This is a remake of a 2020 version I made in Cinema 4D and had a lot of technical restrictions that never sat well with me. There was no way the software and my computer could but 29 characters in a shot and even just moving them around, which worked as no one was going to count the men, was even more limited, since they could really move much or the app would crash. I do think it worked but lacked the look I wanted.
This version made with Blender, I hope, is much more realized with more movement and a better, more detailed setting. Michael Z. Keamy and I were originally going to film this with live actors in Provincetown but getting 28 young men to cavort naked on a beach, even in P-town isn't as easy to put together as it sounds. So I went with animation and his great narration. The soundscape is simple. I added some seagull noises to round it out but otherwise it's unchanged. The structure is basically the same as well. I like the way I set up the shots but now everything looks better and has more going on in each shot. I gave the young men and the woman more character I hope.
This project was suggested to me at a showing of one of my earlier animations. I did not think I could pull it off, the story has over 1000 people and a setting involving 7 rooms of various colours among other technically challenging aspects. After reading the story a few times more I decided it could be pulled back with less people and less room and still keep the tone and message of the story intact.
Even so, it would mean animating more characters in several shots than I ever had before and involve some animal simulations I wasn’t sure how to pull off. Poe’s wordiness and descriptions were also pulled back partly to reflect the simpler setting but mostly to reflect how bad a narrator I am. I did enhance my voice a little to make it sound better.
I used Make Human and Human Gen to create the characters. This made it feasible to make so many and also Human Gen can add clothes you make or buy in an easy way which I really needed for this project. One thing that Blender has in abundance is reasonably priced fantastic addons so my one man show looks better, I hope, than it would have totally on my own.
It was rendered in EEVEE and compositing and colour work was done in Apple Motion while editing was done in Final Cut Pro.
I did have issues with Human Gen here and there. A few characters suddenly had finger rigging issues and I wish that plugin had more secondary facial controls like Make Human. It has much better skin and hair so it’s a question of which I could get the most out of. The robed figure was simply rigged withAuto Rig pro. Something I plan to use more in future.
Not what is next except to get familiar with compositing in Blender. I would like to use depth maps and maybe motion maps in Apple Motion like I used to and separate elements for better colour corrections. I will try and redo some older animations I think will be greatly improved over the Cinema 4D versions and decide on a new project as I go go through all of that.
I was about to write about the new Wallace and Gromit short I saw last night but then saw the runtime... 80 minutes! I might have sworn it was 20! The passed so quickly and there was no part that dragged. I think the last film they were was Curse of the Were-rabbit in 2005, 20 years ago and there no sign that the time between projects had any effect at all. Like old friends you can not see them for decades and and when you do its like no time has passed at all,
I don't think its a spoiler to state that Feather McGraw is the villain as they are in the a lot of preview materials. The farmer from Shaun the sheep makes a brief cameo as well. The basic plot is Wallace has spent too much money on inventions and is behind on paying the bills. His solution is to rent the garden Gnome he made to help Gromit to neighbours but Feathers McGraw is able to find a way to control the robot and turn their lives upside down while he tries to steal the gemstone out duo got him arrested over in his short film from 1998.
That bit might have been a little much, introducing an old bad guy from long ago, but it works and they explain the backstory with humour and doesn't let it bog down the new story.
Ultraman rising is reboot of sorts of the Ultraman franchise as an animated movie. The animation is very good as is the sound and direction. Likes most current films, particularly animated ones the story has something to be desired.
In this version o Ultraman, Ultraman is the father of a small family fight kaju that attack Japan making somewhat of a absent dad. His kid grows up and he and his wife grow apart. The young boy moves to the United States and became a egotistical but excellent baseball player. He comes back to Japan to play for a Japanese team but also to take up his responsibilities as the new Ultraman. He isn't the best in the role and one of the monsters dies trying to get it's egg back after it was stolen by the villain who wants to kill all kaju after the death of his family. Ultraman find the egg, which hatches and he is no charged with raising a giant monster and trying to continue his baseball career.
