32. STUDENT'S BODY

I modeled the female student first, again using nude human reference material to make the bodies with proper proportions. This was quite startling, because referencing a beautiful nude female, I felt that the animated character was malproportioned. Despite all my feminist studies, I did work to make the character with proportions that are more akin to a Barbie Doll, rather than those of a normal human female. Well, in fact I think my student character is actually about half-way between a normal human and a Barbie Doll. All that said, this is an animated film. I mentioned earlier that her eyes and mouth were also different from proper human proportions. 

I spent a lot of time on her hips and breasts, trying to figure out what an adolescent version of myself would like to look at. Again, it was difficult because it was out of step with the human model I was referencing. That said, however, my human reference was nude, whereas often women where pants and a bra that shape their bodies to be a bit more... flattering.

I feel like hands are difficult to model, so I repurposed hands that I created for the first time for Homeless Guy. However, I did have to alter what I had a great deal. This time I wanted to be sure to include finger nails and tighten up the shape of the hands and fingers. Again, a lot of tweaking was needed, but I was proud with what I ended up with. (You'll notice that the face is quite different.)

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31. IMPROVING THE FACES

I knew that I would never get accurate representations of either Timothy Spall or Natalie Portman, but I still needed to get characters who looked good. Being the first time that I tried to make realistic-ish human figures, I didn't get the best looking characters at first attempt. (In fact, I did try to create a realistic self-portrait that was used for Homeless Guy; it ended up looking like a bad PlayStation1 video game character; this time I was going for better.)

But then I learned an important step that every artist knows: the first pass is never the best, and it must always be improved. Perhaps the first drafts of these particular characters were a lot rougher than professionals start with, but I was proud of having at least this much to work from. From their initial faces, I had a lot of tweaking to still do, just moving one vertex at a time, or moving faces back and forth to see what looks best.

At this stage, I knew that I wanted both characters to be a bit more stylized rather than photorealistic. For the student, I remembered a rule for anime characters: big eyes, small mouth. Along with trying to make her jaw a bit more feminine, I kept tweaking until I got something I liked. And then asked other people how I could make their faces better still.

One thing that I knew I couldn't get away without making is the nasolabial fold. That is the line that goes down from the top of the nostrils to frame the mouth. I knew that I wanted this more pronounced in Zann's face, but even thought the student would be younger, her underlying physiology would still have such muscles under the face. I had to use different modeling tools to draw this line in, and even had to make a more three-vertices faces than I feel comfortable with.

The other thing that I needed to remember is to make the geometry as simple as possible. That's because it is a lot easier altering low-resolution geometry than altering high-resolution geometry. Pseudo-smoothing tools really helped in this regard, which kept the poly-count low, but smoothed them as though these were high-resolution models.

  

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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.

      

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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.

   

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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.

   

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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.

  

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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.

  

 

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