Paperman: Re-Thinking Animation

Paperman is an Oscar Winning Disney short, directed by John Kahrs.

The story of animation is both charming and heartwarming, however it is the thought behind the animations that makes this short interesting.

Arriving at Disney, Khars talks about his appreciation for the hand drawings that go into the brainstorming of animations. He points out the "expressive" marks and the "simplicity" of the drawings that make these drawings unique.

This inspired Khars to try and find a way to incorporate the drawings from the preproduction of Paperman into the CG effects that would later become the animation. CG and photorealistic animations seemed to make up the majority of content being produced nowadays. Kahrs tried to imagine an animation that could be different. Paper man carries the drawings along with the CG effects, to create a beautiful and refreshingly different film.

The Box Trolls

A movie that I believe has utilized a lot of interesting animation technology recently was "The Box Trolls." In 2015, I believe it paved a way for animators to be more creative and utilize different types of animation throughout movies. One thing that it used was CG- generated stop motion that combined visual effects with the originality of stop motion animation as well. This caused them to create more complex scenes that were more intriguing to watch. In addition, they also used 3D printing to create their models for characters. This was innovative and something that is sure to be seen in future animation movies to come. I certainly enjoyed the animation and thought it was different and something cool to watch, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a a new animation to watch.

Gravity BTS

Gravity is definitely one of the most Visually stunning films ever made. It's one of those movies where you feel like you are actually there in the moment and it just seems so real.

And yet 95% of the movie was CG. Almost everything you see was generated in post production using advance 3D software. The only things that were practically shot in production were the actors. But everything else from Space suits to ships to satellites and more were CG elements.

This behind the scenes look at Gravity explains the process of what it was like to make this movie, knowing that majority of it was going to be CG.

CG is (Not) Ruining Movies

I recently saw this video by the fine folks at RocketJump Film School (or Freddie Wong as some YouTubers might know him by) about using CG elements in films. A lot of people have said (and still do) that CG in live action movies just looks bad, and how it is better to shoot things practically (as in for real, captured in camera). But is this true?

In some aspects, yes CG doesn't always look great; it may look too animated or glossy and doesn't blend well. But that doesn't mean it's bad altogether. As Freddie points out in this video, the main reason we probably see bad CG and VFX is because the movies themselves are just bad altogether. But there are several movies that use VFX very effectively and people dont even realize it being CG elements. Things like adding cars to streets in a chase scene for example, majority of the cars in the scene are not real cars. They are CG cars that were rendered and utilized correctly in order to add to the story.

I think that the main point that Freddie is trying to make is that CG is simply a tool, a tool that is used to help enhance the story that a filmmaker is trying to tell. If that story is not good, then many other elements will start to look bad as well. The effects will call attention to themselves because the audience is not engaged enough in the story.

So in the end, what matters the most is having a wonderful story to tell to an audience, once you know you have a great story, use the tools you have at your disposal effectively; use the right mix of practical and visual effects in order to help tell your story and make it more engaging and more believable for your audience.

Interstellar's Black Hole

Last night I watched Interstellar for the first time. I was blown away by the amazing depiction of space, the black hole, and the worm hole in the film. It's no surprise that the film was the winner of the 2015 Oscar for Visual Effects.

It took the VFX team hundreds of hours of tedious work to produce such a stunning product. Black holes have such a strong gravity field that light literally cannot escape them, and light that is surrounding black holes is bent and distorted. Filmmakers often use a technique called ray tracing to render light and reflections in images. "Ray-tracing software makes the generally reasonable assumption that light is traveling along straight paths." Generating the proper light effect as VFX was a difficult task for the team. Eugenie von Tunzelmann, a CG supervisor at Double Negative said this about their work, "We had to write a completely new renderer." Some frames took over 100 hours to render with such complex light systems in place. However, it was all worth it in the end. The visual effects alone are worth the money to see this movie. See the full article by Adam Rogers, from Wired, here.

'Unbroken' VFX & Rotoscoping with Hybride

In the Angelina Jolie film, Hybride, a division of Ubisoft, takes the concept of VFX and rotoscoping to a whole new level. Given the complexity of recreation the Berlin Olympic Stadium as a virtual replica, Hybride needed to match the accurracy of the crowd in each of the 50 actions shot. But unlike the average CG crowd, Hybride needed to construct a tool that would allow the added flexibility required for the film's completion.

