘s 2011 full-length album “We Are All Doomed: The Zodiac Killer”. Why am I posting you this update? Because I can proudly say, that the Zodiac font featured was created by yours truly, four years ago.

So if you like the video and/or the music, be sure to give a thumbs up or leave a nice comment!

Same ol’, same ol’

This time ripping the sounds from the SPC files wasn’t new to me, and I won’t go into all the details like last time (if you’re interested, just visit the previous posting).

The New Shit

What was different, however, were the samples present in the files: In F-Zero sound files, basically every sample was loaded with every song, whether used or not. In F-Zero’s case this wasn’t a major problem since the samples were really small, but with Street Fighter 2 this habit began to change a bit: The majority of samples was present in all SPC-files as well, but in the sample-registers 46 and 47, and occasionally 45, were different samples in different arenas, like wood-block and shamisen in the E. Honda’s bathhouse; or sitar in Dhalsim’s temple. In practice this meant listening closely to each song and surveying the sample-number for new samples in familiar places in the register.

Shoryou-! …

Additionally I could also find out which fighters had been in the stage when the SPC file had been dumped from the game, because the sound-samples of the fighters were in them as well — heavily chopped up and four times the speed than they were played in the game; probably another means to save memory. For example, Ryu’s “Hadouken!” cry consists of two separate samples, “Hadou!” and “Ken!”, so that the latter can also be used after the “Shoryou!”-sample for the Shoryouken-move. Seems like it really pays off having played (and listened) to this game 18 years ago or so.

Soundfonting

I did just like I did a few days back, converting the samples to 44.1 kHz, recreating the loops and ASDR-envelopes and putting the new instruments in a soundbank with the Viena soundfont editor.

But the most annoying part in Viena is to construct a GM-compatible drumset, where all the right drum samples are in the right pitch mapped onto the right key. The thing is, that there’s a lot of recycling going on in the SNES-tunes and this over-complicates things in the editor. So for example for the toms you have to add the same sample like six times to the “Drums”-instrument. And in Viena such tasks become a tedious click-orgy.

Progression

Compared to F-Zero there are a lot more real-world instrument samples to find, especially for the drums. The Street Fighter 2 percussion includes:

• A snare drum,
• finally a decent bass (kick) drum,
• a tom-tom,
• a crash cymbal, although with an audible looping point,
• a ride cymbal, used as hi-hats solely in the Sagat stage.
• claves,
• a bongo (used in Blanka’s stage)
• a synth clapping sound for Zangief’s stage (the other analog-sounding drums are just pitched snare and bass drum samples)
• a wood-block sound, also in Honda’s stage.

Yet still: FM synthesized samples are plenty also with this score, but slowly there was a trend emerging of refraining from familiar FM-syth-sounds and towards more realistic, albeit memory-intense, real-instrument samples. It is 1992 we’re talking about, after all.

All things considered, the more samples make the drums much more versatile than those from F-Zero, although I just adore that hearty snare drum there.

Fill ‘em up

Another major difference to the F-Zero is the sheer density in sound-layers. Nintendo’s racing title just used four of the Super Nintendo’s eight simultaneous playback-channels solely for music playback, Street Fighter 2 seven, sometimes all eight! But I guess that’s okay, since the only other sound-samples are punches, groans and special-move shouts and if there’s a very subtle channel pausing for the second Ryu gets punched in the face or Chun-Li yells “Spinning Bird Kick!” so be it.

And the channels are packed! There hardly is any silence in either of them when the music is busy. Even solo-ing only three channels sound like four or five: Capcom’s sound team really packed the tracks with so much stuff that it’s almost a bit too much, in my opinion…

Some Music, eh?

But enough with the the chewing of technical facts and limitations, let’s hear some music! And instead of trying to recreate the tracks we all know by heart, I played a bit with my SNES sound-fonts so far and came up with two new original songs in the style of real old-school SNES music.

This one is my F-Zero tribute, take a listen:

Black Gulch (F-Zero Tribute) by sephcarissa

And the track below is the music to my fictitious stage, also a humble attempt at trying to catch the flair of Street Fighter 2′s score.

Seph’s Stage (Street Fighter 2 Tribute) by sephcarissa

Donwload and Donation

And there are a few of you who are just here for getting their hands on my soundfont, so I thought I give it away for a donation. Have fun! And thanks for listening and reading, y’all!

	Click the Image to download my SNES Street Fighter 2 Soundfont

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

PS: If you love the meticulously hand-pixeled arenas as much as I do, you might wanna visit this site!

Today I really wanted to indulge my mind in some mindless gaming after having watched a couple of Street Fighter 2 Ending scenes, but there was a tiny little thing I wanted to try first: I had an inspiration of it a couple of days ago and now I finally had the time to try it out.

The Backstory

Recently I had the opportunity to create some SNES-styled music for a game of my friend Jot, the Game Designer. I already had some Super-Nintendo-game-soundfonts but all of them were more than ten years old and had lots and lots of missing samples or just bad samples in it. So gathering all the sweet SNES instruments I wanted to use in my composition was rather exhausting and the result sounded a bit patchy as well to me.

The Idea

So what did I think of? Well, I wanted to create a soundfont myself from a couple of SNES music files I had lying around in my extensive chipmusic archive. “How hard can it be?” I thought with a smirk to myself, “Maybe I’ll do three or four games in the next hour or so,” I thought. “Because this can’t take long; an hour tops,” I thought. This was eight hours ago.

The Realization

Part One: Research

Ages ago I ripped some sound samples from Jurassic Park for a remix I did back then, but ended up never using them. I remember using a command-line program that would harvest the samples from the game-ROM. That I was looking for.

But, alas, software from ten years ago is hard to find and I gave it up when I learned that I was helplessly living in the past, because today everything comes with a user interfaces and features: The SPCTool v0.7 (download) from 2004 was a bit buggy but otherwise just marvelously up to today’s task: It highlights used samples in a song, lets you preview the samples (with loop-points!) and batch-export selected samples either as compressed SNES-wave files or — yay! — standard Windows PCM WAV files. I loaded up my favorite F-Zero SPC file, Big Blue and hit play. It was great, I could see which sample was used in which channel while listening to the song. So I selected all the samples and hit Export.

I only needed an editor to create my soundfont with. Ten years ago I was busy with the Vienna Soundfont Studio but couldn’t find a working version for my operating system anymore. Time flies by… Yet again I stumbled across a superior alternative, namely Viena. What the program was lacking in n-letters in its name, it made up for with an incredibly feature-rich and easy to navigate interface. I was delighted once again!

Troubles?

Importing the WAVs I had exported from the SPCTool was a little troublesome. Either that or I had no clue what I was doing. In any case I figured that it might be a problem that the exported files had an odd sample-rate, something just below 22,050 Hz. So I now was in need of something that would help me batch-convert my ancient Japanese sample-files to 44,100 Hz.

Since I am a proficient Googler I found what I was looking for in no-time, the r8brain Sample Converter, free of charge and despite the fugly UI quite useful.

Getting to grips with it

The estimated hour I thought I would be spending with it was almost over and I didn’t even have a single sample ready. I looked at the clock again and it wasn’t that late. I had plenty of time to play around and get a closer look at how the folks at Nintendo set up their compositions. Yes, I felt like Indiana Jones, digging up some treasure from the past…

Learning from the Japanese Masters

Memory was tight back in the days and F-Zero was a launch title of the Super Nintendo, so it had to look and sound good without breaking the mold of the memory. I guess nobody would have thought back in 1990 how much data you could stuff into a SNES game-pak. So what did Yumiko Kameya and Naoto Ishida, F-Zero‘s sound-designers and composers do — apart from an incredibly good job? They tried to use as little memory for music samples as possible. In fact, all the samples in their original SNES data-format where just a bit over 100 kb. In today’s world that’s almost nothing. Even back in the days all the music-samples of the game would fit onto a 3.25″ floppy disk no less than thirteen times!

Interestingly they tried to use as little “real-world” recordings from instruments as possible: Only

• trumpet,
• french horn,
• alto saxophone,
• Hammond organ,
• Slap Bass

and five drum samples — that’s all. The rest are synth-sounds (yes, even the warm E-bass), and some of them sound awfully much like FM-synthesized sounds. Around 1990 FM-Synthesis was state of the art: Soundcards for personal computers (if they had any) would synthesize MIDI-instruments that way, the SEGA Genesis (released in 1988) was keen with it and even Konami developed at the time their VRC-7 chip for NES games. The chip would provide the composer (and gamer) with six additional FM-synth-channels to the standard NES sound. So the SNES was something totally cutting edge with its eight sample-fed channels when it launched. But back to the game. Have a listen to the samples and how frickin’ short they are:

F-Zero Sound Samples by sephcarissa

And yes, there were only five drum samples in the whole game:

• A snare,
• a rimshot (I have absolutely no idea where it was used, to be honest),
• a closed hi-hat,
• a semi-closed hi-hat,
• and a medium tom.


If you’re into making music yourself, you might have noticed that one basic drum is missing — the bass drum. So how the hell did they get away with that in the game? As it turned out, they pitched the tom-sound down a couple of semi-tones and used the result as a feasible bass drum sound. Oh boy, sample-memory must have seemed really small 21 years ago!

But the most interesting sound was the noise of the wind in the track Death Wind. It is very creative: First they used a noise-sample that’s so short, it sounds more like a castanet-clap than anything else. At first I didn’t even rip that sample because I thought it was junk. I mean, listen to it above (it’s the one on the bottom of the play-list).
So they took that sample and pitched it down, down and even further down to the core of Earth itself so it transformed from almost nothing into an eerie, three-second long humm. But they didn’t stop there: On top of it loops an equally down-pitched and stretched sample; the semi-closed hi-hat sample.
Oh how do I bow before thee, Kameya-san and Ishida-san! And needless to say that I had my fun recreating this for my soundfont.

When I was trying to recreate the loop-points in Viena from the samples, I realized how tight they were, some even shorter than a the tenth of a second! And this meant trouble:
I don’t know how much you have worked with sound-samples yourself so let me tell you: If you loop a very short sound sample, it begins to change its pitch. The more so, the shorter your loop is. This becomes a problem when you only have a single sample for one note (usually C’) that you want the hardware to pitch up and down so that you can use it for all notes. This really was a problem and is also the reason why I didn’t quite get some slight off-key sounds out of my soundfont. Of course, I only realized this when I was testing my soundfont out after hours of key-mapping and creating ADSR envelopes off the top of my head.

Yes, this was another problem: To keep the file-size small, many samples were so short that it was hard to figure out where they belonged, i.e. for what instrument they were used for. And since they all were synthesized, it was even harder: It’s easy to distinguish a piano-tone from an organ, for example, even if your sample is just a quarter of a second long. But if you have a synthesized sound you’re lost. More so, if there is a number of them, all sounding very similar. Whew!

The only thing you can do is listen to the songs then in SPCTool, muting and solo-ing different channels during playback and keeping a close eye on the entry that tells you what sample-number is currently playing. So with that approach I figured out most instruments and ADSR-envelopes over the course of two or three hours or so.

The Field-Testing

From VGmusic.com, my favorite game-MIDI archive for over a decade now, I downloaded some artfully recreated music-tracks from the game as MIDI-sheet music and imported them into Reason. There I created some NN-XT sample players and fed them with my soundfont’s instruments to test them out. Holy cow, that was awful at first! No instrument was in proper key, some I had forgotten entirely and with others I messed up the envelopes because I took them for a different instrument than they actually were. It sounded like the devil himself took an AVGN-like diarrhea-dump onto those sacred compositions and was mocking me. So back to Viena for some envelope-tweaking, back to Audacity for some hand-tuning of the samples (Viena‘s correctional settings didn’t quite work with Reason) and back to SPCTool to listen to the originals over and over again.

