Part One –  A preface of sorts:

So here’s the scene:  I’m 5 years old, stuck in the back seat on the way to my grandparents.  This is in the time before interstates (yes I predate interstates, snicker to yourselves) and the trip from Middle Tennessee to the coast of North Carolina was a major deal, driving through the countryside on 2 lane blacktop.  The speed limit was a primary source of income for some of those one traffic light towns, with the speed limit dropping from 50 to 25 as you came around a curve, and a cop car sitting there just waiting.  Once a year we would carefully pick our way across, two full days of driving and detours and potholes that you can do in about 11 hours now.  I’m sure I was complaining.  At a gas stop, my Dad told me to find a toy.  They didn’t have much of a selection, a cap gun, some bags of plastic soldiers – green for Allied, yellow for Japanese, light blue for German – World War II was still being fought out in sandboxes across America.

My Dad was rushing me, and they had nothing you could actually play with in the back of a car.  He points to the comic rack and tells me to grab two – 12 cents a piece, so he pays the lady and complains all the way back to the car that they used to be a dime.  I remember nodding at the injustice of it all.

So I pile in the back seat with my new purchases, grabbed at random off the rack.  I have no recollection of one of them, but I can remember the other one well enough to look up the cover on the internet – Fantastic Four 26 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby – guest starring the Avengers and The Hulk.  I couldn’t read a word at the time, but I opened it and it was pure madness.  There were so many characters they barely had more than a panel apiece, Jack Kirby action lines flying everywhere with people stretching and throwing fireballs and growing and shrinking and turning invisible, and a guy made out of orange rocks and another dressed in a flag and throwing a shield, one with long yellow girls hair and a hammer and one in red and gold armor, and a big green one tearing through all of them with a kid in hot pursuit.  I had no idea what was happening, but it was some other world that I was peering into that was infinitely more interesting than the back seat of the car, and I studied it over and over until it was too dark to see.

A week later on the way home I was up to 5 comics – the seeds of a collection.  I taught myself to read picking through comics, studying the words until they made sense, just as I would watch my own son do years later with Final Fantasy 7.  But even more importantly, those comics, those words and pictures, fueled my imagination at an age in which I was young enough for it to stick.  Thirty years later, I sold the box of dusty old comics, used the money to buy my first animation computers and software, and began making my living with that imagination.

For a little while, I got to bring to life one of the characters from that first comic from 46 years ago, and I got to type into the credits a thank you to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.   Every once in a while you find yourself looking backwards and forwards at the same time, and they suddenly feel like the same direction.

We all set out on this project determined to bring something new to the table, but for me personally it was also a debt that needed to be repaid.

Part 2 – Making a motion comic:

Comics are a unique medium. In the hands of a skilled writer and artist, the story actually resides in an unnameable place between the pictures and the text. You pick up some parts of the information from the words and some parts from the art. The two parts of the brain that handle these chores combine them and you interpret information that isn’t explicitly, solely in either one. This creates an active participation in telling the story. The reader, through these two streams of information combines them into a whole. The storytelling differs greatly from a passive medium, like video or movies, where the information is fed to you in a prescribed manner and the viewer simply takes it in.

The passage of time in a comic is handled differently than in any other medium. The time that passes between panels is random from a moment to years, and the artist and writer have dozens of tools and techniques to alter this time flow, to make you hold on a panel to create a contemplative pause, or to push you through a series of panels at a neck-break pace. Each page can be a design unto itself, and while looking at a panel you are seeing its place in time, with glimpses of the past and the future. The surprises must be timed appropriately, the page turn is the reveal.

