New Irish Animation Blog

Check out cartoon saloon's blog on their feature, looks pretty smart to me!

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Stars on the Telly

Catch 'Stars' on RTE 2 this comin saturday 11th feb at 11:05pm. I'll be at the Broken Social Scene gig and I'll miss it so tell me what happens.

Rotterdam 06 and a tasty music treat

So I went on a lovely research trip to the Rotterdam Film Festival (thanks to my wonderful new producer), where they screened Stars (out of competition due to late submission- hopefully next year it will be in). I got an idea of the kind of life people lead in the upper stratosphere of European film-making. A lot of intelligence and a smattering of bullshit. Many many films- best of which was from a hero of mine- Jan Svankmajers new one 'Lunacy'. It was wicked. Here's a comprehensive website of his work that needs to be updated. Great essays!

Two of the three awards for best short film went to animated films - David Shrigley and Chris Hardings (of Shynola) 'Who I am and what I want' and Run Wrake's 'Rabbit'. It's heartening to see the jurors hold no discrimination between animation and live-action, a sign of things to come?

It was nice to see an exhibiton of a lot of works by visual artists working with video- perhaps indicitive of the step that video art needs to take in order to be relevent alongside the progress of motion graphics and digital animation.

As far as my own work goes I'm still working on new scripts- for TV, film and short formats. As well as doing the odd bit of work to keep me going. Also doing a lot of practical and theoretical research too (another phrase for readin the net and books and fuckin around with programs and cameras)...

Way back in November I made an mp3 mix to sort of celebrate what apparently was 'Month of the Remix' or something like that. I wanted to avoid the regular 'dj someone presents their current taste in music' so I loaded all my mp3 files into winamp and hit shuffle. The mix is what winamp chose from start to finish, but tweaked by myself in Acid. Perhaps it still gives some idea of what kind of music I listen to these days without being too subjective about it, with additional creative twiddlings.

Not without its rubbish mixing efforts and editing mistakes in order to add that 'personal', 'rough', 'analogue', 'authentic', 'raw', 'complex simplicity' touch for all you independent bohemians out there, my first ***cast of any kind, the

shufflemix.mp3

I did this really comprehensive tracklisting image but I can't find it.

Also look out for a vidcast interview with myself and the boys from del 9 on the darklight film festival website, or on their blog.

Starting Afresh

Hokay!

A few changes. Obviously this blog is no longer the account of making a short film because its done and dusted and out there doin some festival rounds. So I guess it will become a (somewhat restricted) journal of my work.

And for those of you who were asking there are now links to videos of stuff I've done.

My driving ambition has led me to the twisted idea that I should try and make a feature film.

So I spent the summer gathering together fragmented ideas and constructing a story.

I managed to get together a treatment of the simple romantic tale and sent it into the Irish Film Board with the hope that they might lend me some money to write a screenplay. The day it arrived the film board called, asking me for more sample script pages (I only sent one). I was busy doing things for the DEAF festival so I didn't get the time. So I might have to resubmit next month. Or I might find out I've got a development grant in 4 to 6 weeks.

I'm very excited about it. At the moment it's called 'Nettle Soup'. I sent in some sketches with the proposal, here's one- it's of one of the main characters- an 82 year old new age hippy called 'Jacob'.


I've also spent my time making a short micro-tv series with a bunch of non-actor no-experience kids as part of The Ark's outreach program. They say never work with kids or animals... so to write and shoot 5x1min episodes of a sci-fi robot story in ONE WEEK was a bit of a challenge. . It was screened on RTE's The Den in October and went down well.

It was fun to let the kids write dialogue and design the costumes.

Shoots are tough. With 8 nine year olds running around not doing anything you ask them to they're tougher. People say never work with children or animals. These kids were crazy hyperactive (they drink energy drinks for breakfast and lunch, no kidding). It makes the prospect of going out on a shoot a little easier knowing that it will be with well trained highly skilled ADULT actors.