Engaged and analytic listening of your favorite music for hours really separates the wheat from the chaff: If you still can listen to the tracks the next day without your eardrums vomiting, then you truly are listening to outstanding music.

During that back and forth between three applications (which don’t quite enjoy each others presence and demand of sole reign over the soundcard) really was exhausting and quite often I spotted errors in the MIDI files I used as framework. Since I am a merciless perfectionist I spent also quite some time ironing out those inconsistencies as good as I could.

The Presentation

“So what does it sound like?!” I hear you asking. Fear not: Below is the playlist just for you. All the tracks in it are recreations from my bitterly crafted soundfont and the rigorously corrected MIDI files from VGmusic.com.

My F-Zero Soundfont by sephcarissa

If you want to compare these to the originals (provided those aren’t etched into your mind), I suggest you get started with this playlist where you will find it all.

The Acquirement

And if you want to play around with the soundfont on your own, I am happy to release it on this very blog under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License:

	Click the Image to download my SNES F-Zero Soundfont


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.



]]> http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/10/27/f-zero-too-much-free-time/feed/ 4 http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/10/20/hello-still-alive/ http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/10/20/hello-still-alive/#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:24:00 +0000 Phil Strahl http://blog.philstrahl.com/?p=2358 It’s been a while since my last update and a lot has happened. In fact, the less that happens around here on this blog, the more is happening with my outside life. Wow, I just realized that this is the first time that I apologized that I had a life outside the web. Anyways: I bet you’re incredibly curious about what has been happening since my last update? Read on, I keep it short and funny. I promise!


Okay, I lied, but it should be at least funny.

A bit.

So this is what happened:

So after my last post I spent some more nice days in Berlin, got treated unfairly by Air Berlin and spent eight more hours than expected at Tegel Airport but met a nice couple from Salzburg that just got engaged in Berlin. In fact, I was just fifty meters away when Stefan proposed to Julia in the Mauerpark. I was busy looking for presents for me, my friends and myself. So one woman got a ring and I got some games for my Atari 2600 — everybody was happy.

Back in Salzburg I had a shower and the next day drove to my lovely and talented digital-artist-girlfriend in Tyrol where she stayed with her parents for a couple of weeks. Whereas Berlin was cool and rainy, Tyrol greeted me with hotness and sunshine. And Conny and I walked and even hiked quite a bit. Her family was super-friendly and it was a nice vacation from my vacation.

Not so long after I had my birthday, my very good friend Jot, the game designer finally moved out of the campus with his girlfriend. Not long after I witnessed with Conny the last few of her colleagues’ Bachelor exam. It was that day when Joey, head of the animation department at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, asked me to manage the students starting this year in the animation master course, since “you are in the project-management master class anyway.” I agreed and so the semester started for us a bit early but creatively.

Hey, and I bought my dream-woman a shiny ring with a shiny stone and asked her to move in together when we’re through with our Master’s degrees. And — yaaaay! — she agreed!

And before we knew we were sitting amidst about a hundred people in the biggest lecture hall for the introductory presentation of the Master’s curriculum. I am not afraid to say: Finally! As a student at the FH Salzburg I’m as happy as a lark and started out way too keen to do well, taking notes, reading up on topics and managing the animators. Hell, even the night-shifts at the Red Bull Media House in conjunction with very early courses the following days don’t scare me, they just exhaust me a little. But hey, I can sleep when I’m dead, right?! Which may happen sooner rather than later if I keep up this lifestyle.

Gadgetwise

Yeeees, this is the part where I let my electronic bling shine: As said before, Berlin was a retro-computing kick-starter and I returned with an Atari 2600 Jr. plus some cartridges in my hand luggage. The Atari still works, as Jot and I found out in one heavily documented gaming evening. It was a load of fun, despite the very noisy TV-picture which made it hard to make out what was noise and what was a bullet.

Then, of course, Propellerhead put out a new release of Reason wich now integrates Record plus at last a studio-grade mixer and 64-bit support. Sugoi! But the most awaited gadget arrived a few days earlier, something I had waited for almost two years since I first saw it in a YouTube video. It finally shipped to my address from Hong Kong and despite the odds (UPS’ inability to find my address for four years, UPS’ finally calling me with the instructions where I should go to retrieve my package, plus UPS’ invoice charging me additional fees to the already royal amount that customs already took from me) I had it in my hands: The Misa Digital Instrumets Kitara, a fully digital guitar with built-in synth behind a multi-touch panel running Linux. Yes, the awesomeness was oozing from every inch of its black and shiny polymer body. As soon as I had some time I plugged it in and realized that I had neither a clue nor innate talent in playing this instrument. But DANG! I’m looking gooooood with it!

Recently I grew increasingly annoyed with HTC’s Android distribution on my mobile phone, the Desire Z or G2: Buggy audio profiles, promoted applications like Amazon MP3 you couldn’t delete and an insatiable hunger for memory. Once I was fed up enough I posted my misery on Google+, asking for advice on how to flash the device with a custom ROM. I got the answer, got it up and running (I might lay out the details of it some time since it was way harder than anticipated) after four hours and was so happy that I also flashed the firmware of my Canon 5D Mk. II with Magic Lantern. My recommendations for both ROMs.

Anything else?

Well… no. Not really. But at least I got some little creative stuff done, like a SNES-music track for a boss fight in a game my dear friend Jot, the Game Designer is working on. I thought my piece is sub-standard, mediocre crap but he likes it. Poor fella. Lost his mind obviously.

Another thing I always wanted to try was programming apps for my Android phone. Installing the development environment was so tedious and complicated that I really congratulated myself when I got it to work, because I thought that it was the hardest part of my career as a successful programmer. Oh, how wrong I was: After two or three days of heavy research I was at least able to code an “app” that force-closed when you tapped any of its sparse user-interface widgets. A few days later I realized that it might be a good idea to properly learn Java before attempting to code The Best App In The World. I got me a book (thanks Conny for advising me in the bookstore!), I got my head wrapped around that whole object-oriented crap (hey, at least no pointers, headers and memory management like with C++) and I even managed to code an arrow that one could control like a car from a top-down perspective. That’s where I stopped for now.

But I got back to my Android phone, but this time more on a creative side. When you got root-access of your phone and a custom ROM, there’s not much you can’t do — gawd, I love Android for it’s openness…

So?

So that’s it in a nutshell. If there’s any possibility that you might have read it all and not just clicked the photos in half-hearted anticipation of seeing something shareable on Facebook, I want to congratulate you and apologize for taking away all those precious minutes from your life-clock. More to come soon. Maybe. If I find the time.



]]> http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/10/20/hello-still-alive/feed/ 0 http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/08/08/berlin-not-so-sunny-sunday/ http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/08/08/berlin-not-so-sunny-sunday/#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:01:39 +0000 Phil Strahl http://blog.philstrahl.com/?p=2351 Today I overslept. Or so I thought. In fact I got up around noon after about five hours of sleep and my first thought was: “Damn, I’m gonna be late for the flea market!” I jumped up and emptied my backpack for the anticipated impulse purchases. Esther left to disassemble the audio setup from the party and I took the U8 to Bernauer Strasse. It almost rained.


Market

The closer I got to the Mauerpark, the more people filled the streets and once inside the premises of the market, everything was tightly packed – as ever. I had a list of people I want to present gifts from Berlin and the flea market is always a good source of unique presents one won’t get anywhere else. And eventually I find something for myself, I thought and mingled with the crowd. But before buying something, only to find something even better a few steps away, I decided to walk and spot the entire marked without making a purchase whatsoever.

For over two hours I looked at thousands of goods, always in search of The Perfect Gift in the back of my head — and maybe some retro electronics for myself as well. Unfortunately the market has quite been picked clean of good old game cartridges and consoles. In total I spotted just a single, lone Sega Genesis in poor shape, an okay Atari 2600 next to a very dirty SNES and the occasional Nintendo DS. The handful N64 games scattered around various stand were either the usual suspects (Mario 64, Zelda) plus some obscure and most likely crappy sports games. The GameBoy cartridges featured the same “diversity” of titles and mostly were in terrible shape (ripped, bleached and torn cover-stickers!).

The only good thing really seemed to be the Atari and instead of considering what presents to get for whom, I caught me just obsessing about that console from 1976 and to keep me from worrying too much I bought it for 20 bucks which was less than I had expected since it came with some cables and a Sega controller (that is compatible with the Atari, of course). I was happy.

Now I could look for some presents. And I found one: Another present for me: A 1977′s Pong clone, titled the Unimex Mark III in very good shape (original packaging) and a real bargain for 7 €! I continued through the stands and even stocked up on post cards until I finally, finally found some presents from other people. I felt so good about my selflessness that I had to get me a reward. That one vendor sold hand-made watches and adjusted them to his customers’ wrists flabbergasted me profoundly and in my excitement I got me a classy custom watch for classy 29 €.

Before leaving the market this time I wanted to get something healthy to drink so I settled for a bottle of freshly pressed pomegranate juice, the weirdest thing I’ve ever drank: It was very sweet, very bitter at the same time, very sour as well and overall very intense. And it tinted my ‘stache probably very red.

I suspected the café Kauf Dich Glücklich to be helplessly overrun and besieged by hungry tourists, like the Glücklich am Park I spotted later. That’s why I headed straight for the Café Napoljonska instead, got a seat and a waffle but was disappointed by the change the whole place had gone through since my last visit last year: It was now cleaner, bigger, brighter and had gotten renovated. What once had the charm of a cozy little café was now a colder, less individualist place that didn’t have that certain Berlin-vibe to me. At least waffles and café were superb. When I felt exhaustion creeping in on me, I left and walking made me feel better.

So I continued up the Kastanienallee to the Lichtblick movie theater to fetch their program. On my way there I noticed another change: The once dark red (i.e. communist) Morgenrot Bar where you paid for a breakfast “as much as you saw fit”, is now also a bit cleaner and has streamlined their name as well: Morning Glory. I hate to say it, but the more renovated and improved Prenzlauer Berg gets, the less and less it is attractive to me as a place to roam and explore.

Dennis

At Rosenthaler Platz I boarded a train back and when I arrived at Esther’s she was about to leave for the Konni Café at Kottbusser Tor meet with another former fellow student, Sandra, who was also working and living Berlin now. Esther took the bike and I wanted to take the train. I missed it and decided to walk instead. At Lausitzer Platz I passed a guy in his early twenties with a slight speech impairment and obvious autistic disorder who asked me to take a photo of the church.
“I can’t man, I’m late!” I said and looked back at him. It obviously encouraged him to follow me and so we walked along down the Skalitzer Strasse. While I was thinking how I could get rid of my unexpected companion, he wanted to “touch pants” and was quite assertive. Obviously he liked my black denim jeans.
“What’s your name?” I asked him,
“Dennis. I wanna touch your pants!” he kept going and I gave in at a red light. He wanted me to stand on one leg and he laid his hand on my upper thigh, watching closely.
“Touch pants!” he said once more and I noticed a dictaphone in his hand. When the lights turned green again, finally, I asked about the gadget.
“I like to record train sounds” he said. It appeared to me that he just keeps riding trains the whole day, recording his experiences. A bit like me with my blog. On the next red light he shouted
“Touch pants! Touch pants!” I sighed and put up one leg. Dennis was intently touching my pants and bystanders looked shyly.

We continued to the Kottbusser Tor and Dennis grew more and more impatient. I told him on the walk before that I was meeting friends at the café there and he had a hard time catching on, so I kept repeating it over and over again.
“Can we sit in café and touch pants?” he asked and grabbed my arm a little bit aggressively as we crossed the street.
“Dennis, please let my arm go!” He did but kept asking me to “sit down and touch pants.” To make him happy I sat on the stairs leading up to the café blocking all pedestrian traffic and he wanted me to take out my phone to he could better “touch pants”. Esther was watching us with a puzzled smile.