This sets up conflict between the hero and the villain who are at odds at what to do about the giant monster attacks. He also meets a reporter who becomes his love interest and begins to patch up his relationship with father. His mother "disappeared" many year before and is assumed dead.
Sadly this all works out in ways you can easily predict including a post credit sequence. I was about to say as the credit rolled that at least we didn't find out the mother was actually still alive but... sequel set up.
It's fun enough and visually interesting but dragged a bit especially you know nothing really out of the box is going to happen. Oddly enough I found the live action mess of a fim Shin Ultraman more fun because it was such a train wreck of multiple storylines and foot fetishes.
A cat walks though the forest, avoiding a pack of dogs but almost gets trampled by a stampede of deer. The cat lives in an abandoned house where a cat obsessed artist has left sculptures from small to enormous all over the land. The cat sees the running deer were escaping a coming flood which covers everything up to several stories.
As the flood rises the cat finds refuge on a boat which already has one occupant, a capybara. Before long several more animals, a dog, a secretary bird, and a ring-tailed lemur have joined the crew as they explore a world empty of people and flooded by water. They learn to co-operate to live in a changed world.
The plot is simple but the story told is more profound, though, like his last film "Away" hard to pin down specific meanings. The cat's point of view is our point of view so we never know where the water came from or why or what happened to the people or how the resolution happens. This could be frustrating but it's really not. It's intriguing and beautifully animated using Blender, a free software and a smallish team that shows it doesn't take 150 million$ to make something meaningful and striking visual.
Its rare you look forward to a film and it meets and exceeds expectations. This certainly did for me. As with "Away" Zilbalodis has created a world to explore, again very Myst-like in its beauty and mystery. It's not a typical "its the friends we made along the way" trope of a movie, though it is that. There is death but handled in a way that won't be traumatic to children and through the eyes of the main character, a cat, so its not from a human perspective. While I would love to know more about the backstory of this world it's better not to know. It might not even be earth to be honest or at least it might be an alternate one. One animal is familiar but not like any version of such a creature we see in our present world.
If you can see it, please do and buy the Blu-ray when/if it comes out. We need a lot more films like this to be made.
The Wild Robot tells the story of a robot programmed to be of service shipwrecked on an island inhabited only by animals. It learns to communicate with them and after accidentally killing a bird in a fall discovers the bird was a mother and finds itself taking the place of mother and has to raise the chick on its own, developing real emotional feelings as it does so.
As this is brand new movie, I will try not to spoil too much. The film is lovely to look at the animation has a storybook/ studio Ghibli style to it that really works. Its very well made, the voice acting was great but I saw it in French so I can’t speak to the all star English cast version which I would guess is at least as good.
The film’s biggest faults might have more to do with my expectations than anything else. I saw the first trailer and thought the animals would not talk… but they do. If you had had asked me to guess ho the story would progress before I saw it, I would pretty much have nailed it. The trailer, like far too many trailers, basically takes you through the entire film and to honest the scenario is a typical by the numbers story. No real surprises, though it is well told.
This is well worth seeing but it falls short of being great because it plays it too safe.
The sequel to the 2018 Spriderman: Into the Spiderverse was a long time coming and at 2 hours, a long time to watch as well. While it did better at the box-office than the first film I think this one has at least one major flaw I cannot overlook.
To start with, I LOVED the first movie. It was breath fresh air in it pacing, style and animation. The story was gripping and managed to be exciting and heart wrenching at times. I thought it might be good, but it was great. The second film is lesser as one might expect but it still has eye popping animation and good character development, for the most part, of the main actors and uses the multiverse concept in interesting ways to move the story along and to add some unexpected twists. I can’t say the movie was boring in any way or cut corners animation wise or went in a direction that took away from the overall quality of the production. So what is the problem?