Stills:

The aftermathematics

'stars' is starting to appear in festivals (coz we're sendin it to loads)

so if anyone wants to see it itll be at the feile beochan animation festival in kilkenny this weekend. then in the kerry film festival at the end of october. hopefully this is just the start of its festival journey so it might have more screenings.

its as much as a fulltime job working this festival racket as making the film was. buying padded envelopes, making multiple copies, duping digibetas, beta sp tapes etc.. geting photos together, filling out the forms. for entry into the IFTA's i had to make FIFTEEN copies of the film. thank god for dvd burners...

the film will also be shown in a club called 'lazybird' upstairs in the international bar in dublin on october 9th. doors are 9pm and we'll be doing other visual things and showing music videos and stuff. come on down.

i've been spending the past while working too much. i'll hopefully get a holiday soon. i've begun to write a feature film (live action) in the hope it can be made under a microbudget. we'll see how it goes... at the moment i just want to tie up a series of multiple job loose ends and breath easy for while.

woohoo!

yay!

my little film won an award for best animation at the galway film fleadh.

thanks to everyone that made it down. much appreciated.
and a BIG thanks to my fellow del9ers for staying down at the festival while i had to go home after the cermony coz i'm doing freelance work this week to earn a few bucks..

but honestly thanks for letting me tell u what to do for the past 6 months.

funnily enough they also gave me an award for best first short, which i accepted coz it was my first short.. but then it ends up that it was already won by these guys who made a deadly film called 'what the brits have done for us' or something. so i have their trophy for a while... gotta post it back..

SOPHIE R.I.P.

I'm finding it difiiicult to blog right now because my girlfriend is looking over my shoulder as I write this. Maybe I should be a bit more eloquent with my verbular grammaticals and she'll be dead impressed.

....the reason I'm getting to hang out with her is that the short is completely utterly in the bag delivered and done.

i'll cut a little trailer for it and stick a link up soon.

Except: rounding off accounts, promotional stuff etc etc.

the work is over, so the blog is over i guess. maybe i'll keep it updated with ideas... talk about other things i'm working on... like visuals, or script ideas and the like.

i'm guessing theres more than 2 people reading this site so if u have any suggestions/questions please dont hesitate to post your comments below.

hope u enjoyed my little blog experiment, watch out for the film... its called "Stars".. a del 9 production.. directed by Eoghan Kidney.

adios!

How to make your first Short Film

Take all the ingredients you like, if you cant find some of them: improvise. Put them all in a big bowl and stir em up real good then shove everything in the oven to cook. When the bell goes off, take the cake out, put some fancy icing on it, maybe a candle and serve. It may taste like a tire or it may taste very nice. I cant eat any coz i was eating the raw mixture and i feel sick. Maybe in the morning I'll have some with my coffee.

Stills n stuff

Theres now about 4 shots all eating up my attention. One is the final one, which we're writing a 3d studio max plugin for- word of advice- maybe avoid hardcore computer programming at this stage of the game..

One shot is an animated timelapse shot thats v.v.v.complicated involving lots of complex light stuff that decides to crash computers. it worked before it was animated... but now theres lots of cloth and character animation in it.. more power needed...

The other shots are niggling simple shots with lighting artifacts in them. My conclusion is that this film WILL have artefacts in it (artefacts=any digital 'trash' you didnt intend to see).. but we simply couldnt have achieved the look we have now without these artefacts, so therefore they are simply part of the overall style.

We got an extension on our deadline which we needed due to underestimating render time.. unsurprising mistake. live and learn.

since there are actually people reading this thing i decided to give yis a few finished stills to whet your apetite. youll have to come along to the galway film fleadh to see it all moving with lots of trippy pscyedelic nonsene in between.

sophie looks dodgy

camerasex

Dontcrysophydophs

Beddybyes

Bloomin sophie

this ones for ringo!

7 days and nights

ok. its the last lap. a whole bunch of scenes are waiting to be rendered. i've booked the sound mixing session. the music is going to be finished next week. we're still animating shots.. maybe about 10 left to do out of 60 or so, including the shots animated in flash. but then we put it all together in aftereffects and have to grade it, which is playing with light and shadow on the 3d renderings in a 2d enviroment, which is fun and easy coz its so fast. not like the stupid ass fuckin son of abitch i hate you fuckin asshole rendering lark. numbers. wait. numbers. wait. asshole rendering!

