Recruiting, Technical Details, and WebDesign

We are now two weeks down into the semester, and I am as excited as ever. While I feel like my team and I are doing a great job getting things underway, I know busier weeks lie ahead. This week was full of contacting people, preparing ourselves for the modeling and animating process, and creating a bit more of a functional website.

Recruiting and Communication

During this past week, I made it a priority to re-establish contact with the artists and other people working on the project thus far as well as looking for more talented people. Early in the week I sent out a few messages to a talented 3D modeler and animator I have worked with before through the website GameZombie TV. His name is Darrin Giggy, and after I explained the project to him, he responded with a great deal of enthusiasm. He has agreed to join our team and work with us on this project. I am relieved to have another modeler on board with us, but I am always on the look out for more talent. With Darrin joining us, we will have to draw up an additional contract for him – a task I am confident Jennifer and Geng can handle with ease. We are still talking about the specific details that will comprise of his work load, so we will see how much he can contribute.

I also got back in contact with one of our previous concept artists, Dillon Olney. He has already developed a great deal of art for The Districts, and he will continue to iron out specific designs. I gave him a few notes on the work he did over winter break, but it wasn’t until I met with him in person that we really went into more depth about designs such as Samantha’s sword, District A Foot-soldiers, and background art. I am always impressed by the amount of time and effort Dillon puts into his duties. Communicating with him on what sort of vision I have in mind comes easy. While I have a specific look I am going for, Dillon is always able to add another perspective. I have asked him to begin designing a few specific street sections for Districts A and E, and I look forward to seeing what he develops. Some general notes I gave him include the following:

• For District E (a.k.a. the slums), I want a look that is a mesh between the post-apocalyptic wastelands found in the video game “Fall Out 3” and the re-building of the city of Midgar in the animated film “Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.” A skeletal landscape with rough edges and earthy tones are important.
• An idea to start with District A is to imagine a Norse knot design and picture that design as the road layout for the district as seen from a birds-eye view. Then smooth and curved buildings will flow from that design with the Chancellor’s manor acting as the center.

I have also recontacted Ryan Campbell about coloring in some of the art work we have already finished. Ryan was one of the main concept artists for creating the three of the four main characters. I have sent him an e-mail detailing the next steps and the overall color scheme for each character. He is currently out of town, but he informed me that he will begin working on those next steps as soon as he gets back.

In addition to my artists, I have also contacted Shane Monds – the composer for our film. He has agreed to meet anytime in the next few weeks to go over the specific details regarding his work and his contract.

Technical Details

I sat down with Taylor this week to go over the scenes we will be working on for the trailer. While we did not get into the specific scenes, we did cover a lot of the technical issues we will be facing as we proceed with this project. In retrospect, I find it was much more productive to be certain of what we can and cannot do technically before we decide on what scenes we want to focus on. The most important issue we discussed was the integration of Motionbuilder files (the Motion Capture files obtained from our time in the studio) with Cinema 4D (the program Taylor and I are most familiar with). We were pleased to discover the two programs are in fact compatible. We still need to experiment more with the binding and weighting of the key framed bones/joints with the models we will be creating, but Taylor has already begun looking more into the matter.

We also began to establish a list of characters/items we will need to model. Priority will be placed on the models that we will need for the trailer itself. Since our deadline for the trailer is May, we will focus on those scenes first, and then expand into other scenes based upon the time we have available to us. We have yet to finalize a specific list, but once the technical details are ironed out we will establish one. I imagine that will be an objective for this next week.

As we progress forward, there are certain problems and issues I imagine us running into.

• Modeling complex characters can take a lot of time. To help speed up the process, we will most likely model a few generic bodies and then swap out different heads and other details. I already have a generic body created from last semester that we can use to start with.
• Hair and clothing are difficult elements to work with. They cause a lot of problems and require a great deal of RAM to render. The less often we need to deal with these elements, the better. For the most part, we will try to model the clothing directly on the characters. However, certain outfits will require a little more “flow” to them (such as Samantha’s dress or even Marc’s trench coat). Even the hair for each character can potentially be tricky, especially Samantha. She has various hair styles and outfits throughout the film, so she will be the most difficult to work with. Taylor has already been commenting on various techniques to make this process easier.
• Render times are going to be on obstacle we need to be prepared for. Even rendering a single frame for a film can take several hours, let alone 1 to 3 minutes. This means that we will need to have our modeling and animating completed with enough time to allow for several days (if not weeks) of rendering. Taylor and I will be putting together deadlines for each step in the process in order to make sure we complete everything in time.

WebDesign

I devoted most of my time this weekend learning more about WordPress, the integrated CSS style sheet, and changing a basic wordpress template into a custom website. After several hours of work, I have the basics down. I was able to format the website in a more organized manner and even add my own graphics. This is where things became tricky. While editing custom CSS with wordpress, you can either start from scratch, or build upon the stylesheets already given to you. Since I am not an html/css guru, I went the route of building upon their templates. In order to do this I had to write CSS code that would override theirs. I had to understand their code and develop it for my own purposes. The most difficult part was finding out which lines of code adjusted which parts of the website and changing them enough to align each graphical element. I am not the greatest web developer by any means, and we will be continuing to look for a more experienced programmer. In fact, Geng is having some luck finding more experienced web developers to make our site look as professional as possible. However, I wanted to be able to understand how wordpress works and get a general feel for how our website is going to be developed before a web programmer joins our team. Not to mention, in the event we cannot find a programmer, I want at least a smoothly functioning and aesthetically pleasing website.

My To Do List

Moving into this next week, I have a few items on my list.

• Jennifer and I need to meet with Shane to go over his duties and contract.
• I still need to contact Austin Lord to see if he will be interested in joining our team.
• I will be pitching this project to sound designers in Norbert’s Scoring for Media class.
• I am awaiting reply from Kaleb Havens regarding background dialogue for this film. Once he gets back to me, I will contact the actors who were not hired for the main character roles to see if they would be interested in coming in for a few “additional voices” recordings.
• I need to go through all of the recorded dialogue and pick out the best takes in order to combine them with our storyboards.