The problem starts with the villain who is barely there and milk toast. I am not sure if we are supposed to care about him at all, the personal life of Miles Morales was fantastic and keeps getting interrupted by a bad guy I have investment in. A bigger issue was the ending…or lack of an ending might be a better way to put it. There isn’t an ending! There is a sequel tease that makes no sense. If a they cut out some of the overlong senses at the multiverse HQ they could have wrapped this up in a few minutes and not made the movie any longer. The 3rd film was already has supposed to have been released by now but there is no sign of it as of this writing. In my opinion it ruins the movie, which I was liking the ride if was taking me on until it suddenly ended seemingly within minutes of a resolution. It felt like a cheat and a cheap ploy instead of a cliffhanger for the next instalment.
Story: As I usually do, the original story had to be stripped down to its most simple and basic form. Lovecraft had the characters traveling internationally for their adventures and the hound chases them intercontinentally. As a one man band making animation, having too many elements, locations and characters will make doing the animation impossible accomplish practically. I felt the 2 characters were not likeable and Mike and I tried to get that across. The narrator is a bit pompous despite his degrading mental state as events unfold.
Production: My animation style is usually very stop motion inspired, this is as well but not as much previous efforts.
This was a challenge, more so than my other short films because my older version of C4D stopped working in my OS and I HAD to learn Blender or not make any more animations. I have been trying to learn it for a decade without any real success. Recently the software has been advancing in leaps and bounds, not just technically but also changing it’s interface to a much more artist friendly one that is closer to industry standards. My work has dropped to almost nothing so while that is certainly panic inducing and financially disastrous, I was able to put a full time effort into learning and since Blender is free it didn’t add to my money woes.
After 3 months I was ready to try and start production and gathered my research, worked on the script and started to make the sets and characters. I made a couple of plugin purchases ( OK more than a couple) to help me get the look I wanted which included a human character generator that works within Blender and also does the rigging automatically which saved me months of time. It is limited in that clothing options are all modern and no third party additions so far so I have to modify to give a pseudo 30s look to the costumes. I spent a HUGE amount of effort reformatting 100s of models from Cinema 4D to Bender friendly files but it was worth the effort. I was also able to easily ad fog, a gothic horror must that did not take hours to render each frame and I was very happy with the result.
I restricted myself with some technical choices to avoid getting overwhelmed on my first project so I didn’t learn how to export separate passes of elements that would normally let me do post motion blur and give me more control over the final images. I also rendered in the faster real time engine EVEE that Blender has developed and it was more than good enough for this. The full force render engine is really great but I would be rendering until next year if I used it, partly because I have to learn how to optimize it for my needs.
Conclusion: I love Blender! Now I finally have a beginner’s handle on it I think I go upwards from here. It is up to you if this is a step up or down from my previous work but it seems a step up to me!
Voici une version avec des sous-titres français :
Histoire: Comme je le fais d'habitude, l'histoire originale a dû être dépouillée dans sa forme la plus simple et la plus basique. Lovecraft a fait voyager les personnages à l'étranger pour leurs aventures et le chien les poursuit de manière intercontinentale. En tant que groupe d'un seul homme faisant de l'animation, avoir trop d'éléments, de lieux et de personnages rendra l'animation impossible à accomplir pratiquement. J'ai senti que les 2 personnages n'étaient pas sympathiques et Mike et moi avons essayé de le faire passer. Le narrateur est un peu pompeux malgré son état mental dégradant au fur et à mesure que les événements se déroulent.