although max tundra gave me a cd of all his remixes on tues when we were in london for the new caribou (formally manitoba) show wot we did all the visuals for. i met kevin shields and bit my lip trying not shout in his face how amazing i though his music was. so all this junk is keeping me happy (and other personal things which will never in a million squillion jillion years become internet knowledge). so basically due to some strange turn of cosmic events, there 8 or so days left until the most important deadline of my life so far and i dont feel stressed. its weird.

although gimme a few more days and maybe i'll feel different.

i wanted to put more stills up but nothings finished. i'll put a frame from a pre-post render still.

well done madden who won the free pint for reading my blog less thanm 24 hours when i published it.

time to pull a del 9 on this film...

shh shes dead i mean asleep ah whatever

Rendering Nightmare

Well the film is pretty much finished except for rendering and compositing.

hahaha no it isnt.

everything is taking longer than i expected... well being producer/director/animator means i'm doing shitloads of different things at the same time. the multitasking aspect of it is worrying coz it takes up bit of energy switching from director mode to animator mode to producing mode.

that paragraph is a product of stress. meetings are procastination. ignore meetings and just give out to everybody and scare them into working harder. thats one way of doing it... hope they arent reading this. i dont think they care really. hey the first del9er to say "squidger wicket" to me i'll buy them a pint.

and i put a big sign in the studio sayin "23 days to go" which is ammendable daily to one digit lower.

thatll do it.

heres a still.

later.

neaarllyy therree

animation wah!

animation and radiosity and mental rays and global illuminations with final gathering turn on maybe another iteration and it will work out oh wait i minute i guess i gotta bake that texture or it will take too long to render oh that keyframe shit it looks like shes outta the thunderbirds andy can you do the compositing i was going to do it but i've got so much else to do oh shit i gotta call the sound designer wait a minute is the music being recorded on wednesday? where? how much do you need? oh i gotta call the producer... sher's in a meeting right now did she say she was coming over tonight i gotta get that cashflow thing worked out oh fuck its crashed less iterations this time maybe how did i get that cool look the other day maybe i used that daylight plugin wait a minute how many frames have we gotta do a day? 200 or something... 1500 is a lot of money for a final grade maybe i can do it somewhere else oh i really gotta finished the animation on sophie shes so wobbly sometimes maybe wheels can do some synesthesia stuff shit i should be working instead of blogging.

Lighting tests with chars

Render Test Break

So I'm playing around with looks at the moment- taking a break from the keying mayhem of december and january. I swear, everytime you wanna do something in 3D you gotta learn a lot of shit. Especially if you havn't got a million euro rendering farm, you also gotta learn the tricks.

i've been planning to avoid all this hastle by rendering the characters 'toon style but i'm really getting into what radiosity and global illumination (calculates what happens to the photons as they bounce around a room from a light source illuminating a scene realistically).

can
do.

but who knows. i guess i got another few days of experimenting before i have to pin down a direction.

Oho, the serious amount of misinterpretation of film contracts that goes on...

We don't get anymore funds until the film is at a FINAL roughtcut stage- that means all the animation finished and rendered and composited!!! Thats 50% of the funding. I guess the film board assumes that the companies awarded this scheme have working capital. I however do not.
Luckily our bank is offering us a temporary overdraft so we can pay ourselves our meal tickets in the final couple of months of work.

i made myself sick this week. had to take yesterday off. i went for a walk and admired the sea for a while: "nature is a bitch of a renderer"(foaf)

consolidationary

Man o man. That roughcut was finished a day behind schedule.

Which is grand coz we also found out we have an extra month of production time.. this was due to mistakenly interpreting the fine print of the contract.

Very rough. A lot of the animation is finished but it isn't rendered or textured- which is a bigger job than animating. This form of production i.e. shooting live action, referencing the video for animation, modelling, rigging, texturing, lighting, shading, rendering, compositing + all the sound stuff really makes for a different kind of schedule. And a lot of files. I've already got nearly a hundred different folders containing all the junk for the film.

I learnt a new word this week : "Consolidation". Its a neat function in aftereffects that collects all your files and organisies them into a nice folder.

We're seeing that we need something called a "pipeline" too. This is a word big fancy post production houses bark on about all the time. Its a word used to describe how all the computers in a studio would be networked and set up to run as one sort of big computer with various artists plugged into it from all different sides, tied into their chairs with small pipes feeding coffee and shitty take away foods into their gut stimulated only by a small buzzing sound piped into their ears.

