53. AND NOW ON TO DIFFERENT THINGS

And so I completed "The Music of Erich Zann." It took so much longer than I had supposed. But it turned out better than any animation I've made in the past. There were a lot of hiccups, and a lot of difficulties along the way, but I certainly learned a lot. I feel confident that the next film that I make will be even better still.

I am writing this last post as I'm watching the just-completed final version of the movie. I always have conflicted feelings after completing a big project like this. On one hand, I have a certain level of pride for my accomplishment. One the other hand, I feel as though I've let myself down; it doesn't seem as great as I'd hoped it would be. I look at it, and ask myself, "This is what I've been doing for over a year?" After contemplating that, then I realize that it's over. Perhaps it is a feeling of despair in that I now have nothing to do.

Except that I do have more work to do! On to the next project.

  The final movie. 



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52. MUSIC

I had originally sketched out the musical ideas for "The Music of Erich Zann" several months ago. However, when my hard drive crashed in August, the music was lost. However, I remembered the fundamental ideas, and different functions that I would perform on the theme, so it only took a bit of time to recreate what I had lost.

But the challenge of the music was there from the beginning. I chose this project because of the central role of music. I feel that the level of success of this film would rest with the quality of Zann's other-worldly music.

From the beginning I wondered how I would create the music. I considered making the music with electric guitar, classical guitar, or computer-generated guitar. Because of the challenges with recording live guitar, either electric or classical, I went for the easiest solution, which was to use computer-generated music. At first, I thought that I would only use the guitar, but I later felt that the terror would have its own music, and I was then able to go with more synthesized sounds.

The main musical theoretical theme that I was trying to develop was within the octonic scale, then to fill out the chromatic with the diminished seventh chord that makes up the tones not included in the octonic scale. Every measure plays on such harmonies in different ways. The octonic scale gives me a chance to exploit nightmare chords, Petruschka chords, augmented seconds, and lots of other fun and unusual harmonies that aren't in tonal scales. I hope these harmonic explorations lent to the haunted sensibility of Erich Zann's curse. 

For the nicer version of the music that Zann plays in the middle of the film, I utilized the same ideas, but rather kept the tones and harmonies within tonic scales. Thus, the music seemed different, yet the same.

I am planning to further develop these musical ideas to create a larger scale piece. I have already completed some of that; here is a live recording of what I hope to be a much larger piece. 



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51. SOUND EFFECTS

After putting the frames together, I had to implement sound effects. I think it is a much neglected aspect of film production; or maybe it's just that I neglect it. Facing sound production in the face finally, I felt like the project was just about done. Perhaps that is why I am apt to rush past this process, even if I know I shouldn't.

Even though there were lots of shots and scenes that needed to be re-rendered, I could still use those poor quality renders to stand in place for use during sound production. So I had a first draft of the movie, without sound.

Several years ago I got the Sony Sound Effects Series library. Like the Mixamo animation library, I limited myself to the resources I had. Like the Mixamo library, this took some work to go through, but once I collected the basic sets of sounds, I got to working.

With every sound, I had to alter it in one way or the other in order to make it work best for my film. Typically this was just adjusting EQ, or pitch shifting.

For as much as I've bad-mouthed my Mac in this development blog, sound design was one place where this computer was able to shine. All of the most basic options were available, and it was invaluable to be able to watch the film while tweaking the sounds.

One thing that I realized once I stepped away from the sound design is that, just like every other aspect of this production (and any production, really) I needed to tweak and adjust so many little things to get it just right. The key revelation that I had in doing this for sound design was that I listened to the whole piece without any visual queues. That is, I closed my eyes while listening to the sound effects. It was easier for me to identify problems in the sound balance this way. Everything that either worked or didn't seemed so much more obvious this way. I'm sure that any sound person would say the same thing, but I just realized it now. 



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50. RENDERING ERRORS

I knew that rendering would take a very long time for this project. I started the process on August 19th, 2016. The last rendered frame was created on October 10th, 2016. And this was only for the hd540 version! That is over a month and a half of rendering. However, most of this was due to errors in rendering; I think that almost every scene was completely rendered at least twice because of rendering errors. Most were my fault, like a lack of version control. Sometimes, however, sometimes there were odd rendering artifacts that I cannot explain.