For many people who did not grow up reading comics, these things do not come naturally, they can read the words and study the pictures, but that exact balance of the two where the story reveals itself is a learned skill. As we set out to adapt Extremis into a new form, we asked the typical first questions: What do we lose? What can we gain? But also, who is the intended audience? We decided the point of a motion comic is to open the stories and characters up to new audiences who might never pick up a comic book. From that standpoint, we wanted to remain respectful and faithful to the original story and art, but edit and compose the shots as if it were a motion picture. This would be the friendliest form for the widest possible audience. This decision eliminated any approach that utilized word balloons and captions, panel borders, or other techniques that referenced its comic book origins. We also knew that we would have to create sufficient movement with the art to give the cinematic feel we were looking for. This led to two decisions: the various Iron Man armors depicted in the comic would be built in 3D to allow for full motion during the action sequences, and we would have to do lip sync to carry the dialogue heavy sections of the story.

Creating the Iron Man armors and surfacing them to cut with Adi’s artwork was time consuming, but with careful attention to detail it was ultimately achievable. Adi’s art was very consistent from panel to panel, particularly with the armor, and our early R&D showed that this would work well.

The lip sync issues were more difficult. Adi had created fully painted art for Extremis. The skin tones were realistically shaded, without the expanses of solid color expected in a cartoon or more standard comic art. Hand painting all the mouth shapes necessary to lip sync each panel with the exact shading from the comic would not be possible. We ran a quick test, projecting the art onto a 3D head and then rigging and animating it. We created dozens of extra control points to allow us to warp the head into the exact position of the art and re-project it from panel to panel. The test, done in a single day, worked like a charm. We moved on to other issues.

Once we started production on Episode 1, the lip sync technique blew up. The panels we had quickly chosen to do the initial test worked fine, but many other panels looked creepy and the gorgeous painted art only made it seem more unnatural. We completely reworked the 3D heads, wrote software that gave the animators quicker feedback, added another two dozen controls – no one thing was a fix. Some of the lip syncs in Episode 1 were redone 7-8 times. In the end we just muscled through it, and it got incrementally better every day. We have a lot of experience lip syncing cartoony characters, over time we realized that the realistic art needed less enunciation. We also began to recognize the camera angles and expressions in the original art which led to problems and eliminated them in the animatic phase where possible, substituting a similar panel that did not present the problem. There are still several lip syncs in Episode 1 we are unhappy with, just a few in Episode 2, and from 3 on they look pretty good. We had high hopes of taking this technique further, but by the time we wrestled it under control we were too deep into the production to begin introducing new looks.

Moving the still art is really just a matter of willpower; we utilized the puppet tool in After Effects extensively, projected full bodies onto 3D meshs where we had to, built and animated dozens of secondary props like vehicles in 3D, and at times did limited cel animation to make it work. The comic tells you very clearly what is happening and what needs to move. I give full props to the staff from one end of Magnetic Dreams to the other for not ducking any of the challenges and finding a creative way to make it happen every time. I’ve always felt that one of the strong points of our studio is that we have a staff of exceptional problem solvers, and they proved that once again. It got easier as we went, and the solutions more solid as we discovered techniques and our skills with these particular tasks developed.

A lot of people have said that a Motion Comic is really just limited animation with sound design and Voice Over. Before we began, I might have agreed. At this point, we are animating Episode 5, working pre-production on Episode 6, and I have to feel like the end result is looking like something new. The gorgeous work that Adi Granov did on the art is still there just crackling on the screen. Warren Ellis’s edgy story is told without compromise. Where we lost something in the translation, we gained other things through the great sound design and VO done by Edge Studios, Underground Music and NYAV, or the excitement of seeing Iron Man in full animation. We were handed a wonderful comic to adapt, I hope that we did it justice. To Ruwan Jayatilleke, the Producer, if all producers were like you animators wouldn’t be cynical – it was a joy.

Now go buy it so that we can do this again.

Mike Halsey

The concept was simple, straight forward and really fun to work on. “Fun” and “crazy” were the key words of direction by Roman. If you know anything about the band Jypsi, you know that they’re not your typical country music artists. They have a very unique style and Roman wanted the music video to reflect that.

On a technical and practical side, the video was to be shot entirely on green screen and the duration was 2:50 sec. Roman was shooting on the infamous Red One camera at 4k here in Nashville.