Considering the stadium’s size and numerous camera movements showcased throughout the film, the technique for creating the magnanimous CG crowd varied according to each camera point of view. On top of the varying camera movements, the size of the environment made it impossible to use a green-screen for most of the live actions scenes. As a result, the foreground plates had to be rotoscoped and integrated over the CG backgrounds. Hybride's technique allowed for greater freedom and speed for the camera operators when shooting action scenes from the foreground camera perspective. According to the director of photography, Roger Deakins, the main goal was to to always have the effects shows fit perfectly into pristine composted and lit shows to make up the live-motion portion of the film. The greatest amount of accuracy was required in the tracking and layout work in order to actively blend the CG elements to the rest of the camera shots. As a result of the crew's strong production ability, the production was produced with the highest quality possible.

Meet the world's first fully CG animated television show: ReBoot

This is ReBoot. It's a show that ran from 1994 to 2001, and was the first fully computer animated television show. 

Due to the new technology required, production actually began in 1991, 3 years before any of the episodes aired! The show is jam packed with computer jokes and references. It takes place within a computer, and the mysterious "user" is often mentioned. Many of the characters have names that are references, such as "Dot Matrix", "Enzo", and "Phong". 

For being such an early example of computer animation, the show looks  decent. The characters move fairly fluidly and the backgrounds have a lot of life to them. 

One of the characters is literally the number 8. Your guess is as good as mine here. 

A fly through showing the neat backgrounds. Something hard to do with 2D, but easy with 3D!

Overall, the show hasn't aged as well as it could have, but I feel it's still worth a look. Here's an example of an episode. 

In it, a chaotic computer virus takes control of the mainframe's paint terminal. She uses it to wreak havoc on everyone and everything. Oh, and she has no face, just a bunch of masks. I picked this episode, as it shows off how little things like textures make a huge difference. 

Rumor has it that a re-boot of ReBoot might be in the works! How will the characters and world look when created in the crazy powerful engines we have today? I would love to see!

Music Video

This video features a bunch of green screening and modeling effects, I really enjoy how the effects are used to make an entire world for the band to be in. during the segments of him falling, clearly there was heavy green screening, but I still thought it was interesting how a simple shot can be turned into something amazing just by knocking out the background and adding some nice effects. Many music videos are actually simple shoots in front green screens, its only after that effects team takes the shots of a singer or guitar player and makes something cool out of it. While some of the effects do look dated, I still thought it was worthy to post on this blog.

More CG shorts

This is another one of those awesome "created entirely in CG" clips. I love the absence of any live footage and can't fathom how much work goes into stuff like this...not to mention render time for such complex stuff even on nice hardware! This one is definitely sci-fi themed but the shot that blows my mind is the reel to reel recorder. It just looks infallibly real, as if it were simply a well-lit live shot.
One thing I'd like to play with is depth of field, like in the shot that seems to be of a keyhole-looking object. Are there any good plugins that create nice, realistic depth of field blur like that? Also, this seems to be yet another really high-end film out of Spain.

Strata Stencil

When the first video revealing Pottermore came out this summer, I was truly excited to have something to continue my childhood journey with Harry Potter. However, after watching the announcement, I found myself distracted. I was more preoccupied with the "paper cut-out animation" used in the sequences with the book, than I was with the actual Pottermore site. It was just so beautiful. Well as time passed, this type of animation has started to pop up everywhere.



After reading an interview with Simon Lloyd and Christine Turner, who led the animation team for the Pottermore announcement, I discovered that "Nothing in this piece is CG. Every element was shot in camera and painstakingly cut, piece by piece, and then moved bit by bit to create a stop frame animation. The book is actually very large in scale to make creating the elements easier. This book was made by a specialist book binder and was a complete replica of an ordinary printed version."

I decided to continue my research and discovered quite a few other techniques that are similar to the animation done for Pottermore. One of them is Strata cut animation which uses cuttings from layers of clay.



Eventually I found, what was to me, a combination of the two animation techniques, "Stratastencil," which is an experimental animation technique that Javan Ivey uses in his animation, "My Paper Mind." Ivey says that "Stratacut removes material to reveal another layer, while this technique adds another layer while still showing the layer before it."



My Paper Mind from Javan Ivey on Vimeo.

Finally I arrived at my final goal, "How do I achieve this amazing effect?" Well, now you can learn how to create a sequence similar to "My Paper Mind" or "Pottermore" in this After Effects tutorial, without the large consumption of paper or time. I think it's quite a beautiful style of animation and I have a feeling it will not be disappearing soon. Enjoy!