30. CELEBRITY AUDITIONS

At this point of the production, I felt (tentatively) finished with the sets. But now came the most intimidating element of production: characters.

I have never felt comfortable making characters for the different projects I've produced, but following The Elf Who Killed Christmas, I developed a bit more confidence. For that project, we worked with a character designer who drew the images that I rotoscoped from. These were cartoon-style characters, and working from them, I saw that it wasn't as difficult as I had feared. I was very happy with how the final characters turned out for that video game.

Since facing success with that project, I challenged myself on "TheMusic Erich Zann" to not only model interesting characters, but also design them myself. However, I didn't really know what style I was going for with the characters. This is where I did a ton of online research. Unlike The Elf Who Killed Christmas, I knew that I wouldn't be able to count on someone to give me the exact illustrations that I needed to rotoscope faces and bodies. I knew that I wanted some sort of caricatured style, but not being an illustrator, or drawer, I really wasn't sure how I would accomplish this since I knew that I wouldn't find a perfect side and front view of any caricatured person.

However, after seeing some great caricatures online, it gave me some ideas about which celebrities I would try to copy. I figured that if I picked famous enough celebrities, it would be easier to find a front and side view to copy. So I searched out some images of character actors whose faces I really admired.

I knew that I wasn't good enough to copy faces in a realistic manner, so I didn't need to be worried about any of my characters resembling real-life people. In fact, looking at the characters now, nobody would ever mistake my characters for those people.



  

   

The actors I modeled my characters after are Timothy Spall and Natalie Portman. Those final decisions were pretty much based on the fact that they were the only actors I found appropriate reference images, from the other actors I wanted to model. Amongst the other actors that I wanted in "The Music of Erich Zann" were Danny DeVito, Takashi Shimura, and Peter Lorre; for the student, I also considered Helena Bonham Carter. Thinking about it now, I guess it's fun to think of myself as having these great actors to choose from; but there's only room to cast one for each role. There were many great auditions to choose from, I'm sorry to those who weren't selected. I wish you all better luck next time.

      

Website:  Contacts:       , and the film: 

29. GETTING ENOUGH VENTALATION

One similarity that was essential between the two rooms was iron gate to the vent, high in the wall. This feature of both rooms was added much later in the production. I always knew that I wanted the scene in her room, where she was listening to Zann's music, but I had always assumed that she was merely listening through the walls.

One thing that was nice about sharing early stills with friends was ithat they could give me suggestions. No one suggested this vent that connects he two rooms, but someone did suggest that I read more books on filmmaking. There had always been a series that caught my eye, but I never actually read, Master Shots by Christopher Kenworthy. So I got all those, and set to reading. By the same publisher was another book called Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sijil.

I'll try to get more into what I learned from these books later, but one idea I got was to make the connection between the rooms visual. In fact, I stole the exact idea of the vent between the rooms from one of the books (which got the idea from some specific movie, but I forget which movie it was). In the end, these vent gates play an essential part in the short.

Just like the stair railing and ornamentation design on the armoire, I found some ornamental line art, and modeled the ventilation gates based on that. The only additional work was that I needed was to cut holes into the walls. Since the idea was to also show the darkness deep in the vents, I also placed a black plane behind the vent; I anticipated problems if it was just empty space that would get alpha-channeled out.

   

Website:  Contacts:       , and the film: 

27. FAMILY PHOTOS

The fourth set for "The Music of Erich Zann" was the student's room. I wanted this room to contrast with Zann's room: whereas Zann's room would be cluttered and lived in, my vision of the student's room was sparse and empty. That's the kind of room that I had when I was a student.

So clearly she would have the bare necessities, but what else? I decided on a single table, with a flower. This central flower, I hoped, would say something sweet and innocent about her character. (However, since the only image of this solitary flower is veiled in darkness, I wonder if what notions this might have transmitted.)

The other key items I included were a few framed pictures on the wall. I intended that these pictures would remind her of home. It is always a difficult decision for me to figure out what photos to include in an animation. For one thing, the photos are not 3D renders, like the rest of the world. Even in the foyer, the framed pictures were drawings. It's always been confusing for me what such ideas convey in animation. That is, how can a photo of her father be a real photograph, when her world is a 3D rendered world (Or in other films, a 2D rendered world)? (I think this feature occurs a bit in the children's cartoon, "SpongeBob SquarePants." And it's odd to me because, in that universe, how is it that photos look like that?)

