This is a work in progress. I plan to make some sample clips
on what each step looks like. But I put it up now for the folks
with a good imagination . . .
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While attending the 2000 World Science Fiction Convention (Chicon 2000), I attended a presentation given by Pixar's David Ian Salter, the film editor for Toy Story 2. The discussion taught me a few things about how to put together large animations.
It's primarily geared for feature length films, but anything longer than a 30 second TV commercial can benifit from applying these techniques.
Film editing a digital creation is very different from film editing a traditional film. In a traditional film, retakes are the rule. Film is cheap and it only takes 1 addtional minute, to do an extra shot of a 1 minute scene. Ok, there's setup time, but for 98% of your shots, it's relatively small. You can easily do many many shots in 1 day's work. A traditional editor's job is to pick the best shots from the pile of film.
But in CGI, a single hi-res frame can take many minutes (sometimes hours) to render. There are about 130,000 frames in a feature length film. There are only 525,600 minutes in a year. In CGI, the editor's job start's on Day 1. He needs to be sure that the 'film' that makes it to 'the cutting room' is already the best it can be. There's not enough time in a year to generate a large set of choices.
This is about making a movie. In my definition, movies have a story. If you want to create "Visual Poems" (ala Koyanisqaatsi) only some of this applies to you. (But be assured some of it still does.)
This tutorial is about one method to get a story 'in the can' as they say in the biz. It is mostly based on Mr. Salter's talk, as I have never gotten a whole story 'in the can'. But I have been working on one, and can see how attending this talk earlier could have saved me quite a bit of trouble. Since this is off-the-cuff anyone with experience to share, please send comments to me at rwenzlaff@soylent-green.com.
Pixar's motto, "No amount of technology can fix a bad story" is a driving force here. Get the story right. Then animate it. Don't be tempted to create a bunch of cool animation and piecemail a story out of it. Your lack of planning WILL show.
The following three steps help you do that planning. You may need to perform several iterations of these to get the story right. But starting with a story that's 'just right' saves tons of work down the road.
In making a movie, the first thing you need to do is to get it down on paper. It can be a formal screenplay with dialog, and stage directions, or something more like a storyboard. But you have to keep in mind that, especially in very long works, there needs to be a story to keep the veiwer's attention.
It also serves the purpose of preventing spending time modeling props and sets that eventually get cut out. Or worse, from a story point of view, leaving surperflous story elements in, just because of emotional attachment due to the time you spent making them.
Personally, I think a formal screenplay works better for long pieces. The reason will be obvious when you read the next step.
That's right, before you place a single vertex*, a rough soundtrack should be layed out. It does not need to be finalized in any way. Pixar 'casts' their animators and office staff in the parts, and splices together a temp sound track using off the shelf recordings that have a similar tempo and tone. (It was really funny to watch Pixar's Toy Story 2 storyboards and being able to pick out music from Star Trek, Star Wars, and Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy.) Final sound can't be done until the visuals are complete. There will be subtle differences between the scratch sound and the final visuals that need to be compensated for.
The soundtrack solidifies the story. If a piece of dialog doesn't work between the actors when laying down the soundtrack, no amount of cool animation will make it work any better. If that happens at this point, tell the actors to take a day off and fix the screenplay. Better to fix it now that after you have weeks (or months) of modeling and animation invested.
If you didn't do them as part of your screen play, now is the time to finish them. If it's all in-house, the storyboard can be as little as stick figures, but it may behoove you to make friends with a traditional (pen and ink) artist (if you're not one yourself) and do these with some quality (see paragraph #2 in "Finishing the Story Reel" below). This also gives the first visual ideas if your breaking the story up into scenes and shots works.
Here's an example of a storyboard for my 2112 project. (Be warmed - 6.8MB).
* I know your Blender fingers are itching. Ok, you can do some modeling at this point. But keep it to things you absolutely know you'll need. Main characters, main sets etc. Avoid going nuts on props and scenery, they will probably change.
OK. Now you have a screenplay, stroyboards, and a scratch soundtrack. Put them together. We finally get to use Blender! Scan your storyboards in (if they're in ink), and use the sequence editor to match the storyboard pics to the soundtrack. This is a critical step. This reel will be used to determine your scene lengths.
More practically, if your trying to break into the big-time, it is used to convince backers that they should invest money in your film.
The film won't be pretty at this point. But it should be watchable.
If you (or more importantly, your
target audience) can't follow the story at this point, there's little point in
going on. It should probably resemble a comic book at this point.
(This process is important for traditional films, too. George Lucas
was in this stage for Star Wars when he ran out of cash. He sold the
rights to the toys to Hasbro for something like $10,000. He knew they would be worth much more
(Hasbro sold something like $2 BILLION in toys while they held the rights.) But George also
knew without the cash to finish the story reel, he had no chance of getting investors
he needed to even start the film.)
This sounds like a lot of work. It is. Especially since at this point, you don't have one lick of work that will appear in the final version.
But let's look at what you do have -
Now when you sit down and start Blendering, You'll have a much better grasp on what needs to be done, and it is broken down into nice sized (and hopefully rightsized) pieces.
Of course the animation process will suggest changes, but at this point, hopefully they will be small changes, easily accomodated. There should be no new or cut scenes, added dialog, or tempo changes from here on.