Production : Mon style d'animation est généralement très inspiré du stop motion, c'est aussi bien, mais pas autant d'efforts précédents. C'était un défi, plus que mes autres courts métrages parce que mon ancienne version de C4D a cessé de fonctionner dans mon système d'exploitation et que je devais apprendre Blender ou ne plus faire d'animations. J'essaie de l'apprendre depuis une décennie sans aucun succès réel. Récemment, le logiciel a progressé à pas de géant, non seulement techniquement, mais aussi en changeant son interface pour une interface beaucoup plus conviviale pour les artistes et qui est plus proche des normes de l'industrie. Mon travail est tombé à presque rien, donc bien que cela soit certainement induisant la panique et financièrement désastreux, j'ai pu mettre un effort à temps plein dans l'apprentissage et comme Blender est gratuit, cela n'a pas ajouté à mes problèmes d'argent. Après 3 mois, j'étais prêt à essayer de commencer la production et j'ai rassemblé mes recherches, j'ai travaillé sur le scénario et j'ai commencé à faire les décors et les personnages. J'ai fait quelques achats de plugins (OK plus que quelques-uns) pour m'aider à obtenir le look que je voulais, qui comprenait un générateur de caractères humains qui fonctionne dans Blender et qui fait également le gréement automatiquement, ce qui m'a fait gagner des mois de temps. C'est limité en ce sens que les options de vêtements sont toutes modernes et qu'il n'y a pas d'ajouts de tiers jusqu'à présent, je dois donc les modifier pour donner un look pseudo des années 30 aux costumes. J'ai dépensé énormément d'efforts pour reformater des centaines de modèles de Cinema 4D à des fichiers conviviaux de Bender, mais cela en valait la peine. J'ai également pu facilement ajouter du brouillard, une horreur gothique qui n'a pas pris des heures pour rendre chaque image et j'ai été très satisfait du résultat. Je me suis limité à certains choix techniques pour éviter d'être submergé sur mon premier projet, donc je n'ai pas appris à exporter des passes séparées d'éléments qui me permettraient normalement de faire du flou post motion et me donneraient plus de contrôle sur les images finales. J'ai également rendu dans le moteur en temps réel plus rapide EVEE que Blender a développé et c'était plus que suffisant pour cela. Le moteur de rendu pleine force est vraiment génial, mais je le rendrais jusqu'à l'année prochaine si je l'utilisais, en partie parce que je dois apprendre à l'optimiser pour mes besoins.
Conclusion : J'adore Blender ! Maintenant que j'ai enfin une poignée de débutant, je pense que je monte à partir d'ici. C'est à vous de décider s'il s'agit d'un pas en hausse ou en bas par rapport à mon travail précédent, mais cela me semble être un pas en avant !
I wrote and illustrated a short story before deciding to make this animation and got some feedback on that which helped this be a much better story in the end. The last 2 years have been a horror of dealing with dementia in several close family members and how this terrible disease is very much a monster that takes those we love away in one of the most heart breaking and sorrowful ways.
Originally this seemed like a good project to do in Blender and start my transition away from Cinema 4D before my old version of that software stops working but I have not been able to get to a point where I can understand Blender well enough to do that and getting this done seemed more important than learning something new(ish).
I decided early on that black and white would be best and I don't regret it. I am an avid photographer who especially loves black and white images and tried to give this a sort of silent film/vintage photography look. I worked for months on the cliff set and small town to get the look I wanted and tried not to overdo it on the details that would never be seen or used. The shot of the walk from the town to the cliffs was the most daunting and took 46 hours to render. I wanted the pace to be slow but I think it doesn't drag on and it has kept the attention the few people who have seen it so far.
Editing in Final Cut Pro and composting was done with Apple's long neglected but sometimes still updated Motion software which I like working in and doesn't cost me money every month like After Effects would.
Music and sound effects are by me and I am not expert in either but I hope they work well enough. I am planning to try and get this in some festivals. The "Another Hole in the Head" in San Francisco has been very good to me over the years and I hope other festivals will pick it up as long as I can find the money to enter a few!
Personal note:
This is the first gothic animation I have made based on a short story I wrote myself. It is the first animation I have done in over 2 years and is the direct result of why I hadn't produced anything else in all that time.
As I often state with my projects, Mike Luce was kind enough with all the other things he is doing to make the time to do the voice work and give me feedback. Core4d.com where I have been an active member for many, many years also deserves credit for the encouragement of the gang in the forums there.
