What Did I Learn From The Over World and What Does That Mean fo Xam and Power Dog?

Forgive me ahead of time. This post is rather long...

So, I've viewed my newly completed short film several times and now it's time to look back and see what I learned.

For me, the first thing that comes to mind it is took me four months to complete the film. I spent the first month designing, building, rigging and testing the characters as well as building the set and the props. I then spent the next three months recording dialogue, learning how to put it all together and rendering a five minute film. Let me say that again. Three months to render five minutes of film!

The next thing I think about is the film itself. Let's start with what I think worked.

Character Design: It's safe to say this is up for debate, but I feel that the character design worked. Sure, Xam and Power Dog are prettier characters (in my humble opinion) but I have to admit I really enjoyed working with this laid back design approach. I wanted it simple and that is what I got. There isn't anything fancy about these characters. Their eyes don't rival that of Pixar's. I only created 10 phonemes for their speech and only 16 other shape keys for their facial expressions. Believe me when I say I could have easily doubled or tripled those numbers. Their clothing, with the exception of Dr. Huffenagle trench coat, are not separate from their mesh. Their rigging doesn't have any fancy controls or constraints. I painstakingly had to move each individual bone separately to position them and this was never more of a pain then when I had Jimmy walk or crawl. Still, when I look at the finished film I believe what I see on the screen. Sure, the walk cycle could have been cleaner. Sure, I took many shortcuts with the speech controls and facial expressions, but none of that stands out to me. None of that detracts from the overall appearance of the film.

The Set: When I envisioned Huffenagle Hill, the house and the valley below, I wasn't sure how it was going to work. Although I've done a lot of character design I had never set down to build a set. Xam and Power Dog has so many sets, interior and exterior but I never sat down to design them. One of the many reasons I chose the scene I selected was because it was a big set, set outside and at night. In the end, I think I pulled of a pretty nice, night scene. I think the set is nice to look at and fits very well within the world of the characters.

The Acting: I hate saying this because I did all the voices and had to direct myself but I think the acting isn't bad. It is very well documented on this blog that I don't like my voice and the thought of acting and putting myself in front on the camera (or behind the voices anyway) was daunting for me. Luckily, I do have a little experience in front of the camera and on stage and I was able to fall back on what very limited training I've had in the past to bring something to this part of the project. Also, thanks to some very clever software, I was able to hide enough of my voice to the point I don't really hear myself in the characters.  Overall, I don't cringe during many parts of the film.

The Script: Based on the reaction of those few who have seen my film, I'm going to say the script works.  Granted, the story is something that I've been able to flush out over the years and I, for the most part, know what is motivating every character in the film. This made writing the script incredibly easy. In the end, I genuinely believe you can't take one line out of the film without changing the context of the entire scene. That means no line is wasted and that is important to me. I've even had the occasional comment that it sucks that this is only a side project and I have no plan at this time to make this a feature film, which in my mind is exactly what this story is. I seem to have attracted some attention to this story and that could only have happen because the the script worked.

Now, let's look at what didn't work.

Character Design: Honestly, I think everything about this was good.  I have tried to find something about it that doesn't work but these characters are exactly what I envisioned when I sat down to create them.  This is one of only a couple of things about the project I am completely happy with.

The Set: One thing I did to speed up rendering time was to use back drops instead of rendering every character, building, tree and blade of grass individually.  Still, I needed it to look like the characters were actually standing in the valley so I designed a patch of grass for them to stand on and that patch of grass sat in front of the back drop. One thing that stands out in the film in some scenes is the blending of the foreground with the background.  Simply put, in some scenes you can see the line separating the foreground and the background. For the Xam and Power Dog movie I will need to make this line seamless.

The Acting: I know I said above that I think this works but the truth is that I think this works only for the most part. There are two versions of the final film on the blog and that is because I wanted to go back and work on Nathan's voice. Although I am happy with the sound in the final-final version I don't like Nathan's cadence. My plan when I recorded his dialogue was that I wanted to make him sound ghostly and that affected the cadence by maaakkkiiinnng hhhiiimmm tttaaalllkkk ssslllooowwwlllyyy.  In retrospect, I would prefer his cadence match a young boys, like Jimmy's.  Nathan's slowed down speech pattern just made some of the scene drag on a little longer than I would like. The other thing I'm not exactly happy about is Huffenagle's voice. When I finished designing Huffenagle I realised he looked a lot like Patrick Stewart! Once I noticed that I wanted him to sound like Patrick. Of course, I couldn't get Patrick Stewart although in all fairness to the man, I never reached out to him and asked. The problem is that I don't even come close to sounding like Patrick Stewart.  I can't even do a bad impression of him.  Apparently, what I can do is a very, very, very bad impression of Sean Connery (and if I'm being honest, who can't).  My wife thinks he sounds like Dr. Dugong (for all you Venture Bros. fans out there) or, more recently, kind of like Bane in the new Dark Knight Rises movie. Still, this is more of a voice thing than an acting thing so I'll move on.

The Script: Again, honestly, I'm pretty happy with the script. I can't really find anything I don't like.  Now, sure, viewers won't understand every thing they see.  It is, after all, a scene from a much larger story and therefore the viewers of this scene aren't meant to understand everything.  Hopefully, it leaves you wanting more.  :)

So, what does all of this mean for Xam and Power Dog? Actually, this means quite a lot. I now have a better idea of what exactly it will take to make Xam and Power Dog at least as good as my short. 

I've learned that if I continue to have trouble creating the advanced rig I'm trying to make work for those characters I can always fall back on the classic approach I used to rig these guys.  Sure, to do that will mean I won't get the kind of quality I'm hoping to achieve for Xam and Power Dog but perhaps I'm not meant to.  If, at the end of the day, the movement of Xam and Power Dog looks only as good as Jimmy, Nathan and Huffenagle then that will truthfully be alright with me. I could live with that.

I've also learned that I am definitely going to need to get my server farm up and running. This short was created using only a laptop and when I was rendering the scenes I was locked out from continuing any work on the rest of the movie. Also, the longest scene in the short was 14 seconds and that took the laptop 1.5 - 2 hours to render.  That's right.  1.5 - 2 hours to render 14 seconds of film!  A server farm, in my case, will be one server at first with plans to add a second down the road. This server will be beefed up to render movies which will, in design at least, speed up render times.  But, if for some reason renders aren't any faster then they are on my laptop (and I can't imagine this being the case) then at least I won't tie down my laptop when rendering and I will at least be able to continue working on the movie during renders.

The last thing I learned was that I can continue to work on my models to get them ready for filming but I won't be able to film one scene until I get all the dialogue recorded and perfected.  This means that I'm not only going to have to make sure the script is exactly how I want it but also bring the cast into the studio to lay down their dialogue tracks.

But, the most important thing in all of this is that the short is finished and now it's time to start working on Xam and Power Dog again!

Check back next week.  I'll keep you updated as always.

Later