I introduced Esther to Dennis and the same moment Sandra arrived and it was a very confuse situation. I let Dennis touch him my pants one last time, although he kept shouting
“Longer! Longer!” but at one point the three of us cut him off and told him that he had to leave. Before he did he asked me whether I will be passing by Lausitzer Platz again.
“I don’t know” I replied, taking the decision that I won’t be passing there. Dennis was a friendly guy at heart but he was too complicated and stubborn for my taste. I wasn’t looking for a companion tagging along, I was looking for a few days of vacation. Dennis finally left to the Kottbusser Tor station and Sandra asked for how long I knew Dennis.
“About 15 minutes” I replied to her surprise.
“You guys looked like you got along nicely” she smirked.
“Touch pants!” Esther concluded with a broad smile. There was no point in trying to repel the formation of an in-joke at this point.

Sandra

Sandra just came back of a “date” (her quotation marks) and she wasn’t sure about her feelings and seemed more shy than had known her to be. Esther and I tried to help her sort out her emotions but we constantly drifted off into jokes. Paradoxically this seemed to work out for Sandra. And when a young friendly dog with a bandana looked at Esther, who instantly fell in love with it, the topic was more or less dropped. When Esther had to leave for her contact-gymnastics-session, I talked with Sandra for an hour longer and she invited me to tag along the next time she and her work colleagues from the animation manufacture she was employed. Back home I took the subway this time.

Now Esther is lying in her bed and listening to a relaxation video on YouTube, since she has troubles sleeping. Frankly, this is getting me sleepy as well… good night! If only the guys across the street could quit yapping.



]]> http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/08/08/berlin-not-so-sunny-sunday/feed/ 1 http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/08/07/berlin-saturday/ http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/08/07/berlin-saturday/#comments Sun, 07 Aug 2011 03:49:47 +0000 Phil Strahl http://blog.philstrahl.com/?p=2346 So I’m in Berlin again, like the years before. And since my trip has become more tradition than exploration I decided to take it back and add more excitement in my experience. I started with booking a different seat in the plane, 23F instead of 15A – hell yeah!

Everything that led up to actually leaving was a bunch-load of stress, the stress of getting work done, the stress of writing dozens of emails, the stress of packing my bag and the stress of not sleeping much. Since I really want to get my sleeping rhythm back to somewhat normal, I only slept three hours on my day of departure, Saturday. I went to the post office, fueled up car, took the trash out, packed the lasts few things and when I wanted to get to the airport I realized that it was three hours too soon. So I had a breakfast in the Café Fingerlos in Salzburg until Tina drove me in her great ancient Volkswagen mini-bus to the airport. Everything was very laid back today, even getting through security.

And so I sat in front of my gate, sweated like a pig and finally began to realized that all the stress laid behind me and the only things ahead were taking photographs, sitting in cafés, writing and thinking of my beloved Conny. But I was not permitted to relax yet, the “Boarding” sign flashed and everybody got up to the gate. A telephone rang at the counter behind the tape. Nobody answered it. At least I could see that the plane was already getting loaded with luggage. Twenty minutes later finally actual boarding started. Since I was clever enough to board the plane from the aft I was in my seat and ready to go. I took a last photo of me in Austria and sent it to Conny before I was asked to put my phone to rest, so I took a couple of photos until the friendly flight attendant asked me to delete the photos of her I made during their security instructions choreography. I showed her how small she was in the actual wide-angle shot of the cabin and that settled it.

Hobbyists on small ladders peeked with the small cameras over the fence of the airfield as the plane took off into the sunny sky and into the north. I enjoyed the ascent, as all my stress would remain on the ground, far behind. I was the only one who had ordered a overpriced menu on the very short flight which was very tasty and supplied me with much needed energy, maybe the coke also helped with that.

Once arrived I got me a weekly ticket for public transport and boarded the first bus that arrived. Constant questions about the bus’ route were asked by newly arrived travelers and the driver answered them all.
“Excuse me, does this bus go to Brandenburger Tor?” a tall blonde asked the driver, who replied smirkingly, “No; only if you kidnap me and this bus.” Quickly another passenger from behind overhearing the conversation shouted “But I am not okay with this!”

As I arrived an hour later at Esther’s place she opened the door before I had made the last step and the familiar smell of the premises greeted me. So did Esther who was in a hurry. She headed into the kitchen and from a big jar she handed me an apartment key. “Take everything you need!” she said and left for the event where she was the head audio engineer.

I went to the bathroom and splashed the exertions of my journey out of my face. And I realized that the flushing mechanism of the toilet was broken, instead of a push-button I could see into the tank through a gaping hole. Berlin always surprises me.

I shuffled some of my belongings and went down the Skalitzer Strasse to the Café Manus. I realized Berlin is constantly changing: Not only had the subway station Schlesisches Tor finally been (somewhat) renovated, also a number of small breakfast cafés had popped up down the street like mushrooms after a heavy rain. What was a small snack stand selling grilled chicken two years ago had become a packed joint with occupied benches in front and the restaurant I went for dinner last year across the street had closed.

At the café I had one of their great carrot cakes and a latte macchiato (6 € with tip) where I sat in the back, listened to the music and read a little until exhaustion overwhelmed me and I headed back to Esther’s flat where I chatted with my incredibly awesome Conny who had signed me up for Google+ until I literally fell asleep with the phone in my hands. Esther was still at the party.

Good music seemed to become the main theme of this year’s trip: Boarding took place to the rather uncommon Radiohead B-Side Banana Co and un-boarding to Damien Rice’s beautiful melancholic Cannonball, on my short walk to the café I recognized loud electronic music coming from the school’s soccer field, the kids were listening to Kraftwerk’s original Trans Europa Express.

Much to my surprise I woke a few hours later to something that was either close fireworks or a gang war. Since it went on for quite a while and no sirens were approaching I convinced myself of it being the first and I had troubles getting back to sleep. Then Esther returned and we talked for quite a while about everything: Our old classmates that live in Berlin, love, US politics, international politics and cake. Then Esther stopped replying and I started typing these lines with the faint hope of getting sleepy again. Currently it’s close to 6 am and the stream of partying people of many different tongues outside has slowly waned, as the sky had gotten lighter. I will take another photo and set my alarm for 9 am. Gotta fix my wacky sleeping-rhythm somehow…



]]> http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/08/07/berlin-saturday/feed/ 0 http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/07/15/the-gray-king/ http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/07/15/the-gray-king/#comments Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:36:35 +0000 Phil Strahl http://blog.philstrahl.com/?p=2312 It’s been a while since the last posting, right? And I’ve been busy as a bee with all other projects for AEtuts+ or my completely updated, recoded and redesigned portfolio and other stuff. And last evening I was sitting in this café in Salzburg and a short story hit me. Out of the blue. I typed the first draft down on my phone which took two hours but (hopefully!) was worth it. Please, read on…

The Gray King
He opened one eye, slowly and inert. Then, after many hours he opened the other, just as indolently as the first and gazed with his stone-gray eyes motionless into the darkness of the cavern surrounding him. The stalactites had grown longer, the stalagmites had grown taller and some of them had already merged into monumental pillars circling a massive natural stone table. Some more hours passed as he observed the cavernous hall (or rather the hall-like cavern) with a lazy stare. Occasionally there was some movement between the rocks and flowstones, a slow yet determined movement of small creatures shuffling from pillar to pillar.
“Which Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ is it?” he spoke up in a voice that sounded like gravel being ground between boulders and echoed for a long time from wall to wall. At first his question reverberated unanswered between the wet pillars. Then, after some time had passed, one of the creatures came stumbling into his direction, slowly but steady and from all around high pitched voices could be heard, whispering and excited, and somebody ignited a small fire in a corner of the cave. The creature headed for the throne stepped out of the shadows and into the faint glow of the fire. On the foot of the massive geologic throne it took a long and deep bow before the Gray King, its beard and nose almost touching the salty ground.
“My liege…” the creature began to address the king with a voice like the creaking of a tree’s branches in a storm; obviously looking for the right words, or words at all.
“Thou hast awaken too early as it appears” the gnarly and weary looking creature continued, that still bowed and pointed at the table amidst the pillars. The Gray King was observing the homunculus with half closed eyes and without making a move whatsoever.
“Thou beard, my liege, thou bristly beard has entwined the table not more than ten quarters as of now.” Expectantly the creature looked up from its bow and beheld its grumbling master who began slowly looking down on his beard. Dark gray it sprouted from his boney chin, was stretching over the uneven ground where it became home of fungi and lichens. It had thinned as it grew longer over the years, the decades, the centuries it kept growing from the king’s majestic jaw around the table two and a half times.
“Indeed”, the king replied to his servant,
“Indeed. The dozen has yet to be reached.” Slowly, the Gray King sat up in his massive, corroded throne, a flowstone entity like everything else in his majestic hall. His crown started to slip on his gray hair which reflected the cave’s appearance of colorless, weary stones. Swiftly, the bowing creature jumped up and gently, ever so gently, put the chiseled crown back in place.
“See and behold the signs, Friedrich, see them with your naked eye,” the Gray King commanded without seeming to have noticed that Friedrich saved the crown from falling on the ground.
“Yes, my liege. Certainly.” Friedrich bowed deep once again, his auburn beard swiping on the stones as he scuttled backwards. After he had gained some distance to the holy throne, he slipped through a narrow chink in the wall, and then another one, each with a pass so narrow and crooked that a human would get helplessly stuck and starve to death. But Friedrich knew his way around despite the pitch-black darkness and continued his ascent, guided only by sound and touch. For hours he climbed the wet rocks, slipped through seemingly impassable rock formations and even swam through a river or lake whose chilly waters would have numbed any common creature. When he got hungry he ate some of the strange fungi that grew occasionally in the most obnoxious corners and places, when he got thirsty he licked the wet stones, when he got tired he laid down on the hard rocks. Friedrich had grown modest.


And so Friedrich climbed and continued his way upwards for five days. The longer he traveled, the wider and taller the caves grew until eventually one ended in a harsh bright light that hurt Friedrich terribly in his beady eyes but the sensation lost gradually its ferocity. As the hours had passed, so had the color and intensity of the outside world. As it was milky and blue, Friedrich could finally step outside into a hazy and cold alpine air. The world was as frugal with spectacles on the outside as on the inside, there were rocks in all kinds of sizes and formations and the biggest difference seemed to be the lack of a ceiling or opposing walls. The dark blue haze seemed to stretch endlessly and chewed on the pale moist skin of the cave-dweller. After all those years he was not used to the chill of the wind anymore, the brightness and the uncomfortable vastness of the alpine panorama that stretched below him. He sat down on a jagged rock and just listened into the void of the outside world. He listened to the wind, to occasional loose pebbles rolling down towards an invisible valley, to his memories, buried under a mountain of years spent in the cave. A chamois jumped from ledge to ledge over a gaping chasm not hundred meters away from Friedrich. It didn’t seem to notice or care about him. An eternity ago, Friedrich remembered, he was jumping just like it from rock to rock, from field to field, from kingdom to kingdom. It was so long ago when he pledged allegiance that he had forgotten almost anything about his existence before it. Perhaps it was better that way. He served a bigger purpose now. And then as the wind had waned for a moment, the dark blue dusk carried the croaks of a raven to Friedrich’s ears. He looked up, instantly dismissing all thoughts and memories haunting him. There it was, a majestic black bird against the sky, croaking and shouting at Friedrich. And then another raven. And one more. The three of them fought against the strong wind circling the mountain, then dived below it and let themselves get carried away to the east where the sky was as black as their feathers. Just like they had vanished, so had their cries. Friedrich stared blankly into the darkness after them, only a moment, and looked at the stars in the sky. It was not a melancholic, reminiscent stare, rather a scientific, calculating gaze Friedrich made before turning around and beginning his five day long descent back to his king. No, it was not just his king, it was his emperor.


