Quality trumps Accuracy, but they can't flourish without each other.

Production on the Gorgeous Knight intro has halted a bit, still waiting for images from the studio so that I can begin putting things together.  They've said that they are having some difficulty trying to get together all the images that they want me to use to tell a story during the opening credits.  So, still waiting to begin working on that.

In other news, me and Multifunproductions have parted ways.  We couldn't agree on a good balance of quality/accuracy.  Specifically he kept wanting to use images from the Tron movie itself as textures for the 3D models, which made it look like a cheap video game.  In this mindset, he kept thinking that accuracy was way more important than quality.  I kept wanting him to learn how to actually create the geometry to make it look awesome, but he never took the time to learn or have me teach him.  Not to mention what he was doing was stealing copyright imagery from the movie itself to be used and promoted as his own work, not smart.

In my experience over the past few years, quality trumps accuracy EVERY time.  If you take a look at my Tron videos, none of them are movie-accurate and I never, EVER make that claim because it would be rediculous to do so.  Instead I created my videos out of the design aspects of the film, made them my own, and made them look as best as I could.  Every single bit of animation, modelling, special effects, etc, is from my own two hands, but the IDEA is of course not mine.  The IDEA should serve to inspire creative escapism.  Unfortunately, his idea of "accuracy" totally threw quality out the window.

He kept saying that the industry does shortcuts and cheats like this all the time.  And he's absolutely right.  The difference is that he did it poorly... A shortcut or cheat in this industry can't be noticeable or look like a video game.  If I were to create a shortcut or cheat on what he was trying to create, I would have built the geometry first, did a high-res render of that geometry, and then use THAT as my shortcut not having to render out additional geometry and still look awesome.

But whatever, I couldn't seem to get my point accross and we argued about it on several occasions in the past month (this was certainly not the first time he did this).  We are still friends and I will still help him out if he needs it, but I won't be creating models or videos for him anymore or assisting with his film, that's his own mess to create.

What I am left with now, are some pretty sweet looking (and accurate) models of both the Lightcycle arena and Disc Wars arena complete with a fully rendered and dynamic crowd particle system.

Hmmmmm, what to do now? :)

More work on Gorgeous Knight

As of now, I have finished effects and animation for 3 scenes for Origin Nile's Gorgeous Knight film.  They are extremely happy with the results and wanted help with "just one more scene". :)  Even though they were hesitant to ask my help for yet another scene, they felt that the other people that they've employed to work on the film weren't good enough to tackle this scene.

They wanted to see if I could do the title intro sequence for the film, along the lines of the intro sequence for the movie Watchmen.  *cue goosebumps*.  I personally consider the Watchmen title intro to be one of the best film intro's of all time and is incredibly powerful in art and music.  The movie itself is fantastic, but if I were to just see the intro, that's enough for me!

Here's the intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14vTrFyHO94

Needless to say, I've been dying to create something as powerful and emotional as this, and Origin Nile is going to give me the oppourtunity to take a stab at it!  But they don't want it to be recognizeable, they don't want people to say "Oh cool that's from Watchmen!".  So I've got a lot of creative leeway to help make something just as emotionally powerful and put my own spin on it.

This is going to be one for the books!  AWESOME!

Sights on Sundance

Last Friday, I got a call from OriginNile films in Atlanta.  They were looking for someone to work on a special effect shot for their latest film "Gorgeous Knight".  It's a unique action drama film about human trafficking, and shot entirely with photos for stop motion.  For this particular scene they wanted some movement for the climax in which two people ride away on a motorcycle barely escaping some explosions.

Photo manipulation and explosive action are definately up my alley, so it didn't take long for me to create a scene in which they were extremely satisfied with.  I don't think I can show it now, but you can check out a trailer for Gorgeous Knight here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yz3kAbbF7g, and I'll post the scene I worked on later.

They liked my work so much that they want me to take on a few more scenes to help wrap up production.  Once the film is finished, they want to show it at Sundance... wouldn't that be something?

They've also discussed bringing me on for paid work for other films in June/July.

Tutorial - Dynamic Tron Lightcycle Trail in Cinema 4D

After a long while of research and testing I was finally able to setup a dynamic Tron Lightcycle trail in Cinema 4D.  It was a ton simpler than I thought and it only takes a few minutes to setup!  I got the idea from a similar concept done in 3DS Max (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neyPavamOO0).  Using the tracer mograph tool and a sweep nurb in Cinema 4D I was able to create the light trails on-the-fly from the animation of the lightcycle.

On my original Tron Lightcycle animation I spent the better part of about 4 days working on the lightcycle trail and it still wasn't perfect.  With this technique it would have been done in 5 minutes not considering material tweaking!

Behind the Video #1

My first tutorial is up!  While not a complete end-to-end tutorial, it's more of a behind-the-project type of video where I open up and discuss the project files created for my Tron Lightcycle animation.  Hopefully it will give insight on how the video was created and enable "ah hah!" moments to help people struggling with their own project.



I think I might be doing two separate video trends.  A series that opens up and discusses my project files (Behind the Video) and a series on full-blown tutorials on some indivual techniques.

By next weekend I hope to complete a BTV (Behind the Video) on my Tron Intro animation, and then produce a complete tutorial on creating an animated crowd in Cinema 4D afterwards.

Tutorial Update

I knew recording tutorials was hard, but I didn't expect this.  It's amazing the mentality of kids nowadays that are very used to finding tutorials for whatever they want to copy, people just don't understand what it takes to create a tutorial (especially on something that they fumbled their way through) and they expect a tutorial to pop up immediately for whatever they want to see.

Anyways, I'm about 40% complete with my first ever tutorial, it's probably a bit long for a first tutorial but I figured why not.  It's weird listening to yourself talk, I've picked up on things about my normal speech that I had no idea about, for instance; I still sometimes talk to fast, I sumble over my words or say the wrong words, and I have the weird habit of clicking my toungue on the roof of my mouth.  Along with all the usual "ums" and "so, now", I am extremely glad I'm a decent editor! :)

I hope to have this completed (or at least done with the recording) by the end of the weekend, the only thing I am worried about is if anyone watching it will get anything out of it.  I hope so.