I've decided to insert myself into this system and upgrade to 3ds max 7 and learn how to use combustion. They work together in a 'pipeline'

oo did we meet our deadline?

no.

we're still working on the rufcut. probably be done today. i'm getting real sick of looking at these nudey computer generated twentysomethings i tell u .. i put a shirt on sophie in one scene and it felt great to give her some digital dignity back. sheesh...

heres an email i wrote to my sound designer.

"
hey paul,

that "sophie. sophie love." wav u sent me doesn't sound like theres anything done to it??

i really need that o connell st file.

i've listened to the first hallucination scene and had some thoughts. you were right about me not really giving you enough direction so here we go.

ALL of brian's dialogue in the audio i gave you should be completely fucked and unlistenable building up to an unbearablly busy high pitched electric shriek on "i annoy the shit out of you"- its this sound that makes her scream and attack brian- this scream should start off loud and shrieky as it is still part of the hallucination. and shrink down into silence after 2 seconds so its leads into a pause of silence when shes holding him down against the bed

the hallucinations come back when he says "sophie whats wrong?"- they must be the worst yet- like what the character would sound like if he was a male banshee.

i would avoid clipping the audio as well and i need it very clear with no fuzz in the background.

i really like the little sounds in the background between the lines, keep those, but try and create most of the hallucination from just the sound i gave you.

"

look at me being a director n all, directin people.
again, this is stuff i just should have told him when we met but again i assume that people know whats goin on in my head and i let em do their thing before i end up asking them to do it again with this and that in mind... but i get to see whats goin on in their mind first which is handy.


meeting today about what the hell we're gonna do when this film is finished and we all revert back to breadline life again. where did i leave my social security card...

at least we get to do all Caribou's visuals and music videos again this year (formerly known as Manitoba). which is ace coz his tunes are rad and we can make beleive we're in a band and act all london.

Our FIRST deadline is TOMORROW

Although masochistically self imposed, theres a deadline tomorrow to finish all the animation. I think I've pretty much keyed all my stuff. Pauls still workin on his and I'm annoying him by asking to look at his previews. lookin sweet tho. some of my animation looks r o bo tic and a bit lazy but hey it can be fixed. my mentality is running along the -lets get a version of the film finished then improve what we got-.. so after 2moro we start squeezing the shite out of the footage and flush it. on the 7 days a week vibe right now. socialising is becoming tough(er) as my brain has been hijacked by the film-making process. i'm also noticing that we've got 3mins too much footage. good complaint i guess but when we start cutting things the film gets more confusing. i say -more- coz its pretty ambigiuous as it is. not everythings spelt out.

my dad was up in the studio on sat and took a look at some stuff. he seemed very surprised:
"oh thats dramatic. its a serious thing is it?"
me:"yeah, em, I guess so. its always been like that."
dad:"well isn't it supposed to entertain people?"
me:"well, no. i mean yes. its kind of, em... an experiment."
dad:"well whos it for?"
me:"whos it for? well, festivals and stuff. tv channels might buy it."
dad:"oh. okay. well its got an interesting look."
me:"next thing i make will be funny."
dad:"will it? well. just do what you want."
me:"no seriously, i want to- the next thing we're gonna do is a funny film. we've been talking about it."
dad:"ok. well its got an interesting look anyway."
me:"ok."

i think thats the conversation i have with myself everyday.


i saw 'in the soup' on sat night after getting back from a tsunami related gig (incorporating spontaneous female breakdancing (in ireland?)) and it made me cringe at its portrayal of the film-makers ego and insecurities fucking up their film. my no.1 fear. ignore these thoughts at all cost.

subvert expectations.
involve yourself in a logical process.

Update and Good video link

Its nice to see different bits and bobs come together. I composited CG sophie with a rotoscoped character yesterday- one of my main fears about the style of the film was that maybe these two very different types of animation wouldn't sit well with each other, and thankfully they do. I'd say partly because of cool performance by the actors. I'm still going through the scenes and animating sophie. Another 2 weeks and we'll be able to have a rough cut done.