As Friedrich arrived in the sacred hall five days of deprivation later and advanced slowly towards the sacred throne, the Gray Emperor was sitting in it exactly in the same posture as when Friedrich had left ten days ago, as if he had fallen asleep for a short nap. Not even his cold stare seemed to have fixed anything else in the meantime.
“The signs, my liege, are good,” Friedrich reported and the Gray Emperor slowly blinked as if to say Go on.
“Further, my liege, the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ counts seventeen-hundred-and-one-dozen.” For more than an hour the emperor looked at Friedrich, contemplating and pondering until he opened his mouth a last time for the next hundreds of years and muttered the same phrase as he had done three hundred years before:
“When ravens no longer fly around my kingdom’s summit and when my beard has entwined the table a dozen quarters, our Lord will end the world and I shall return for His last battle.” Then he slowly closed his furrowed eyelids of his furrowed face and fell asleep before the echo had faded away like the shine of the fire that swiftly got put out.
If you were wondering how I came up with that cool premise then let me tell you: It’s totally stolen from the Legend of the Untersberg because I’m lazy. And now guess what? You can download and share the story also as epub-eBook for free if you want. If you want it in a different format (Kindle, Sony Reader, etc.), you can ge it for the same price here.






]]> http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/07/15/the-gray-king/feed/ 1 http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/05/11/fmx-11-day-four/ http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/05/11/fmx-11-day-four/#comments Wed, 11 May 2011 11:19:53 +0000 Phil Strahl http://blog.philstrahl.com/?p=2138 It’s terrible to say but I was somewhat glad this was the last day of fmx. There had been so much input, creatively, inspirationally and technically that my brains were running out of memory like my Maya scenes with MentalRay. And I didn’t get much sleep this night either and staggered like a zombie down to the breakfast, at least that’s what I think, it wasn’t quite there. Man, if I had feasted on brains I wouldn’t remember it.

I only somehow woke up after my caramel macchiato shot (that I would have preferred injected directly into my heart but the lame-ass barista refused to) and I found myself in the Großer Saal. Second row — How did I do that?

DAY 4 IS COMPLETE – W00T! (at least the text is)
Soon I will finish writing the other days’ reports, then add lots of pretty pictures and proof-read the whole grammar-abomination thoroughly.

The Studio

The STUDIO from New York were giving the first presentation, STUDIO as space. Interestingly you could instantly tell that both presenters, Mary Nittolo and Gary Giambalvo were from New York. And their names rhymed, they both had an Italian sure name, the same hair-length, and I think they even had the same glasses — charming! Mary and Gary started off by showing a digital mural from their website, that was a collaborative piece of some of STUDIO’s artists. The concept of STUDIO is creating a community of functioning teams, especially with artists and freelancers that join the environment for just a couple of weeks before they are off again. Mary was one of the few employers that really gave this a though, how such freelancers feel when they arrive as strangers in an already established community, “there’s no constant environment when you freelance.”

Mary had the idea to the STUDIO in Italy, when she was observing a painting in a small church: The painting was done by multiple artists that all built upon what was already there, different people came together produce a piece or art together. Twenty years later the STUDIO is operating that way, although “it has become a bit difficult in the current market. But we’re close to a new renaissance of art and science.”

STUDIO has 20 employed artists and also offers places for interns. “We want them to come with a project,” Mary added and showed “The Sparrow”, a project by one of STUDIO’s interns who had a very illustrative style and did some character development sheets, a colorful and well elaborated storyboard and a very elaborated animatic of it, complete with music and sound.

But Mary also wanted to engage in an exchange, asked the audience questions about their two cents about working freelance. How was it to work and live in New York? “The problem with New York is finding a place to live you can afford. But if you are persistent and really want it, there’s always a way to figure it out,” Mary encouraged the audience, mostly assembled of students and freelancers at it seemed, and one zombie running on caffeine¹ So why not just work from home as a freelancer then? “Working alone is isolating. It may be a bit tough to arrive in a new environment but exchange can and will happen. Working alone from home is the most alienating, because you will always have to find a person in the studio who can give you feedback, that the working experience becomes valuable to you. It should be you to initiate that contact, a lot has to come from you that way. So you should ask for it to prosper from it.”

Despite producing small projects of their own, the STUDIO started out as a storyboarding facility — and still is. “I have seen many storyboards of you guys here and the storyboards we do are much more specific and detailed.” Indeed, the stuff Mary showed was really well done and looked more like high-level illustrations than storyboards. The STUDIO does this mainly for agencies whose customers don’t get the ideas they are pitching to them. “Their clients are not very visual so they need to see a very specific visualization of what ouz client wants to present to them. So rough sketches won’t do.” Additionally the STUDIO produces CG-animatics for the same purpose that look like what some cheap productions sell as “finished project”.

But what was even more eye-opening than the quality of the storyboards, was the time frame the STUDIO usually has for such things. “It’s not uncommon that the client calls at four in the afternoon and needs some 12-odd boards with a complicated concept finished by noon the next day. And we can do that. But you have to be very fast. If you spend an hour or more on a single board you won’t finish.”
The strength of the STUDIO emerges from it having “insanely versatile” employed artists available all the time, also on weekends. To pull of the feat of producing a 30-second CG-animated animatic within a week are motion-captured animations and around 30 different rigged characters they can only modify a little. “The Sparrow” for example, with character development, animatic and edit was produced in no more than three days.

“In the US, everything gets tested,” sometimes your creativity is limited quite a bit by the client who tend to cling to the animatic once they’re happy with it. They see it almost like a casting. It can even be arbitrary things they like in it and want to keep, like “I want exactly that dog!” or “I like her shoes!” On the other hand even best and most interesting idea sometimes won’t do it because “they’re testing it against a Midwestern housewives.”
“How can you still be creative in a situation like that?” one question was asked from the audience. Mary agreed and said that it sometimes was hard. “There are different kinds of artists, some need to be creative and others are more crafty. For the creative such projects can be very tough, so we try to delegate the work as best as we can.”

As Known As

Before the next presentation began, the room notably filled with people and having a seat in the front now was worth twice as much and you could tell why. Studio AKA‘s Philip Hunt was getting ready for his lecture on the studio’s experience with getting From Pitch to Screen.

How does everything begin? Basically with drawings. Lots and lots of drawings. They are the fastest thing to do (“The pencil is our most important tool), to shift from one thing to another and throw out a lot of sketches that don’t fit or they don’t like. “I’d say 70 to 80% is immediately discarded.” Then the storyboard phase begins and especially for the clients the 2D designs of characters are modeled in 3D because it is easier for them to visualize them in the final product. But many projects don’t make it to the end and eventually get killed after weeks of work. “You need to cope with that. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes ideas get accepted and everything happens very fast,” as it was the case with their commercial for SingUp, an organization helping kids find their voice.

Studio AKA‘s animation for the British Lottery, “The Big Win” set them into a certain direction and other clients wanted a similar style for their own commercials, such as Lloyds TSB, who became “our benefactor bank”, because the communication with the client is very fruitful and they quickly understand from small drawings what the idea is. The studio produced a number of animations for them, although “it is sometimes not easy coming up with a fresh idea after dozens of spots.”

To escape the colorful, friendly and maybe even a bit boring visual world of Lloyds, Studio AKA grabs every chance they get to do something different like BBC’s openerfor the Olympics, who wanted “something like SinCity only with sports.”

And less is often more, like the Love Sports films, whose characters are just some colored blocks. “Character is not about technical stuff or much defined by appearance, its what communicates and connects with the audience and tells a story. You can do so much with so little.

Studio AKA is mainly concerned with commercials, but they also made a name for themselves with their short films and more stylized animations, such as A Morning Stroll that he would present twards the end of his presentation. We all were looking forward to it. “We’re not so much an FX animation studio, as we’re focused on character and narration.” Currently in production is The Beast which is about a beast that lives in the basement and is visually much more experimental as well.

Lost and Found

Working on films is entirely different. They produce them over years and work on it when they have a break from their commercial work, which can sometimes mean a few days, but also not being able to get any work down for weeks. The film that was shown also shown at last year’s fmx as part of the Shelly’s Eye Candy screening. I remember not liking the sequence on the rough sea very well. I found it to be too long and that the appearance of the ocean clashed with the style.

“We really liked the book but we had to expand the story much to make it work. So we did a version of the book, not the book.” In the eleven months the project took place, the creators learned “the hard way about pipeline and planning.” A thing they prospered from was the involvement of Oliver, the author who brought himself in and enjoyed working and redrawing on his original story and set drawings and even small text for signs from New York via email.

The look of the ocean was a challenge of its own and one person worked nine months to get it right. The mass penguins on the South Pole were achieved by crowd animation but unfortunately this produced some “possessed penguins” whose animation was messed up and they dithered like they were, well, possessed. “I tell you, animating every last penguin by hand would have been less work than painting out those bastards!” Philip explained their solution to the problem.

They also got a complaint by the safety department why a kid was without a life-jacket and a guardian making his way alone to the South Pole. “So I explained to him that the trip was a dream the kid had, the rough sea part being a nightmare. And about the octopus,” he turned to the audience, “Do you remember when you were a kid and had a bad dream and fell out of your bed and then your parents would come and pick you up, you were still half asleep, and put you back in the bed and tug you in? That’s why the kid is dreaming of the octopus.” That really sounded like a reasonable explanation. “They bought it!”

One person worked really long on an automated and very complicated rig for the arms on the octopus. When the time came to animate it, all it would was wobble its arms, something that was not in the film at any point. So one of Philip’s colleagues looked at the storyboards what exactly needed to happen, considered it for a bit and said, “Yep, give me a week and I can do it.” And he did. “It’s a good example of what results blind panic can achieve!” Philip concluded.

Then it was time to screen A Morning Stroll to us, the first public screening of it — yay! And it really was everything that I was hoping for: Funny, witty, experimental perhaps, and with a great twist at the end (that it wouldn’t quite need in my opinion though). In the animation there even was a fictitious iPhone game featured “and we’re trying to make that game” Philip closed. Some still chuckled from the animation.

MacGuffed

Even more people flooded in despite it being the last day of the fmx while Pierre Coffin from Illumination Entertainment was setting up his laptop for the presentation. He looked into the audience, the room was completely full. “You all came to see this? You people should get a life!” before he began with outlining The Making of “Despicable Me”.

Originally Coffin was approached by an US producer with some concept drawing and a rough idea he wanted to see in a big film. It were drawings of a villain in everyday situations, how he would live his day-to-day life. “He really wanted to get the project done, so we went to dinner, I had chicken which was really really good and he presented me some ARGUMENT$. And then more, he was quite A$$ERTIVE.” Coffin declined until he was promised to work with Chris Renaud as his co-director who had worked as a storyboard artist at Blue Sky and co-directed there a Scrat short.

Still, the story was non-existant it was just that idea and a couple of gangs, but “they were strong”. Concept artists drew upon this some more art and coneptpaintings of how such a person would live. It was all very dark and black and steampuk-ish. Some elements from these illustrations were built upon to develop a story, because there just was no script to begin with.

But then, the steampunk-look was toned down a notch because the production grew a little worried to lose some audience, because “it needed to be a family movie. And who in the family decides what movie to watch? Dads don’t decide. The kids do. But only when their mother agrees, the family will watch that movie. So our focus shifted from teenagers to kids and the villain became just some sort of grumpy guy.” Also during the concept phase it was clear, that the protagonist shouln’t be too successful in what he does. “He should be smpathetic. We like failure”.