There were basically two main aspects of creating this fun video. The first was creating a high energy edit. Roman and his editor took care of that on their side, and did a great job jumping in and out on the beats, keeping the video alive through out the song. The other component is the environment the band would perform in. That ’s where we came in. I think the last time we counted there were 190 shots in the final cut. We had roughly two weeks to pull keys on all shots, and then create backgrounds. ( I would also add that some shots had multiple shots being layered in, so there were well over 200 shots to key… ouch!)

After watching the music video you may think it was total randomness. However, there was  somewhat of a method to our madness. Our first step was to analyze how many different types of backgrounds there were. We were able to determine differences based on camera angles and wardrobes. We separated the camera angles in two categories: wide shots with head-to-toe on the artists, and the rest.  Jypsi used 4 different wardrobes for the video. With these determining factors we decided to create a certain amount of backgrounds to mix and match up with.

To create these backgrounds we brought in some outside help. Graphic designer Keith Johnson (vieuphonik.com)  came in and worked with us churning out multiple  backgrounds for us to play with. When I say play with I mean bring into After Effects and add motion, light effects, and color correction. Our final step was to add all the funky scribbles and flickering polygons over the top to increase the madness.

All in all it was a great project to work on. The deadline was pretty tight, but who are we kidding…when is it not?

Magnetic Dreams has launched a new website: www.magneticdreams.com! The new site features a brand-spankin’-new interface as well as new content for your viewing pleasure. Indulge yourself.

This project offered to us an opportunity to deliver a great message and work on a fun project. The 2 minute spot, later truncated to fit the standard 30-second tv spot, features Benny and Franklin, the birds. Benny is an eager, yet clumsy, little squirt that acts as the comic relief. Children don’t like being lectured to, so Benny is our vehicle to help send the message home. Franklin, the wise narrator acts as the authority figure. As Benny and Franklin talk, Benny realizes the threat to the children in his neighborhood. He rushes from one house to another warning them to STAY AWAY FROM THE TRUCK!!!

As the modeler, texturer, lighter and a render manager of this project, I had my work cut out for me. Fortunately, I had excellent concept work created by Rickey Boyd who designed the sets and the birds. Andrew Atteberry assisted in designing the children. As with most every other project, I start out by modeling the characters because this is what our story is about – the characters. We needed to get the client approval on the main characters (Benny and Franklin), so I knocked those out first. Once approved, I moved onto the children as we awaited approval. By the time all of the humanoids were modeled and approved, I started the environment and props. The rest of the process was bouncing back and forth between assets and departments.

Franklin - Safety first, from high atop his perch. Franklin is the trademark of USPS - the eagle. He is considerably larger than Benny. His face is a bit more human as to be taken more seriously. His body language also carries a lot of maturity. We decided to model in the main feathers to produce a strong outline in poses. On top of that, we laid down a subtle feather texture to hint a texture makeup of thousands and thousands of feathers.

Benny - the goofy, hyper-active counterpart of Franklin. Contrary to Franklin's face, Benny has more cartoonish features. If you are going to be goofy, might as well look the part. He is much more skinny and nimble. What can be any more goofy than a pot-belly bird with a crane neck and pencil-thin appendages?

The neighborhood. This environment asset proved more difficult than I had originally thought it would be. I started out with a quarter-circle that made up the road. From that, I propagated several referenced houses around. I had about 4-5 different houses that I randomly placed around and changed color schemes. I detailed out the properties with 'accessory assets' such as mailboxes, stepping stones, driveways, bushes, grass chunks, trees, etc. We wanted the environment to have a bit of a 2D feel to it, so we relied heavily on basic geometric shapes with cartoony/stylistic textures - avoiding bump and displacement as much as possible. The trees are simple-form meshes with a tiled pattern of 2D leaves. The trees on the horizon are painted in Photoshop and placed on 3D cards. The clouds were produced the same way - 2D painting on a 3D card.