I had a meeting with the sound designer and the composer on saturday and came up with some cool ideas for the hallucination scenes, and how the music will tie together certain shots. I think that most of the conversation was about where NOT to use sound and music. Too much music in a short film usually is there to hide something, and generally makes the whole thing seem like a trailer to a bad movie.

Check this out: The Grey Video

It's a video made by some very talent graphic design student to a song from Dangermouse's now infamous Grey Album and damn if it isn't mega deadly.

Bedroom Set

3 weeks to rough cut deadline

Okay, so this is how it works with film board grants.

After preparing all the necessary paperwork, and submitting contracts and signing, correcting mistakes in paperwork etc you receive 50% of your funding. The next installment is 30%, which you get when you have a rough cut of the film finished- the deadline is 1st Febuary.

Since the locked down cut of the live action footage could be considered a rough cut, I had to decide what warranted a rough-cut for this film. We have decided that all the character animation and some rough animatics of the non-character stuff would suffice. So we're working away with our CG (computer graphics) characters, making them talk and walk and crossing off our scary slug sheet (the broken down schedule of bits of animation to do). We're also working on completing the rotoscoped elements.

I agree on the idea of the rough cut deadline and installments. It really forces a deadline on your work, and when you are producing and directing something on your own with no boss breathing down your neck, its very easy to get distracted and sometimes unmotivated. Facing the prospect of not receiving funding unless a deadline is met definitly gets you motivated. We're working to meet the deadline. Especially because the animation involves a lot of annoying CG tweaking, once that deadline is met, a lot of the rest of the work is fine tuning and compositing- which is much more fun that spending hours constructing 3d morph targets of smiles and screams.

One of the things we had to build for the rough cut was the set of the bedroom- where most of the film takes place, so I did a render using radiosity in max (for anyone who wants CG to look at all any good use a good renderer using radiosity like max's in built one in max 5 or if u have max 6 learn to use mental ray properly). I've only got into decent lighting in 3D and its a revelation. The new max has a mental ray renderer that can process sub-surface scattering- the technique used to render realistic transulecent skin tones pioneered by gollum in lord of the rings... next 3d project i'm defo using it.. given that the next 3d project will happen when computers are fast and cheap enough to render it fast enough- currently it takes hours per frame on one character on an fast machine.

So heres the bedroom- plus some tweaks in after effects. Its getting close to the final look of the film.

Sophie and Brian CG models test

SHh's AliVe!

Hah!
I just made some very angry noises at my computer there.

I wrote a lovely big entry for this blog and stupid windows xp2 blocked a pop up and in the process reloaded the page and wiped my entry with no back back allowed.

ANYWAY!
let me start again.
I've started to animate Sophie to see how she would perform. I basing her movement on an actress performance I shot and its working out ok. Some bits don't translate of course (see The Polar Express for an example of soulless animation) so I've got to research some classical animation techniques and implement them.

But the models look good. They're ready to go bar some wardrobe issues. So I'm pushing on with the animation anyway coz we need to have a rough cut finished for the 1st of Febuary. Then we have 2 months to hone shit down. The deadline for the finished film is April Fools day 2005.

The cg versions of the actors don't look really that similar to the humans or the concept art. But stylisticly these were good places to start- it doesn't matter if they look exactly like them really.

Eoin has been pluggin away at his 700 frames of flash animation for an outdoor scene god bless him. I've drawn up a slugging chart (sort of a production timetable for animation). 12818 frames in total. Multiply that by 20 layers or so per scene and you get a big scary number.

3.5 months to go.

back to work.
coffee...

Shoots finito

Ok now all of the live action shoot is finished except for the pickups.
Thanks to everyone who made it out to Kilternan for the party scene, much appreciated fellas!

Big thank you to mysterious bearded man who turned up after seeing a call on some message board a friend of mine organised. Sound-out.

Unfortunatly the shot that we got ended up too long, so the complicated digital crowd enhancing '"technique" I was bragging about probably won't end up being used.

Sophies model is rigged, I'm now experimenting with cloth simulations which is causing all sorts of funny mutations to the poor girl.

I also had an idea how to fix the edit while lying in my bed waiting for caffeine to leave my system. Scenes shall be switched. Film board needs to be notified (any changes to a script have to be approved after contracts have been signed)- I hope they dig it coz I think it'll fix my story problems.