The actual script came in late: In the last four months of the production the third act got written, not quite knowing where the story was headed. “And the ending came, well, in the end.” Pierre confessed. As the script progressed and changed, so did the animation. “In the end we more or less has to do everything at once”, also (re-)recordings of Steve Carell.

Gru

“We always had this tall, Transylvanian looking guy as our villain quite long in our heads as protagonist.” Pierre continued. The character had already benn built and posed with early models of the girls. This main character had also a clumsy Igor-like assistant who was much rounder and bell shaped. “In the end we decided against him because it just was too much stereotype. And the Igor-character we called Kyle looked friendlier” and he also looked better in the expresson and stating tests. The only thing that needed to be changed was his bell-shape, so they put his head in his torso a bit straighter and gave him the tall long legs of the Transylvanian looking guy. Then animatoros experimented with walkcycles and little stories. “What animators love most is a character playing a charactor, like Gru explaining his money problems to the minions.”

Girls

The girls really had a great design and Pierre was looking forward to seeing them modeld but unfortunately they looked totally unpleasant. Inly two month before the principal animation began they needed to be re-designed and recosidere. The three girls were very long though of as being just one character split into three people but, obviously, this wouldn’t work. So the small one became the true one, the middle one, they almost mute, boyish one and the oldest the reasonable one, “but boring. I know I shouldn’t be bashing on her but I never really liked her” Pierre said. The modeling was done and changed until shortly before the production, “in the last moment we pulled her mouth down for aesthetic reasons with messed with the mapping a bit.”

Minions

In the original concepts the minions were various kinds of baddies but the budget didn’t allow for esigningk, rigging and implementing them, so their design was thought over. The idea behind them was like little plumbers working for Grro. The simpler the shape, the more of them the production could afford and Pierre wanted to put them just everywhere. And as many thing, their final design came “super-late in the production”. The three Minions who get sent off to buy a toy from the drugstore ha a whole story arch around them, like they would get lost and travelled the world unintentionally only to come back at the end to save the movie in the most funny way, “but we never could think of something good enough. So we discarded it.”

A typical shot

Everything would start from a scene in the scrip or a recording of Steve (who also came up with Gru’s accent and the names for the minions) for the storyboard.

Pierre’s main direction to the animators was that he hated overacting and “illustrative physics” as he alled it, something quite different from DreamWorks. He also wanted to get to the point visually very quickly without just stating the obvious. Another philosophy was to get to get to the idea, to the core of something, instead of a very elaborate storyboard, for example. The storyboards sometimes only showed generic locations, axial jumps but, again “that is not the point of an animation storyboard.” Based on that, the set and the layout of the scene were designed and modeled, everything still very rough and just to make it possible to point out blocking problems and camera angle issues.

“There is this myth of putting all and any of an actor’s performance into the character no matter what” Pierre explained as he was showing one of Steve’s recording sessions. “Overall he’s not really expressive all the time.” The artists sometimes filmed themselves and intercut the footage (like it had been donw occasionally on TRON Legacy with Jeff Bridges’ performance captures) and used that as a reference for their animation. Then they made blocking tests, just the keyframes of their animation to see whether it would work inthe framing and the set. Once this blocking pass was greenlighted the shot could evolve further. In parallel artists color sketched the scenes for the lighting artists. As said above, everything “kinda happened at once”.

Even despite the fact that the movie came out in stereo, it was not a particular technical challenge. “We did it in 3D because they wanted it and we made it work, that was it. But we didn’T invest months of heavy-duty-research like Disney on the use of stereo-3D” Pierre summed up and showed a very funny little short animation of the minions, titled Banana. We did a couple of them, it was like a TV animation and didn’t spend more than two to three weeks on each. On the feautre we worked three years in total.”

Chaos Theory

Then it was noon again and again I dropped my wallet, but this time I found it within minutes because I already expected it. Sounds like I should change something. Maybe I need more credit cards or something. So a strawberry smoothie and a box of rice later I was ready for some more knowledge. I just wish I had hurried up a bit, so I got a rather bad seat. Pixar’s lectures are always insanely popular, no matter what. If they just would present a new RenderMan version, everybody would be over the place. Wait a minute, that was the case three years ago!

This year again Variety‘s David Cohen said a couple of introductionary words and let Bill Polson begin with his lecture with the interesting title Chaos Theory: Making More than One Movie at the Same Time”. The first thing he threw on the wall was a roster of the release year and title of each Pixar films so far that showed that Pixar more or less released a feature every year in recent years.

Oh Shit!

But Pixar works four years on a movie, and those four years are split up into four stages, Bill lined out, Preproduction, Pipelining, Modeling and Shots, “or as I am going to call them Oh Shit!, Chaos, Stability and Crunch.

Oh Shit!

Chaos

Stability

Crunch

In your Oh Shit! stage you have no idea where it’s going and how to do it, the Chaos stage is defined by developing software, getting things to work and figuring out a way to put everything together. Stability means that everything is working and everybody knows what to do and where the project is going, and finally< in Crunch you pull over-nighters, some get carpal-tunnel syndrome and you just try to get the thing out.”

Then he gave some examples of the Oh Shit! moments with the corresponding Chaos stages in the last few productions, a slide I will reproduce here:

	Oh Shit!	Chaos
Cars	Cars! Car Paint & Reflections!	New Model Pipeline Raytracing & New Lighting Tools
Ratatouille	Clothes, Hair! Food! Look of Film!	New Character Pipeline New Fluid & BRD FX New Shading Model
WALL•E	Robots! Look of Film! Look of Film!	New Character Pipeline New Light/Shading Model
Up	Jungles! FX!	New Setdressing, Instancing, etc. New FX Tools
Toy Story 3	Match Old Look! FX!	Old Light/Shading Model (From ABL-Rat)

The Oh Shit! stage in Cars was figuring out how to make and animate cars and especially reflections; Ratatouille posed the problems of clothes, fur and rendering believable food; WALL•E asked for expressive robots and a world of trash and Up was set in the jungle — “The more things you do, the more things are going on.” Moreover these new additions to the shading pipeline needed to be implemented without braking what was already working. Pixar always tests new techniques against the models of the previous film(s) in order to ensure consitency and compability. So the shading pipeline of the last years looked like this:

	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Rat	Food!	Perceptual Linearity
WALL•E		Planet!	Physically Correct
Up			Cartoon!	WALL•E + tweaks
Toy 3				ToyStory 2 Look!	Back to Start!

So in 2007, for example, there were four different shading pipelines at play. In context of all the Pixar films, is has been that was since 2003.

Impact

Next up Bill showed how multiple films-overlaps at different stages overlapping affected the crew and culture, software development and the studio itself.

“Let’s see how the situation when we release one film every two years.” In this scenario a lighter would be in Crunch mode on a feature, the next year there would be nothing for her to do, only to join the following year another movie in Crunch. Since Pixar’s philosophy is to have the artists on staff at all time to ensure they share the same culture, they can’t have their lighters unoccupied for a year, so “they are encouraged do modeling work for the next movie.”
In an environment of releasing a film every year, lighting artists can either specialize in lighting or skip film, the latter not being encouraged because “when people skip every other film, their culture becomes fractured and this slowly adds up to an environment where people start losing touch with each other. A film means learning. Miss a film is missing an opportunity to learn.”

In terms of modelling and shading this fracture unfortunately inevitably appears because the artists need to be present in both Chaos and Stability stages.

But the worst break is evident for the technical leadership because they accompany a project from start to finish over the whole for years, “which would mean they can only work on a film every four years.”

So what can be done about that situation? The answer is a mix of generalists and specialists. Specialists work on projects of a short release cycle, whereas generalists can work on films with in a longer cycle. Cohesion is maintained only for single-year departments, as soon as multi-year departments come into play they get fractured. Worse, the technical crew gets fragmented and hyper-specialized.

Software

The problem with software is to keep the versions stable over the course of a project. With a film every year the software departments needs to manage and keep track of four to, at worst, eight different versions of software combinations, which is a huge problem. Currently there are two different systems in each screening room, each for a different production, moreover the screening rooms themselves are dedicated to, either project A and B or C and D.

For the software developers the sweet spot is a release cycle of a film every three years: They come to it pre-production, work on the software through the Chaos stage and in the third year stay on the project until it reaches Stability. When the productions shifts into Crunch, the developers can get to a new project.

But in a two-year cycle this looks differently: In the stage they would be working on the stability of a software for one film, they instead are on a new project in the Oh Shit! stage already, which effectively means that they leave the software before it is stable. And fracturing developers is a bad thing, but in order to get things done, you need to have 2 pipelines.

Bill put up another table: “When you as a developer join a new project in the Oh Shit! stage you need to answer a few questions about the status of the software of the film you were previously working on. This works out pretty well, if your previous film is in either Crunch or Stability,” as outlined just before:

Previous Film	Stability or Crunch
Does their stuff work?	“Yes, mostly”
Will it work?	“Probably”
Do you want to adopt it?	“I can judge it”
What keeps you up at night?	“My stuff”
Can you worry about stability?	“Yes, keep things stable”

So if the Oh Shit! moment occurs during the previous film’s Stability or Crunch stage, you’ll likely be okay.

So what they want in a yearly release cycle is the software developers jump from Stability to Stability stage — instead they get them jumping from Chaos to Chaos:

Previous Film	Chaos
Does their stuff work?	“No!”
Will it work?	“Who knows?”
Do you want to adopt it?	“I can’t say as of now”
What keeps you up at night?	“Everybody’s stuff!”
Can you worry about stability?	“Hell, no!”

That paints a pretty bleak picture: If the Oh Shit! moment occurs too soon, when the previous film is in Chaos, “you’ll likely whipsaw the pipeline and your crew”. Bad. Very bad. “Part of a solution is to only let go of the previous film once everything works. Otherwise there is nothing to test the new film against and you’re flying blind for two years. So getting the stuff working is critical.”

So what are answers, rather, are there solutions to the problems? Bill sent a last table on the big screen:

Issue	Long Release Cycle	Short Release Cycle
Tools / Production	Soft boundary	hard boundary
Crew	Generalists	Specialists
Culture	Cohesive	Fragmented
Pipeline	Stable, evolving	Chaotic, ever-changing

“There’s a thing to say about the specialists vs. generalists” Bill said as he touched the subject of what kind of Pixar is interviewing and eventually hiring. “Schools that force students into specialization in their last year have a much better chance to get hired by Pixar,” as compared to students who come from schools that train generalists.

An Answer?

It seemed to me that there were not many (if any) solutions the situations and the slide of the presentation was rather general in the solutions it presented: “Management, trust, etc”, “Department structures”, “Focus on stability rather than artistic reach”, and “Others ?”.

In the near future Pixar will be producing three films in two years, so all the tensions and problems will only increase, “so we got to standardize” which was difficult so far. Lucky for Bill, who is concerned with the more technical task of pipelining and management, getting the stories together takes currently longer. “The lack of good stories is the main thing that has kept us from scaling up” so having even more movies in production at the same time is currently not an issue. “Once they get solved the technical stuff is not ready yet. But we’re working on it.”

In Pixar’s early early days there only were generalists around, people who also flowed in an out between technical and artistic departments and groups. “Now the walls are high and you need to specialize. It was more fun in the old days” Bill reminisced. Still, Pixar’s philosophy is to get motivated and talented people and make them great.

Q & A

“And now I would love to hear your war stories” Bill finished and sat down in a chair next to David Cohen on the stage.

“How does the short film division fit in?” one guy in the audience wanted to know. Clever question! Bill explained that they had to slice up the production to fit the shorts in whenever they can to fill the gaps in the rolling production of features. “The difficulty is to have the inventory ready”, because (much like what I heard about Studio AKA that day) there are months when nothing is done on a short, then a couple of animators work like crazy to finish in two weeks. Again, the short hibernates until the lighting artists have a couple of days to spare. “It’s incredibly difficult to schedule so we now treat and plan shorts like miniature films.” Shorts are also a good way of keeping the artists motivated and help them getting out of a rut.

