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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42. ANIMATION - MOTION CAPTURE

Creating the animatic was a bit more time-consuming than I had supposed it would be. Even though I knew that I wasn't creating the best animation possible, I did still want to make something that was adequate, and that nicely represented what the final image might actually look like.

In fact, my own animation skills from my previous projects probably show in great detail in these animatics. That is, when I was finally complete with the animatics, I realized that this animation was as high-quality as I had ever done on my previous works: not very high quality animation. I remarked to myself that if I didn't insist on creating a higher quality film this time, I would now be done with all production except rendering.

However, I did want to get higher quality animation. My initial plan to get this would be to use motion-capture technology that I had secured, using IpiSoft. The problem, of course, is that I hadn't yet used the software or the hardware, and I was intimidated by the learning curve that this was sure to bring. In fact, in our past use of this motion-capture tech on our video games, it was quite a pain to get usable animation, and even then, there would be a lot of post-capture details that needed to be ironed out.

Another problem with the motion capture tech that we had is that we used two sets of Kinect cameras, which required two video cards on the computer. My own computer, however, did not have this, so I would be limited to one Kinect camera, unless I bought a new computer with two video cards. This would be quite an expense.

In any case, before I even got started with the motion capture software, another animation solution fell in my lap...

This Homeless Guy research video from a few years ago presents some of the challenges and benefits of using motion capture. In this case we used IpiSoft. 

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41. SCREENPLAY

It was at this point during the production that I finally followed my friend's suggestion, and read some books on film production. He had actually suggested to read "Masters of Light" so that I could better understand the mind of the cinematographer, and I did get this book, but I didn't read that one (and I still haven't).

Instead I got the books that I've mentioned before: CinematicStorytelling, and the Master Shots series. Those books were easy and quick to read, but filled with tons of great ideas, especially for someone as inexperienced as I. As always, I annotated the book while reading, and even marked specific ideas that I would try to implement in "The Music of Erich Zann."

It was only after reading these books that I got a better idea about what I never understood about screenplays. I decided to take a step back from the animation and visual production of the work, and really detail the screenplay that I would now utilize for the production.

Creating a detailed screenplay was the absolute best decision that I made during this production. While I had written notes during preproduction, and on prior projects I even created a sparse storyboard, I had never done so at this level of detail.

While the first scene was already laid out, it was a long and arduous process where I came up with ideas from the top of my head; some worked, but others didn't, but the trial and error process probably wasted a lot of time.

Utilizing my new screenplay method, I was better able to pre-visualize, in my head, what I wanted to see, and how I was going to accomplish these ideas. Now, to be clear, I don't think that there is anyone who would look at my screenplay and describe it as being in the proper "screenplay format." (I know that there is such a format, but I don't care to learn it at this stage.) Instead, I still insist on calling my work a screenplay because reading it helps illustrate what the play would be on the screen, thus a screenplay.

I tried to incorporate several important elements in the screenplay. The first is breaking each scene into the different shots that would make up the scene. The second is the camera lens that I would utilize. Of course, I would also include what the camera was looking at, and how those things were framed in the image. The third element is how the characters in the camera move. And the final element to make sure each shot in the screenplay had was how the camera moved. With these ideas in mind, I also broke down each scene into the individual shots that would make the scene.

From these details, I had more pre-visualization than I had ever created for any of my previous animation projects. I didn't end up making a storyboard since my screenplay was so detailed. I would thus go directly from screenplay to animatic. After building the animatic, I would then get a very accurate idea of how film would look with this low-animation-quality animatic. After fleshing that out, I could see what worked and what didn't and what needed to be changed.

By the way, after creating the screenplay like this, I realized that it probably couldn't have happened in any other order. That is, even though it turns out that I did spend too much time and energy creating items and props that were never seen, I don't think that I could have created a screenplay without the visualization that knowing the sets actually provides. That is, if I didn't know how the world looked, how could I have thought of the specific camera shots, and their framing? Perhaps there are people who have this sort of vision, but I do not.

Below is a one-scene excerpt from my screenplay. This can be compared to the final film, with the youtube link below.