I saw The Incredibles on Sunday. Director Brad Bird has now made two of the finest films ever- the other one being The Iron Giant. I want to eat his brains.

Flud's concepts 

Conceptualisationality

Here's those pics fluddy did. Nice one.
I finished the CG model of Sophie and I'm currently going through the rigorous task of rigging her for movement. Its a slow process... the hands take more time to do than the rest of the body. But I've spent this week constructing her in 3D studio max (5) and I'm surprised how fast she ended up looking back at me from the screen.

I've always found modelling in 3D to be a bit of a bitch. Luckily I came across this tutorial last year and it brought me up to a whole new level. I sneakily used it when I was teaching my CG class last year and everyone copped it really fast. So its good for newbies too.

Concept Painting of Brian & Sophie 

we is start

Currently working on the reference shoot, editing what we've got already, planning a party shoot on saturday with loads of extras plus pickups whenever the actors are available. They're busy bees.

Man I can see how pickups are so important. I hate like 30% of the edit. So I'm rewriting a bunch of lines and adding bits here and there. I think its mostly because I assumed that people would make assumptions about characters and situations but sometime you have to spell out certain things.

A very talented friend of mine Mark (whos currently a key animator on the new cartoon network series Fosters School for Imaginary friends- have u seen it? Its funny!) did a bunch of concept drawings for the character designs and I'm working off them to construct the actors. I'll stick an image of the finished characters when they're done, and a few of Marks deadly drawings when we buy a new scanner.

So much to do. A lot of CG building, character animation, rotoscoping and I dont even know how big the final compositions are going to be. I hosted a Q+A with these extremely talented architects turned animation collective 'Lynn Fox' for the Darklight Digital Film Festival on saturday and I probed their brains for info on how they make their videos so amazingly beautiful. Luckily enough, they answered any sort of question I had to ask.. They mentioned that they rarely used less than 60 layers in any shot- something you can well believe when u see their stuff. It was a pleasure hanging out with them.. sometimes it felt like a lecture but in a positive way.

I threw a wobbler at my producer last week but she doesn't seem to mind. Apparantly I'm allowed one hissy fit.

The film board asked for an image from the film for some brochure so I did up a quick concept painting. I'm going to put it on this blog so if I'm succesfull u should see it!

Processing...

I've been informed that the funding is being processed or transfered or whatever channels it has to go through. Just in time lioke I cant afford me rent n all. Reference footage for the animation will be shot post haste.

I've been working on other things for my company, and its good to leave the project for a little while only to come back and see whats wrong instantly. Scenes need to be cut and scenes need to be added.

Fluddy is doin some concept work for the character designs and they're looking sweet. I'll stick some up as soon as they're finished.

go blog now

I'm making a short film. It's about sense and love and death. I'm 25 years old so I don't want to pretend I know too much about love and death but thats what its about. Its animated so it'll look cool at least.

I'm lucky enough be making this film with a bunch of mates I went to college with and been working with for years under the name of Delicous 9. We've done a bunch of music videos and visuals together, and bits and pieces for T.V. and theatre but this will be our first biggish project. Our 'calling card' as some people have it.

This blog will hopefully be a documentation of the making of the film, for my funders, for animators, film-makers, students and whoever is interested. Its being made in a slighly interesting manner, with actors and cg and junk so maybe somebody will see the technique and go "wow i gotta use that in my next mobile phone commercial!" or maybe michel gondry will see it and go "oui oui i shall call this man and hire him to direct all my films instead of me oui oui" or whatever.

So check back from time to time to see pre production designs, progress on CG models, animation tests as well as mindless drunken rants blaming everybody but myself.

I'm currently trapped in a beuraucratic nightmare of red tape and documentation, waiting for the first installment- but I won't go into that because it doesn't really matter, all its doing is holding back the production. Only that its been good and bad, good because I've had time to really look at the film and work out how its going to be made, bad because I'm living in abject poverty, being told that I'll start getting paid in 2 weeks for the past 2 months.

Deadline is April 2005. About 6 months to go. 8 minutes of CG animation, with a core team of three people. Yipes!