“(Why) do you need to change the pipeline every year? Is this really necessary?” Bill explained, that every film need things implemented, that the previous films did not need. “Between WALL•E and Ratatouille we changed the definition of the geometry and shaders, lighting and added post effects. This in a way broke the ability to test against the old productions and the production few blind for two years.” Also, there are a lot of dependencies that get affected when you change one thing, say the shading affects also lighting and rendering. So Pixar changes only a few things at a time, keeps things as stable as possible and still, those petty paced steps end up in a pipleline that has not much in common with the one from five years ago.

“What do you do to maintain the culture, if it still keeps getting fractured so easily?” Pixar is assembled a groups of superiors who “own” teams of artists, like all the animators or all the lighters. This group also indicated community-events such as training for their employees, cross-show lunches or the monthly lighting-lunch where artists show, across the various projects, what shots they lit and get feedback from other artists. Further, there is a newsletter to keep everybody on the same level of information.

Alembic is a file format that stores platform and software independently the position and movement of vertices of a CG scene and hence makes it possible to easily transfer animation data, no matter how that animation was created in a specific program.
See Alembic at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

“How does standardization compromise creativity?”, a rather opinionated question arose. Bill smiled “In fact it does just the opposite.” He told the story, that even the shorts needed an adjusted and new pipeline to work. However, One-Man Band used the pipeline from The Incredibles without any adjustment because it didn’t need any. “It all worked, it was cheaper, it was faster and the animators had a great time” because everything worked like it should right away. On a related note, Autodesk organizes bi-annual meetings among the industry leaders to talk about what they want in future Autodesk releases, “but you don’t talk only about Autodesk products”, Bill assured and explained that in those meetings certain standardizations for core elements originated such as Alembic.

The Pixar Brain Trust is a small group of creative leaders at Pixar who oversee development on all movies. The group came about during the development of Toy Story. They meet frequently to watch the status of films currently in production and tell the directors their criticism. The directors have to listen to the Brain Trust, but are free to ignore their opinions (although this is rarely advisable). There also exists a Technical Brain Trust at Pixar who bring in their ideas to the Technical Supervisor who is also free to ignore the suggestions, yet implementing suggestions “its different with the Technical Brain Trust because the changes affect multiple films.”

“What if I have a real good idea for a story?” — Pixar doesn’t acquire stories, simple as that. Instead directors should come up with their story ideas themselves, “we want them to be passionate about their stories.” When the very first idea for Pixar-stories are thrown in for discussion by the director they usually are not the that good in first place,but have potential. “If you give a mediocre story to the best people, they can turn it into something great. Give a great story to mediocre people, the final result can only become mediocre” Bill explained. And basically, anyone at Pixar become a director. Usually people who have been observed being skillful in story and art get asked if they wanted to direct a film. If they accept, they are given the time to come up with some ideas for stories, which can be as simple as “What if a rat wanted to become a cook?”. Over time these stories get better and further developed until they are ready to be produced.

This culture of participation among all Pixar employees is what is unique to Pixar. There are oftentimes organized screenings of the films in production among the Pixar employees, from directors, to artists to security guards to kitchen staff. Everyone is encouraged to send notes and ideas to the producer like “I didn’t get that joke” or “that scene was boring”. This openness, it seems, served the integrity of Pixar’s storytelling well.

Layout

Next up was another Pixar presentation and again, the König-Karl Halle was packed. In all the chaos of people leaving and others coming in, I was able to catch a seat up front that left me more room to breathe and, more importantly, to take notes.

German Filmakademie Badem-Württemberg alumni Saschka Unseld and layout artist at the studio with the lamp was presenting Cinematography at Pixar. He was introduced by Terrence Masson who I observed tirelessly swiping away on his iPad the days before². Saschka’s presentation also featured a sneak peak of Cars 2 but mainly dealt with the opening sequence of Toy Story 3.

“When I get asked where I work the immediate response is: oh you’re an animator then? When I tell people that I am a layout artist they usually go ‘huh?’” Saschka laid out the situation of layout artists. Layout is all about camera, staging and cinematography, he summarized, “or visual storytelling.” Pixar employs 20 to 25 layout artists of whom 12 to 15 people work on the same feature together.

In principle the layout artist gets the storyboard(s) of a shot, creates very roughly the animation and interprets and explores it via camera angle, position and movement. This means for every single shot the artist tries out a number of different angles to give the editorial department plenty of stuff to work with. “It is not about recreating the storyboard as close as possible but to use it as a guide and to express its story point visually as good as possible.”

This starts with animating said sequence as a blocking pass and then putting cameras into the scene. An exchange between art and set-creation is always happening, for example when there is not enough space for the action to take place or elements obstructing it. Of course, there are some per-shot changes in the final film, but “we try to avoid it as long as possible.” in case you can’t tell: At Pixar work perfectionists.

Just like on a real set the action is filmed from different angles and in dialog scenes, there also are master shots rendered for the editorial department to cut together to their liking. The editors may also occasionally retime shots to make them work. When their work is finished, the shots come back to layout where the retimed shots are re-animated in accordance to the changes from editorial.

An important factor of this work is “Shot Hygiene” which means that every file that leaves the layout department must be clearly built and named, cleaned up, properly linked and have the exact frame range because the files files then are given to the animators who place their work right in the file, and so does the lighting department, for example. “When it leaves layout, the film is done.”

With every feature there also come certain cinematographic concepts and principle, one applying to all Pixar films: “Restrict yourself!” just because a camera can fly around everywhere and do crazy stuff, it shouldn’t. I guess we all have seen amateur works with nauseating and impossible camera movements and that it what they want to avoid, to “feel” CG. Many such real-worked developments were introduced in WALL•E as Danielle Feinberg explained two years earlier. So in addition to having a specific lens-set (ranging from 10mm to 150mm), the use of certain lenses in Toy Story 3 was restricted to either toy perspective or human world. Since the world of the toys should not feel too small, the DoF was kept high to avoid a macro look like in Toy Story (1)³ and to have the human world and the toy world consistent.

But staging is also a matter of framing as well. A character’s high point can be emphasized by putting him or her really on top of everything in the framing, in the low-point the arrangement and composition might be weighing down on the character and isolating him or her ⁴. You can also imprison your characters when they are trapped also visually and so on. Again, layout is visual storytellling and the link between the story department and animation.

Sequence Evolution

How does not a sequence evolve from a story board to the finished and locked layout? Sashka laid this out (pun intended) in detail on taking the opening sequence of Toy Story 3 as an example, were everything started out with the “Set Scout”> where the script and storyboards of a sequence are reviewed by a artists from layout, lighting set-design with the DP.
In the “Location Scout” phase the art department roughly designs the set on a plan where director and DP often propose changes. This very early and very basic set model then gets blocked out by producing a number of still frames to check the proportions and sized of the characters against their environment. The results are presented to director and DP for feedback and changes are made in accordance to their feedback once more.

“Shot Blocking” follows, the actual layout stage. Again, the angles from the storyboard are not simply copied, the blocking must tell the story beats as good and clear as possible. Sometimes it is possible to combine two or more story boards, at other times, the action needs to be broken down in more shots than anticipated. Since there is a lot of exploration happening, a layout artist might not have all the assets she or he needs for an idea, “if you don’t have something you want, temp-in something” Saschka encouraged.

What camera angles and shots end up on the big screen gets decided in the editorial with director and DP. Layout supplies them with as many interesting ideas to chose from for each beat as possible.

In the end, Saschka presented a short sequence from another feature’s opening sequence, Cars 2 where he showed the evolution of an action-laden scene from storyboard to final. It was stunning, how visual ideas Pixar managed to pack into it. “Are you sometimes not satisfied when you seen the final?” Saschka was asked as the clips had finished. “Always,” he answered instantly “every time I watch it I find something that I could have made better. The longer you explore a set, a shot, a beat, the better your ideas get” he concluded.

My mentor and former Disney animator Fraser MacLean is finishing his book about The Art & Evolution of Animation Layout which will be out in August this year. Highly recommended!

Megacity

The audience’s transition from Pixar to DreamWorks took a little longer and I found myself sitting next to some American college students, as it seemed to me. Almost instantly after the lights dimmed down and Philippe Denis began on “Megamind” — The Creative Process, the one next to me whipped out her Blackberry and launched Texas Hold’em Poker, her other hand found yet another cell in her purse via which she was heavily involved in keeping up what was new and cool on Facebook — the entire presentation. I really am thankful that my social life and craving for distraction are not as demanding, so I was able to take quite a few notes.

Without losing too many words about it Philippe verbally rolled up his sleeves and got to work, displaying an abstract slide with circles and lines on a jagged grey shape. It was the basic street layout of Metro City. Just like Blue Sky for Rio, they came up with a procedural approach for generating the city. Based on the rough boundaries and boulevards laid out beforehand, the tool created the street grid, then populated it logically with blocks and lots. “And in the lots the buildings could get placed.”
On the city map different colors indicated different types of buildings, residential lots were red, commercial ones where blue⁵ and so on. To control the height of the buildings a simple height-map was plugged into the script that would select a building type and then scale it to the desired height.

“Scale to the desired height?!” I thought but of course there wasn’t mundane scaling at play. Instead, the different types of buildings were coded, so that scaling the height effectively meant that more floors would be added automatically between ground floor and rooftop, each cleverly broken with ledges and other architectural braids. “Architecture is all about proportions” Philippe added as he rolled a screen recording from inside Maya where the operator scaled such a “coded” building into every direction.

And there were a lot of buildings to design and code. Ultimately the city was composed out of 20 thousand people, many thousand cars (following a traffic rule-set) and 70 thousand buildings, each with different LoDs and corresponding maps: If a building had a certain distance to the camera its modeled architectural details would retreat into a normal map, for example.

Also, the roads and streets were designed and coded in a similar manner, even details such as crumbled curb-edges, mailboxes, street lamps etc. had been modeled and were placed by the algorithm.

But the city’s buildings also needed to be shaded and this was where things started weighing down in memory; the whole city was around 1 terabyte of data. The solution was to bake the complex shading networks which resulted in a seven times faster rendering.

The city, however, would not only be used as a rigid stage, parts of it would also get destroyed at some point in the movie. As for the FX development there was a close cooperation with the other departments to always keep the direction transparent for each artist. The dust blown up by collapsing buildings was, for example, realized with Maya fluids that interacted with the geometry, so even DreamWorks put their pants one one leg at a time.

“A Cape Doesn’t Make a Hero”

“We also had to realize some character effects and because Megamind is all about superheroes it’s mainly about capes.” Philippe started off and displayed some cloth simulations in which the cape didn’t behave like it should, or to be more precise, like the animator wants it to behave. To cut a long story short the solution was giving the animators tools to deform and pose the cape with IK/FK handles; curl, skew and sine wave controllers and to also simulate the cape. Afterward the simulation could be seamlessly mixed together with the animation.

City Lights

In terms of lighting DreamWorks settled for a new path which seemed old hat to me to be frank: Philippe showed a shot board of some of the feature’s shots turned into black an white. It was obvious that a bit contrast was missing. Proudly Philippe beamed a slide-filling tone curve that was ever so slightly S-shaped and top-heavy. This evidently increased the contrast of the final renders and also provided a gentler roll-off towards the highlights.

But also the exposure range was presented as a bit braver than in a traditional animation as it had been decided to let things blow out into overexposure when they were not necessary to the shot (“we expose for the character”), such as bright-lit buildings in the background when a character was standing in the shadows in the foreground. Also nothing really new.