In any case, that's a problem that I didn't allow to consume me for too long. I did decide quickly enough, though, that he photos should be of H.P. Lovecraft. That would be a little bit of the homage the the author of this story. Online, I found both an adult and child picture of him. After layering some dirt on top of the pictures, and applying some filters that abstracted them a bit, I used placed them in the frames, and hung them on the walls.

   

Website:  Contacts:       , and the film: 

26. GUITAR CASE

Since I was going with a guitar, I figured that one piece of additional set dressing must then be the guitar case. To be sure, this wasn't terribly difficult to model. I literally built the case around the guitar that I had just modeled.

I wanted to be sure to also model the clamps, and the hinges of the case in order to illustrate better detail. These are more details that were probably not even noticed in the film, and thus another aspect of the production where excessive detail might not have been required for the finished film. (However, one justification for this attention to detail might be future uses of these items, perhaps where more detail will be necessary (but maybe not).)

A key challenge for me in creating the case was setting up the case for modeling. Unlike simple doors that have perpendicular and straight points of rotation, the hinges of a guitar case are at an odd angle. To solve for this problem, I modeled a straight bar, which represented the pivot axis for the lid of the guitar case. This was helpful because then I knew where to place the joint, and how to articulate it, so that opening and closing the lid would make sense. Another way that this helped was that this bar also represented the one-dimensional line along which any hinges for the guitar case would have to sit in order to make the opening of the case seem realistic. To be sure, this is a place where photographic reference would be trumped by the physics of the animated world.

  

Website:  Contacts:       , and the film: 

28. HIDING BEHIND THE CURTAIN, OR NOT...

The other slight changes that I made to the student's room were to make it smaller, and also hang up a curtain dividing the water closet from the rest of the room. Although this curtain was dirty and grungy, I hoped that this would still seem more neat than Zann's room, which didn't have a curtain at all.

However, as I mentioned before, in the final film, there are no images with either Zann's curtain- less rod and bathroom, nor are there shots of the student's curtained bathroom. In any case, as I've said before, I'm not sure that I achieved the feeling I was going for with the rod and curtain. Perhaps it would have been better if I had a torn curtain in Zann's room, rather than no curtain at all. I'm not sure.

Another difference between the rooms was the wall texture. I did want at least that much difference between the two rooms. Only after watching the completed film, though, did I wish I had changed the color of the walls a bit more.

  

 

Website:  Contacts:       , and the film: 

25. PLAYING GUITAR

The guitar has a special spot in my soul. I've played guitar for over twenty years, and I still pick it up everyday. Thus, from the beginning I knew that in my animated version of "The Music of Erich Zann," he would play a guitar, and I would write the music (I will discuss the music writing process in more detail later). However, I had never created a 3D model of a guitar. I supposed (perhaps mistakenly) that it would be an easy process.

Indeed, it would be easy to utilize photo references of a guitar, but I had a further advantage in that I had a physical guitar readily available that so that I could include even greater detail that I might have missed with photos. One place that I tried to add specific detail were with the strings. Initially, I had planned on animating the actual music performance to the note. (Once I got to the animation phase of the project, this direction was quickly abandoned.) So I had to be specific about exactly where the frets were. This was easy with photographic reference. But I also wanted to be sure to include the excess string, and loops made when tying the strings to the guitar at both ends, at the nut, and at the tuning pegs. To do this, I created a curve, and extruded the strings along that curve.

One place where I left out detail on the guitar is the threads of the screws of the tuning pegs. I've yet to model any screws, and I dread the thought, but I expect that I could probably find some online tutorials regarding this (which is what I did at so many points during the production). So I shouldn't be too scared to do this in the future.

Texturing the guitar wasn't too difficult, either, since the division of the parts is fairly straightforward. The only thing that I paid attention to is where to add specularity (on the body of the guitar), and where not (on the fretboard).

I'll later discuss alterations that I had to make to it during the animation phase of the project.

  

  

Website:  Contacts:       , and the film: