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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46. FACIAL ANIMATION and FACIAL SETUP

Although I found a free solution in Mixamo for character rigging and animation, I still had to do facial setup and facial animation on my own. Since my first animation, I have been doing facial setup and animation in the same way, with weight target morphing.

The greatest challenge of this is that it involves moving the individual polygons, edges, or vertex points. This task can be quite difficult if topology of the face is hi-res. That would require moving many more points than is convenient, and I could easily create a mess.

For that reason, I kept the resolution of all models very low from the beginning. Most 3d modeling software have a solution by which you can merely smooth a surface in order to add resolution, and make it neater. In fact, most software have a solution to hit a button to merely give the model a smooth view. I took advantage of such tools throughout this project, and it was most helpful during the facial setup process.

Back to weight morphing, then. This entails copying the face of the character for as many different weight targets that I want. I got a book a long time ago called Animating Facial Features and Expressions. There is an appendix in that book that merely lists and shows a ton of facial morph targets. I knew that I wasn't going to use any dialogue in the film, so I just stuck with the facial expressions. It seems to me that the most focused areas for facial animation are the eyelids, the eye brows, and the mouth. The mouth is certainly the most complicated, since the eyes and the brows are typically only require me to lift or lower the faces.

However, the mouth has very complicated geometry. Not only must I lower or raise faces, but I must also compress certain areas, like a kiss, for example. Further complicating this is the fact that there is the inside of the mouth to consider.

This whole process required a bit of patience. There were a couple of times that I had to redo the process because of later errors. But by the third time, it was easy since I knew what to do.

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45. MIXAMO SETUP

One other thing that Mixamo does with characters is set them up for animation. That is, all that is required for Mixamo to work is the initial geometry. Mixamo creates the skeleton and the skin weights to make the animation apply to whatever bipedal character is designed.

Of course, the Mixamo skin-weights aren't always guaranteed to work, and I needed to fix them. This was especially so for Zann. From fairly early on I knew that I wanted Zann to be a portly figure. (That's why my original references were Danny DeVito, Takashi Shimura, and Timothy Spall.) However, I have known for a long time that such portly characters are always difficult to animated (I remember many of my earlier problems with Zann, such as his shirt buttons, double chin, etc were due to his stature).

However, one thing that was nice with about Mixamo is that a number of their animations could be customized to better fit different character types. Most often this included arm spacing; but other times this included specification regarding how excited or calm the character would be while performing the action.

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44. MIXAMO CHALLENGES

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Despite the fact that these animations that I sourced from Mixamo were so much better than any animation I could create, there were still several challenges that I now faced.

The first challenge was finding the animation that fit what I needed. There are only a limited set of animations that Mixamo has available. If there is not something that fits my animatic plan, or ideas that I wanted, well then what could I do?

I could either make the animation myself, but that would probably reveal a big clash between my own style of animation and the high quality Mixamo animations. (In fact, in a couple of places, I think it is a bit too clear where these contrasts happen in the film.)

Another solution that I exercised more frequently is to mix different Mixamo animations into one that fit what I needed.



This is the case with the guitar-playing animation. The Mixamo solution has the musician standing while playing guitar, but I clearly wanted sitting. So I found a nice sitting animation for the lower part of Zann's body, and used the guitar-playing animation for the upper part of his body. 

Yet another solution to this challenge would be to simply abandon the shot that I wanted.

The second challenge that Mixamo introduced was making the animation fit within the sets that I had already designed. The most obvious examples of this were walking up and down the stairs. The steps that Mixamo prescribed ended up different from the size of the steps that I originally designed. I figured that having good animation was more important than the size of my stairs, so for that scene, I remade the staircase so that it would better fit the steps of characters took in the animation.

 

The third challenge of using Mixamo animation was that it might not have fit within the confines of my original animatic. In that case, it was very easy for me to decide that my shots would be altered in order to make the animation fit the idea better. This might entail having to move the camera in different ways, but that seemed a minor sacrifice to get nice looking animation.



My original screenplay had these shots all combined as one long camera-shot. However, because I couldn't figure out how to best combine all of the animations required to get this to work, I decided to simply cut it into a couple of shots. This was easier since part of my original screenplay did include the camera leaving her out of the shot for a moment. During this moment, it was easy to incorporate a new animation for the student (and during that last animation for the scene, I did have to combine two Mixamo animations in order to get her to the door). 


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43. MIXAMO ANIMATION

My brother was working on a different animation project where he needed to source animation. His research turned up Mixamo, a free source of pre-created animation. I remember that he had told me about it some time ago, but my own pride precluded me from using these sorts of resources during our video game production. I didn't even look at it.

But then he told me about Mixamo again, in regards to yet another project he was working on. Something about the way he described it this time made me think of another project that I'd had in mind for some time (and still have in mind), so I decided to give it a look.

I had been turned on by the idea of using Mixamo's animation primarily for video game production. Part of this Adobe platform also includes tools for creating digital characters, which can then be animated using the Mixamo set of tools. I thought this would be great for quick turn-around production proofs for video games.

But looking at the tool set that was available from Mixamo, it quickly became clear that these tools were perfectly suited for this production of "The Music of Erich Zann." Instead of needing to learn a whole new set of hardware and software in using motion-capture, I decided that I would instead utilize these pre-made animations.

(Just to be clear, these dances don't appear in "The Music of Erich Zann." 

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