Instead of writing too much, I will simply list the rendering errors that occurred, and had to be fixed, and thus re-rendered.

-Washed out images

-Camera out of focus

-Low resolution background elements

-Lighting errors: wrong intensity; wrong color; wrong settings; etc.

-Shadow errors

-Alpha Channel errors

-Wrong textures for items

-Untextured items

-Odd rendering artifacts (This is the only type of error that was not my own fault)

-Low quality options checked for rendering

-Mismatching renders from different computers

-Lights in the wrong place

  

  

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49. RENDERING

Incorrectly, I always consider production over once my animation is complete, and I consider rendering to be post-production. Really, everything is just production; there is no pre-production, or post-production, there is only production, or no production.

I began the rendering process on August 19, 2016. I anticipated that the total rendering time would be about a month. I initially only rendered it at a resolution of hd540, to get it completed for a pre-showing later in October. The process didn't actually finish until October 10, 2016. During this time, I rendered almost each scene twice because of different errors in rendering. Oh well.

Also, I was accustomed, in my previous project, to batch rendering multiple scenes, and just leaving the computer alone for that time. However, the Mac computer didn't seem able to do this. It was a pain. To make it even worse, the Mac renders at such a slow rate that I feared this lower resolution rendering would take months to complete.

To resolve this, I pulled out my five year old Windows machine, and while the Mac was rendering some shots, I had this old warhorse churning out frames more than twice as fast. 

With two machines working, I was able to complete the whole project quicker. However, there were a few issues that I faced. One was that I thought that two machines could one shot, which could be later stitched together flawlessly. However, after doing this with a few shots, I saw that there were slight inconsistencies in how the different machines generated the same renders. For that reason, I stuck to a new policy: one machine, one shot. 

The other difficulty that developed was that after I was finished, and compiled all the scene files into an archive, there were silly confusions regarding which scene file was the final version. This really hit me when I finally got around to rendering the hd1080 version of the film. I thought that I would merely have to pull up the old scene files, and switch their settings to hd1080 before rendering. However, because I confused myself with version control, I ended up rendering the wrong scene a couple of times. That was especially frustrating because I would only learn about the mistake after rendering for several days or more; I would think that I was done rendering the scene, then I take a look, and I realize that I have to do it all over again. 

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48. GHOSTS AND MONSTERS AND ALIENS

The challenge for the final scene in the story is portraying the villain at the end. Unlike the Cthulhu mythos that Lovecraft developed, this story doesn't explicitly describe that which terrorizes Zann. Given this fact, I felt that it wasn't the visual of the monster that would give the greatest impact, but rather the lack of a visual queue that would be more frightening.

However, at some late point in the production, I was still wondering how this whole scene would be portrayed. I even considered that I might try to incorporate a Japanese style ghost or monster from Edo era ukiyo-e prints. But I wasn't going to be able to pull this off in the way that I wanted, so that idea was aborted.

Instead, I decided on a weird lens-flare effect. I hope it worked. In fact, I am happy with the final shot in the animation.

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47. NEW ANIMATICS

I tried to apply the new animations to each scene, but it was too much for my computer to handle. So I recreated the scenes with bare bones, minimal sets: usually just a floor and whatever necessary props were needed for the animation, but nothing else. I was easily able to apply the new animation to the characters, without many hardware limitations.

One limitation that did occur, however, was that I couldn't simply apply all of the animations to one character. The rotations and movements of the characters were difficult to carry over from the previous animation. So I used different copies of the character for different shots.

Once all the animation was in place, I could also figure out what specifically was needed for the camera settings, and the camera animations.

Once each scene was laid out in complete, I could then import this minimal animation right into the high resolution set, and simply hit render. To be sure, that hi-res set with all of the animated characters was way too intense for me to work with in any effective way, though it was still able to render when left alone. If I needed to make any tweaks to the scene or render settings, then I had to turn off a lot of the hi-res elements. 

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