• FOYER
• Shot 6.1: short lens from Zann's door, as she is closing her own door, center frame, as though to leave. NO MUSIC. She turns her head down the hall, and towards stairs.
• Shot 6.1.0: [[[At same time, camera rotates to see Zann struggling up the stairs. (No. This isn't powerful enough entrance for him) he must have a turn in entrance, pg46.] She is framed so hard right, that she is partly out of frame (maybe even completely out of frame.) she then runs down the hall, towards Zann to help, from frame right, to frame left, while camera doesn't move at all. ]]]
• Shot 6.1.1: she stops at the top of the stairs, looking down, seeing Zann. (But camera doesn't move from looking at her at top of steps, over the rail.)
• Shot 6.2: camera over her shoulder, long lens, tilted down, looking at Zann's back as he looks out the window of the mezzanine. Either camera zooms in, or pushes in as Zann turns around, facing the camera, and approaches forward, up the steps. But then we see him struggle with the first steps. 
• 
  
• Shot 6.3: camera shorter lens, from behind him, as he ascends the stairs. Wall is frame left, she is center, descending, he is frame right. From top of stairs looking down, she rushes down to help him up the stairs.
• 
  
• Shot 6.4: camera long lens close up framing both of their faces, as they walk up the stairs, while he's holding the rail, panting, looking down. She is a bit behind him, helping him up the stairs.
• 
  
• Shot 6.5: short to medium lens camera panning with them as they walk corridor to his room, just past hers.
• 
  
• Shot 6.6: long lens focus on the surprise/ startle of her face as She realizes he is the player of music.
• 
  
• Shot 6.7: very short lens looks out from inside Zann's room as he just opened his door. A bit over his shoulder because he's looking at her. Her surprised look becomes more curious-happy, like a child about to discover something. He gestures to welcome her in. She nods and She follows him in as he turns and walks into the camera (which is effectively a fade to black)

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40. ANIMATICS

The first scene would be the first that I would tackle in terms of an animatic. I didn't yet have a screenplay or storyboard, but I knew that some basics could be fleshed out early.

The only real idea that I had in mind for any of the shots or scenes was this opening scene. I didn't attempt too create too much detail in the animation at this stage. But I did just want to try to flesh out some idea of how the final movie would look. I thought that I could make this animatic in place of a storyboard or screenplay.

(The horror for this development blog, however, is that few of the original rendered animatics survive. Sometime in early August, my new Mac computer's hard drive crashed, and it was lost there; I was very fortunate that I had been backing up every other object from the production.)

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39. LOW RESOLUTION STAND-INS

With the sets and the characters completed, it would be time now to add animation to the characters, and help them tell the H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Music of Erich Zann."

I figured that I would start with the first scene first, and then move forward from there. Right from the beginning I saw challenges that this project was posing on my computer. I didn't even try to animate the characters nicely at first. I just wanted to shape and block out animatics in order to get the roughest version of the film done, and then I could see where I could improve the animation, sets, and even cameras. Even the simplest animations, and moving around the scene were causing my computer to slow way down, and I questioned if I would ever get through these bottlenecks to finish the project. For every hour that I worked on the animations in their respective scenes, I would need to restart my computer at least once.

However, I have dealt with this sort of problem before, and so I intended to solve it in the same way I did before, by creating a low resolution version of each of the sets. I would hide all of the high resolution geometry, and simply build a layer of very low resolution geometry in the exact same spot.

In order to help improve the look of the low resolution geometry, I rendered orthographic views of each of the buildings, and then I could use that rendered image as a picture to slap on top of the cube that I would use for the low resolution stand-in.

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37. ZANN'S BUTTONS

The only real difficult challenge with Zann's clothing came with the buttons that I wanted to add on his shirt. I knew it would be difficult, so at first I decided against it. Well, I didn't think that modeling the buttons would be difficult, but I did know that once Zann was setup for animation, that the buttons would react and distort in odd ways with the skeleton.

Anyways, after finishing the rest of Zann, I tried to make the buttons. They looked good... but only if I didn't animate his torso. I knew that wasn't going to be an option, so I tried to figure out a way to set up the skeleton, and/ or skin weight, or lots of other things in order to make this work. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out a solution. The skinned model would never animate just the way that I wanted it to when applied to the skeleton. That is, the buttons would stretch and distort into odd shapes when Zann's torso was moved. So after painstaking trials, I eliminated the buttons from his shirt.

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