Renowned animator Phil Tippet worked on this film over a period of thirty years. People familiar with his work on the Star Wars films , Jurassic Park or Robocop will likely be shocked at the Bosch/Giger/Blade Runner nightmare that is this film. What is it about? Fuck me if I know, but it's fascinating nevertheless with its combination of stop motion, puppetry and live action all smooshed together in a gory, slimy mess that pays homage to everything from Forbidden Planet to 2001 A Space Oddest and every torture film you ever imagined.
The animation is top notch and complicated. The sets are amazing and detailed and the music gives you more clues as to what is happening than the visuals will as they show you a world of violence and mysterious mysticism filled with pain and terror.
Encanto is the lightest film about transgenerational trauma you might ever see. It manages to be fun, musical (thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda) and still gets a pretty deep message across about how terrible events in the past can still affect the present, even effect those who were not alive at the time of the event.
As expected from any Disney film recently, the animation is flawless, the skin tones and the colour palette is really complex and beautiful. They have a way of making the most complicated animated scenes look effortless and every frame brings you deeper into the film's world of magical realism.
All the members of a family have been granted magical gifts after being chased from their homeland a generation or two ago but these powers seems to be fading. One family member, Mirabel, was not granted magic powers and it comes down to her to find out why things are changing and discover how to fix them. I won't spoil it, but the lives of her siblings are not was magical as one would be led to believe.
I like how the time and place of the film is never defined and even the traumatic event is very broadly defined so it could be anywhere anytime. Well, anytime after photography was invented as they use a camera in the movie a couple times.
A well done, well acted. and well sung film with a deeper side if you care to look into it.
Loosely based on the 1904 story "Oh Whistle and I'll Come for You My Lad" by M.R James. This film has no spoken dialogue and French translations of some written text. A woman living alone is joined by a surprise addition to her isolated beach location where a hidden horror is revealed.
This was a much delayed project for many reasons. The pandemic made it difficult to create oddly because I didn't have enough isolation and family issues became a higher priority. It was also started, sets designed and a computer glitch made all the set files corrupted and they had to be redone. This made them much better in the end, I think. There is no spoken dialogue and the 2 instances to written text have French translations underneath for my local viewers.
I use some traditional Aztec instrument sounds for some of the effects and composed the music myself, if you can call that composing... I hope it works. I made the character with an app called "Make Human" which has is limitations and needed modifications but saved time and aggravation getting this thing finally off the ground. All of the visual compositing was done in Apple Motion, my choice for animation these days. I had a plugin that allowed me to do change the focus in post, but it was updated and that feature was deleted! I was able to get my money back but the old version wouldn't work with the current Mac OS so I had to improvise and while not perfect, I found a way to do essentially the same thing. I did make the lighting with After Effects. I could have done it in Motion but AE has a preset that makes it super easy and I felt super lazy about it.
Librement basé sur l'histoire de 1904 "Oh Whistle and I'll Come for You My Lad" de M.R James. Ce film n'a pas de dialogue parlé et des traductions françaises de certains textes écrits. Une femme vivant seule est rejointe par un ajout surprise à sa plage isolée où une horreur cachée est révélée.
Ce fut un projet très retardé pour de nombreuses raisons. La pandémie a rendu difficile la création bizarrement, car je n'avais pas assez d'isolement et les problèmes familiaux sont devenus une priorité plus élevée. Il a également été lancé, les décors ont été conçus et un problème informatique a corrompu tous les fichiers du décor et ils ont dû être refaits. Cela les a rendus beaucoup mieux à la fin, je pense. Il n'y a pas de dialogue parlé et les deux instances du texte écrit ont des traductions françaises en dessous pour mes téléspectateurs locaux.