Metro City at night on the other hand asked for a little more ingenuity. I guess some of us had to build and mainly shade nightly illuminated CG-buildings. As soon as the camera starts moving (or in stereo 3D) you won’t get away with incandescent “interior views” that have been plastered over the windows. That is why behind the lit windows the buildings really had modeled rooms (= boxes) with HDI textures to suggest real buildings. Also the rooms were spanned across multiple windows “which really conveyed a real feeling.”

The street lighting was a bit trickier. The indirect illumination from the streets up the buildings was realized by an ingenious application of ambient occlusion: Take your ordinary ambient occlusion with a large radius, the subtract another ambient occlusion rendering with a smaller radius, tint it yellow and there you have your street-light illumination on the buildings, which worked really well⁶. Still, even by faking it that way, there still was enough to render, thousands of streetlamps with nine light sources each could only be rendered by calculating point clouds for the illumination.

As if that was not enough, a scene set at night also asked for pouring rain which amped up the render time per frame to a buzzing 38 hours, but that gain was feasible since the rest usually only rendered five to six hours per frame: “The complexity was not so much the geometry but the amount of map data and point clouds the renderer needed to access” Philippe summed up.

Like the old days

The college kids with the smart phone stood up as the lights brightened and I was thus granted a little more room in my row. I was rather exhausted of four days of taking notes and typing them into (somewhat) meaningful sentences that I almost forgot that there was still one presentation imminent: Animating “Tangled” by Clay Kaytis, Animation Supervisor at Disney.

“Tangled was Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 50th movie. And the really wanted to make it something special, something that could hold up to the old classics like Pinocchio or Beauty and the Beast in your DVD shelf,” talk about setting the bar high for yourself!

“But everything starts somewhere and often it is not pretty!” Clay smiled and showed the first test of a CG model, animated with blendshapes in Maya. And they really were producing disgusting holes and errors in the geometry; additionally the deformation looked eerie, like a corpse (and I am not talking about the flat shading). “The needs of the performer should drive the design” Clay remarked and went on to a photo of a beautifully sculpted maquette of Rapunzel that got scanned and cleaned. But unfortunately also this model did not work properly with the facial animation system back then.

In about a week an artist took the task of creating a new facial rig to heart and presented Clay with the result on an already modeled character: Instead of blendshapes he had settled for a rig of intricately weighted joints, eight lip controls, six for each eye, four or five for each brow and so on. Even in that early stage it was clear this was the way to go, because animating a character’s face was more intuitive than before. The rig was extensively tested with extremes and there things started to feel a tad too fleshy since the rig did not treat the bone structure differently. To tackle this issue, six extreme poses were defined, drawn and modeled and used as targets, once a certain constellation of joints was closing in on an extreme pose. This method assured a somewhat believable bone structure and additionally art-directed extreme poses. “You want your rig to be like a sports car,” Clay explained, “intuitive, elegant and very responsive.”

For body testing the team really had to gear up as Clay one day slipped that he wanted Tangled to feature the best character animation they had ever done. So they started learning animation from scratch: They animated Rapunzel turning, walking, jumping, looking and so on. Once the animator gave the character a motivation to turn or to act in a certain way, Rapunzel suddenly began to feel like a real quirky teenager, “You need to find a way to have the characters act from inside out.”

The character of Flynn should be sporty and slick although not too grossly “slick”, but the fears were allayed as soon as the character was modeled. Since Flynn and the Horse also needed to be in the sneak peek of the movie, the development on Rapunzel stopped, though.

Tangled did not have dedicated character supervisors. In the beginning all the animators played around with the characters and soon certain animators made certain characters the best.

The Nine Old Men, as they are called, were a group of Disney’s head animators starting with Snow White. Best known are Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas for authoring The Illusion Of Life

Glen Keane, legendary Disney animator who had the luck of being trained by the “Nine Old Men,” came initially as a co-director to the production but for health reasons had to leave for six months. When he returned he stepped down from directing to just animating, “a dream come true for us other animators so he would sit with us all day and we could learn from him,” Clay remembered revelling. When he came back after his leave, the artists showed him what they got and Glen started drawing over the viewport rendering. And in 2D he drew the changes needed to be made on the model “which freaked out the animation department.”

In the end there were eight months time to animate the movie when all main characters were rigged, approved and ready for production. “The rig was so robust that there was nothing you couldn’t do with a character.” It was also scripted so it could be set up easily for another character.

Dailies with Glen

During dailies the artists showed Glen what they animated and he would give feedback and draw key poses on a Cintiq over their animation in the screening room. On a new shot, Glen would start drawing his suggestions and ideas of posture and poses and the longer an animator would work on the shot, the smaller and smaller the ideas would get. “Every day was like a masterclass in animation. You go in clueless and walk out with all the right answers to make your shot better.”

When the animation on a shot was final, a breathing pass would be animated to match the breathing of the voice actors which was vital in the singing sequences. Another very subtle detail that got added towards the end was the direction and shape of the eyelashes at each key pose, a detail Glen expertly used in all of Rapunzel’s drawings.

“And he’s always getting better. After 35 years he’s still improving!” Clay finished and rolled a reel of showcasing the animators with a sample of their contribution to Tangled — a well rounded conclusion to this year’s fmx. In the Großer Saal across the street followed the screening of the whole feature but with a heavy heart I had to pass.

“See ya in 2012!”

After four days of too little sleep, caffeine-abuse and battles for up-front seats, my body was aching for rest. Not more coffee, just rest. So I ransomed my car from the ridiculously expensive parking garage and rolled back to my hotel. I was asleep before I remember hitting the mattress.

…but it’s not over yet! Soon I will finish writing the other days’ reports, then add lots of pretty pictures and proof-read the whole grammar-abomination thoroughly.

This site is still currently under construction and more will follow soon.
Watch out for falling pixels!

1. well, probably more but I only know of myself. ↩
2. …and who is also the author of CG101, the book Bill Kroyer was reading the day before. ↩
3. Although I guess that they didn’t have the technology for advanced DoF blurring implemented back in 1994. Just my guess, though. ↩
4. as can be observed in Lotso’s memory sequence in Toy Story 3. ↩
5. I hope I remembered that correctly, otherwise twenty years of SimCity took its toll on my perception of city maps. ↩
6. I have thought up a related method of faking sub-surface scattering on cartoon-like characters a few years ago. ↩



]]> http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/05/11/fmx-11-day-four/feed/ 0 http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/05/06/fmx-11-day-three/ http://blog.philstrahl.com/2011/05/06/fmx-11-day-three/#comments Thu, 05 May 2011 22:43:59 +0000 Phil Strahl http://blog.philstrahl.com/?p=2114 The morning was worse than I had anticipated it, I don’t quite remember how I got to the venue today, I only remember that I didn’t even get tea for breakfast. The Haus der Wirtschaft was buzzing like a hive again and most of the bees hat been busy at the Echtzeit party that lasted roughly as long as my writing session for yesterday’s blog post. Even worse: Those people seemed much better rested. Life is unfair.
Like with all breaking-news-hot-stories-as-they-develop-kinda blog posts there will be an update with some media for you to enjoy as soon as I have the time to. So come back soon! And for god’s sake ignore the typos and mistakes!

I stumbled between the rows of the darkened hall as some animation’s credits were running and got my favorite seat to watch a couple of really funny Wily E. Coyote-like animation shorts about Mr. Hoppe, trying different approaches get rid of a barrel of atomic waste that always backfire. There were a bunch of lovely ideas involved, so check out the website!

Know the Past, Conquer the Future

Shortly after Eric Ross introduced the founder of Digital Domain before he sold it to director Michael Bay and a bunch of investors, so he was in the business right from the start on the other end of the spectrum, not an artist but a producer and manager. How he felt after being in the industry for thirty year? “Boy, am I tired!”

“I am going to talk about the past of the VFX industry a bit because it is important to know where we all come from.” Scott joined ILM in the middle of the 1980′s when the company was working on “Innerspace”. What surprised him, was that in fact very little was done on the computers. It was the time when companies had in-house teams (such as Pixar) to develop computers for specific tasks, so called transputers. Since Scott originated from a wold of optical printing and the telecine he thought “that wouldn’t it to be wonderful to bring that to the computer?” At ILM, John and his brother Thomas Knoll started developing a program for doing composits on a Macintosh computer, a program that what would eventually become Photoshop ¹. “But rendering was still a big issue and it only got feasible until we got us some Pixar cubes², which were used for the VFX on The Abyss³. And today? There are probably more colleges that provide VFX education than there were people in the VFX industry in the early 1990′s.”

Scott continued that historically not so much is known about the producers and managers behind the artists of the early days, although somebody “fighting off the client so the artists could work” is just as important. Oftentimes, he lamented, the industry is not really that much interested in the business of VFX. “If you wanna be only an artist then cut off your ear, move to southern France, eat cadmium yellow paint and have a good time!” he joked “In our business it don’t mean a thing if it don’t go kaching.” — simple as that.

But he made clear that the business people are out to suck out all an artists creative power, rather to empower them instead by providing infrastructure, time and the opportunity to individually make a living with their craft. “Well managed companies can always pay all of their employees’ hours all the time.” That made me remember the unpaid overtime I oftentimes did.

History

Scott continued painting the big picture, what companies were founded at what time, and what stages they went through, like the first generation VFX divisions that were all created out of the needs of a single project such as Industrial Light and Magic (which spawned Pixar later) was founded for the purpose of creating Star Wars; Douglas Trumbull created the Future General Corporation for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Rob Abel founded Robert Abel and Associates (RA&A) for Star Trek. All that happened in the 1970′s.

The second generation facilities were founded mostly by people who were fed up “working for the man” and decided to start their own companies. Rhythm and Hues was founded in 1987 by six former RA&A employees, Richard Edlund’s Boss Films, John Dykstra’s Apogee, Inc. and Scott’s Digital Domain were all companies created from former ILM guys who had a “religious problem” with George Lucas, as Scott put it: “He thought he was god, and I disagreed. So I started my own church.”

The next wave were studio owned VFX divisions that would open and close and open and close, depending on whether they were needed for a production or just were unprofitable such as Buena Vista EFX. Warner Bros. Digital is now closed, Sony Pictures Imageworks costs the studio a lot of money but they produce very well grossing features, or The Secret Lab that used to be Dreamquest got closed after Disney’s Dinosaur bombed.

Of the 3rd, 4th and 5th generation facilities some made it until today, such as Weta Digital or Method Studios whereas many didn’t (The Orphanage, Station X, Asylum, Café FX, etc.) or as Scott put it: “The highway is littered by dead bodies. For a successful business you need to understand the business aspect as well as the artistic and the technological aspect. And still, that might not be good enough.” And a good name is also important. “Somebody back then suggested Digital Domain, whereas I wanted to name the company Presto Digital-tation or something like that. I’m terrible with names… I have three children but I won’t tell you their names” Scott said with a smile.

And today? There are mostly studio-owned companies that produce full CG movies, which turned out to be highly successful: Disney got Pixar (“Toy Story”), Fox owns Blue Sky Studios (“Ice Age”), Dreamworks acquired PDI (“Shrek”) and Sony has Sony Pictures Imageworks that currently delivers high-end VFX. The advantage these companies have, is that they provide the content creators with all what is necessary such as distribution, marketing and licensing. Still, “content is king. Making and owning content will do you right” Scott is convinced.

The crux with today’s high-end VFX and CG production is that it does not happen in a free market environment. “In VFX, the consumer has no vote, s/he can’t say I am going to pay $15 to see a movie by Sony!. Instead the studios control the business, which means that when you have a VFX facility you have these six clients worldwide.”