J'utilise des sons d'instruments aztèques traditionnels pour certains des effets et j'ai composé la musique moi-même, si on peut appeler ça composer... J'espère que ça marche. J'ai créé le personnage avec une application appelée "Make Human" qui a des limites et des modifications nécessaires, mais qui a permis d'économiser du temps et de l'aggravation pour que cette chose décolle enfin. Toute la composition visuelle a été réalisée dans Apple Motion, mon choix pour l'animation ces jours-ci. J'avais un plugin qui me permettait de changer le focus dans le post, mais il a été mis à jour et cette fonctionnalité a été supprimée ! J'ai pu récupérer mon argent, mais l'ancienne version ne fonctionnait pas avec le Mac OS actuel, j'ai donc dû improviser et, même si ce n'était pas parfait, j'ai trouvé un moyen de faire essentiellement la même chose. J'ai fait l'éclairage avec After Effects. J'aurais pu le faire dans Motion mais AE a un préréglage qui le rend super facile et je me sentais super paresseux à ce sujet.
A film pretty much entire painted by hand by 100 artists in the style of Vincent Van Gogh and entered around a fictional attempt to deliver his last letter to his brother. The style of this film is amazing and the animated painting aspect looks like a impossible task to pull off but they managed to do it. Though the story is fictionalized, most of the information transmitted about the artist was vetted through a group specializing Van Gogh and they assisted and supported this project for years to insure its authenticity.
The technique of animation could have been very distracting from the story but I have to say I was drawn in from the start and the well done characters and performances of the voice actors and those who were rotoscoped were so compelling the animation slipped into the background for me. It covers a lot of ground and is very emotionally charged at times, especially the end which made examen my own life as an artist, one who is NOT a genius but feels compelled to create over anything else.
500 years after all the dragons have been turned to stone by the evil Drunns who were in in turn banished by the a crystal welded bu the last of the dragons, humanity has turned against themselves and separated into tribes. One of the leaders wants to unite all 5 tribes but he is betrayed and the Drunns come back when the crystal is shattered and dived amounts the rides. The Drunns over the following years turn most of the population into stone but the daughter of the would be unifying leader goes on a quest to find the last dragon, bring the crystal pieces together and save their world.
While not a life changing event, this is a pretty fun, beautifully animated and hits many of the right notes. there are cute animal sidekicks and other typical Disney tropes but if you are looking for something light you can do a lot worse than seeing this. The voice of the dragon was the only thing that didn't work for me and the modern day references and speaking styles were sort of out of place but there was some nice action that kept me from leaving the story being told.
My latest gothic horror animation is based on a very short story by Ambrose Bierce, read it here if you like, and is itself fairly short. Like my previous Bierce animation, this one also strays quite a bit from the text as I try to make it relevant and more visual. For all the character, save one (the man on the porch) I used a free character generation application called "Make Human" which lets you create realistic humans with slider controls, including dressing, rigging and weighting. This means you can, hypothetically start using them in minutes and creating them takes only a few minutes as well. It is a huge time saver, especially for subjects that are not required to be created in a specific style or have to do anything unusual or complicated. I used this as a starting point and repainted the clothing myself and added controls to the rigging to make moving then less of a bone by bone affair and it worked for the most part.
The setting itself took few months to put together. It is one location but one that ages and rots over a long time period. I wanted the fade from past to present to be noticeable but for the house to retain enough features that no one would thing the location had changed.
I found the Make Human models were not suited for some of my rigging techniques. At least I could not figure out how to use them which was ashamed because there are some plugins I rely on for every project that I could not use. I did find some work arounds but making them walk was really a challenge so I had to limit that as much as possible.
This IS a horror short so there is some blood and violence but nothing like we see on TV show everyday. I do hope there is a little shock or 2 for people watching, however.
This is a remake of a 2020 version I made in Cinema 4D and had a lot of technical restrictions that never sat well with me. There was no way the software and my computer could but 29 characters in a shot and even just moving them around, which worked as no one was going to count the men, was even more limited, since they could really move much or the app would crash. I do think it worked but lacked the look I wanted. 
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