The thing is, though, that the facilities are not profitable, as said before for a number of reasons: You can’t see long ahead if and when there will be which amount of work. Then, it is difficult to price VFX since everybody is constantly asking for something new that had never been done before which make it impossible to compare. What is really hard on the US-based facilities is the subsidized situation in the UK where VFX companies are basically spared from some taxes by her majesty. The cost of labor has steadily increased (which is at least one good thing for us artists) so when an artist got an annual salary of around $40k for the work on The Abyss the same skill set and expertise earns you today a healthy $200k to $250k per year. Broken pipelines are another issue that might cause great damage, technical prowess, managing the client, next-gen facilities, capital investments and satisfying the management’s expectations — that all costs money.

What grosses money today

The 80′s were dominated by a film star scheme that worked really well: Have a familiar name on the poster and you were certain to get your revenue from it. As Scott showed the top 20 grossing movies of all times there were only three of them starring a movie star with appropriate pay: Johnny Depp. Almost all the others were features heavy on VFX where the lead roles didn’t make a difference, “VFX and animation mean everything today!” Scott tried to motivate us. I know that I had really gotten worried on how the industry is headed right now. “The new film stars are you, your work gets shown in every trailer, not a witty dialogue by Tom Hanks, the images you create people want to see and pay for!”

In the end Scott talked about the Korean film “The Host” that was incredibly successful in Korea and Japan, “but if it was produced in English with a slightly more Western structure in the narrative it could have made twice as much internationally” he concluded and was running out of time on this extensive lecture so he jumped through the importance of outsourcing and spoke a few words of warning, that the low-cost content providers will become the provider of services in the near future — like it or not.

“But there is a bright future for you as the content provider, because, again, content is king!” he said. With the new models of distribution with the internet the current system of the Big Studios can easily change. “There is a bright light at the end of the tunnel. But it could also be the light of a train. You need to find a place to fit in, and don’t think that everything is gonna work out like roses, because sometimes it just does not.” I was irritated by the mixed messages I received from his lecture. And all that without coffee made me feel like Garfield on a Monday morning.

Oh, and here are two interesting facts from the presentation I could not find a place to fit in the text above:

• Scott played the cowbell on one Jimi Hendrix song. Funny story.
• Monkeypoints is net-profit on a movie. Since the studios have clever ways of shuffling and hiding the money a feature makes, it practically means you never see a dime; whereas First Dollar Gross means a percentage of what is made at the box office.

Going Global, Pt. 2

I remained in the König-Karl Halle because I was too exhausted to move and so I sat there and watched the panel that was up next. Eric Roth moderated the discussion Global Production from the U.S. point of view among the illustrious round of industry leaders and professionals. On the podium sat Jeff Okun, VFX Supervisor and chair of the VES; William Sargent, the founder and CEO of Framestore, Dan Glass, Executive VP and GM of Method Studios/CIS and Lee Berger, the President of Rhythm & Hues. I tried to note down their respective views and opinions on the topic.

Lee Berger stated right in the beginning that 90% of the costs is labor and if you want to stay in business you want to cut the costs by retaining the quality. And outsourcing is a way of doing that, in the case of Rhythm & Hues about 30 to 50 percent of a project is worked on abroad. Taking William’s statement “in the end it still comes down to the price” into account, Eric Roth asked if this was going to become a race to the bottom of the price. “Definitely. But you still don’t want to cut any corners quality wise. India and China catch up in quality pretty fast and will soon be able to deliver the same quality. And we do whatever we can to keep the prices low.” As brutal as this may sound, R&H still managed to stay in business for 24 years and counting and always managed to pay their artists.
A question from the audience was asked whether this fragmentation will continue to a level where the artists work on a powerful system from their homes and exchange via the cloud. “That would be too fragmented for productive and creative work,” Lee explained. “It is already happening for tasks like roto where you pay somebody $50 for it, but for creative tasks it just won’t do, you need to be around each other.”

Dan Glass considered taxes and subsidies to be a huge factor for where in the world to produce VFX, but also the skill set teams is important. “We want our teams to be self-sufficient, being able to work on sequences independently. We don’t split up tasks.” Apart from filmmakers still pushing for high quality and not accepting mediocre VFX, he also talked about the development that low-cost labor will not remain low-cost forever, so you always need to be vigilant about the global fluctuations and tendencies.

William Sargent was rather pragmatic in his view as an CEO of a big company, and stated that “in the end it still comes down to the price”. But in his eyes the globalization doesn’t really mean shipping jobs abroad, instead just growing abroad. Framestore also operates an office in New York, “but since New York is the center for commercials we just wanted to be near to our clients there.”
Nowadays you get paid for what you can deliver on a per-project basis, nobody wants to pay for the R&D that goes into the steady creation of something that has never been done before. But a positive development in recent years is that the VFX houses have become part of the discussion. “Clients say: We have $ 5 million and want to do this. Is that feasible? How can you help us achieve this?” In Williams’ opinion, the VFX industry has the best organized and still most flexible part of any production, “things can virtually change over night and we can react to that.”
Eric asked if he gave William $50 million, would he found a VFX facility again?
“There’s definitely an easier way to make a living than to start a VFX facility, but this is just where my passion lies. And with $ 50 million you wouldn’t open a VFX studio, you would start a project instead and maybe found a small VFX studio in the wake.”
But is being a small VFX studio with a better profit percentage preferable to a bloated system? “Well, you need a certain size to being able to obtain and finish some projects.”

Jeff Okun saw the change toward a global industry in bright colors and as an opportunity for the creative: “We are the migrant film workers,” he continued, “I didn’t get into the business to win an Oscar but I love figuring ways out to do the impossible and I don’t hesitate to take my family with me and go where there are opportunities. I lived half a year in New Zealand, six months in South Africa, six months in Thailand… I don’t think geography is that important anymore, it doesn’t matter. The only reason the industry is still so US-centered is because it’s where Hollywood grew and became the center of it, where everything used to be in once place. The US is a sad place right now, a lot of bullshit going on.”
“Embrace the change, change is good. It gives everybody the opportunity to fix things that are broken. This is a good age to be a student and a good opportunity for a do-over.

Fun fact: Bill Kroyer sat in the row next to me, a book with the colorful cover next to him (CG101: A Computer Graphics Industry Reference, 2nd ed.) and I was racking my brains to think of something I always wanted to know about the original TRON because I’d probably never have the chance to ask him again anytime soon if ever. In the end I nodded off during the Q&A session in the end. When I woke up, Bill was gone. Damn!

Outsourced

The next session of that day’s focus on producing global was held by Philippe Gluckman of the DreamWorks Dedicated unit who had started as a supervisor on Shrek and was at PDI when they got acquired by DreamWorks. In his presentation he talked about the struggles, surprises and success of building a DreamWorks animation studio in Bangalore, India. “So basically what we tried was to apply the same process of unification that was going on when PDI merged with DreamWorks.”

In May 2008 the studio in Bangalore was opened in cooperation with Technicolor that already operated from the same tech park. The studio “opened” in a sense that it was lacking employees and equipment but the premise were ready for them.

What was the goal for DreamWorks’ Indian unit? Cheap work? Low expertise work? Philippe made it clear that was not the case. “We wanted to make it the equivalent of PDI with the same level of quality.” Then he showed the studio’s demo reel with various Madagascar or Shrek themed seasonal TV specials. To me it looked just like the movies. “The only thing that’s different so far is that we don’t make or own innovations, we just use the techniques that PDI already acquired.” But what the Bangalore studio does not do is recycle already used sets, because it doesn’t quite work and in the end you spend more time making an existing set work in a new context than building a new one altogether.

Training

“We needed to train the local artists with our software first. It is proprietary and different than what the artists are used to. It has no full documentation and takes quite a time to get comfortable with.” But the training also needed to be broader than just teaching the tools. Some also needed to brush up their English and the leads were sent to the US, just as some people from the US were sent to India. “Our artists really enjoyed those visits and loved to be exposed to the top people of their field, they wanted to soak up their knowledge like sponges.”

Culture

What about the cultural differences? “The people weren’t used to the freedom we gave them: Instead of urging the animators to churn out a shot each day we gave them six weeks for it. But what sounds like creative heaven at first also needs to be seen in perspective: You need to figure out a way of working that fits you and that you are able to constantly improve on your shot. To keep this level of quality we ask much of our artists but they reward us every time.”
“At PDI there’s a culture of voicing you opinion and exchange so you also need to see criticism as opportunities, not threats. In the beginning it was difficult to get the artists voice their opinion and to be as forthcoming as would like them to be and pitch their shots before others. They got used to Tell me what you want and I do it exactly as you say. That is not how we do things.

The time difference of twelve hours soon made it obvious that there were only limited opportunities for reviews from DreamWorks in California. Since the studio felt like a start-up, sometimes people got promoted to fast into leading positions they did not feel quite ready for.

Technique

Technically there also were some challenges waiting to be mastered: “There was no person in India that lights the way we do. We don’t have a compositing department, everything happens in the renderer so we really had to train people first.”

Also the matte paintings in the trademark DreamWorks style were too uncommon to find a talented artist right away since they are not photo-real but much more detailed than a concept painting, they lie someplace in between.

In practical terms also the look of some elements resulted in different comprehensions, as with pixie dust. “Magic is terribly hard to get visualized because it is highly subjective compared to, say, water.” The Bangalore studio also animated clips for a DVD menu that asked for a fully deformable yet still fully loopable fire, which posed “a tricky but interesting task.”

The Future

DreamWorks’ goal is to have a studio in India that is capable of developing and producing a full feature with the quality standard of the headquarter in the US. “And this happens right now in Bangalore.” Philippe closed before showing some personal photos he took of the people he met on his exploring walks around the tech-park.

WALL-@

Again my caffeine batteries were empty, my low biological activity almost drained as well and it was hard keeping my mental focus. And to my knowledge there is only one medicine⁴: COFFEE! So I tried to get out and to the other Starbucks as fast as possible to avoid long queues. I finally arrived, merrily ordered a salami bagel and a caramel macchiato and reached for my wallet. It wasn’t there anymore. I looked incredibly stupid at the barista “I lost my wallet.” I uttered. This was not happening, I thought, there was everything in it! “Tough luck. NEXT!” he replied and I traced back my steps. Vanished was my exhaustion, exchanged for a cold panic with sprinkles of irrationality that made me text my beloved Conny who was hundreds of kilometers away and couldn’t do anything about the situation apart from sending a reply: “Oh no!!!!”. Back in the König-Karl-Halle at my seat there was nothing. I asked the technicians, they didn’t have a clue. I went to the info-desk and ask whether a wallet had been found. “Yes. What name?”. I showed her my ticket and she handed me my wallet. Even the money was still in it! I was so relieved I babbled like a madman about how relieved I was and sent an all-clear-message off to Conny. I went back to the coffee shop with a fresh boost of relief-induced energy and placed the same order at the same barista. “I hope you can now pay for it” he replied with a smirk.

Why did I tell you this? Because you should learn from my mistakes: Don’t hog so much loose change that your wallet gets so heavy, it falls out of your back-pocket when you try for three hours not to fall off a chair.

Forged Cutting Edge

Yep, this is it: The box of Morpheus indicating that I am too exhausted to go on today. What will appear here in the next couple of days? What The Foundry said about Ocula and Katana and how the terrible internet connection at the Hotel was teasing as I tried to write all this today. Stay tuned. Or logged in. Or just hit F5 very often.
1. John still being the first name listed in its credits ↩
2. At that time Pixar was an in-house division at ILM manufacturing hardware and software to sell to other companies but never succeeded so in 1989 Steve Jobs decided to pull the plug on that business model. ↩
3. …whose VFX still relied heavily on optical printing, as John Bruno explained on last year’s conference. ↩
4. Well in fact there might be other drugs but that ain’t the way I roll ↩



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