As you can see, the horizon is made up of 2D trees on a 3D card. The house is comprised of simple geometric shapes that really pop once we apply the ambient occlusion. The grass is simple geometry instanced via XSI hair. The windows are a simple fill with painted drapes. The proportions of the house do not match the child or the dog - but then again, they don't need to. A style like this can be a challenge, but forgiving in other aspects. The bush is a simple mesh with a fractal displacement, just to help in conveying the makeup of a bush.

The little girl of asian decent was my favorite character to create, but unfortunately she has the smallest role of all ( She is the child that ducks to pick up a flower as Benny flies by overhead). Sometimes, no matter how many hours and how much effort you put into a particular model, it can end up being on the frame for about 1 second or less. Que sera sera.

For the truck, I needed good reference. What better reference than an actual USPS truck? I went to the local Post Office to take pictures of one of their trucks. From the plethora of images I snapped, I was able to construct the truck. In the end, I put in more detail than would fit in the world we created. I dumbed down some of the textures and deformed it a bit to look more cartoony. I found that to be a challenge in itself – constantly reminding myself (after the fact) of the director’s desired style and having to refrain from adding too much detail and thus detracting from the cartoon style.

Coming soon, a post on the conceptual stage, from brain to paper…

- Chris @ Magnetic Dreams dot Com

Producer Ross Caroland, formerly with the United States Postal Service and now with the CDC, approached Magnetic with a unique issue:

The Post Office wanted to launch a campaign aimed at increasing awareness of the risks inherent to approaching postal trucks delivering the mail.  This urgent need was in response to some cases in the past where small children approached the postal truck without the driver’s knowledge and were accidentally hurt or killed.

Magnetic was asked to create an animation which could help educate the children and parents and prevent these tragedies from occuring.  It was an honor to be a part of this noble cause.

Here is the finished work:

The main crew on this project was:

• Ross Caroland – Producer
• Director – Don Culwell
• Creator – Ross Caroland
• Writer – Ross Caroland, Rickey Boyd, John Hamm, Andrew Lee
• Production Designer – Rickey Boyd
• Designer – Andrew Lee, Kat
• Story Artist- Andrew Lee
• Matte Artist – Andrew Lee
• Lead Modeler – Chris Harkins
• Modeler – Jeff Greulich
• Texture Artist – Chris Harkins, Don Culwell
• Lead Character TD – Steve Alley
• Lead Animator – James Coakley Jr.
• Animator – Andrew Lee, John Hamm, Don Culwell
• Visual FX Artist – Chris Harkins
• Lead Lighter – Chris Harkins
• Lighter – Don Culwell
• Lead Compositor – Don Culwell
• Compositor – Joel Gibbs
• Voice of Benny – Rickey Boyd
• Voice of Franklin – Rickey Boyd
• Sound Design – Eric Friend

It all started with a brain storm session and an initial treatment from Ross Caroland (Producer at USPS). He wanted to use an Eagle as a spokes person and possibly a sidekick character that the kids could laugh at… I mean “with”.

The end result had to be something that could be approved by the Post Master General and pass through USPS legal without being castrated. After kicking some really funny ideas around we ended up with the script for the finished spot minus a pelvic thrust and a few MD logos. However, they did let us keep one of MD’s owners initials on the boxer briefs.

The complete 2 minute spot with an alternate 30 second version, features Benny and Franklin, the birds. Benny is an eager, yet clumsy, little squirt that acts as the comic relief.  Franklin, the wise narrator acts as the authority figure. As Benny and Franklin talk, Benny realizes the threat to the children in his neighborhood. He rushes from one house to another warning them to STAY AWAY FROM THE TRUCK!!!

We had a lot of fun creating this piece. It’s a great feeling to think that this animation might keep children from being accidentally hurt or killed by a postal truck.

This PSA has been aired nationally for over a year now and is being used by the Postal service at schools coast to coast.

The poster was featured in color on the cover of Postal Bulletin magazine which is the longest running periodical in the nation. Since being published in 1880 only one other issue of PB has featured a full color cover. WOW!

So we decided we were going to put up another Adamo spot that we completed. We won’t go into the detail that we went into for the Adamo spot. However, we thought it would be interesting to post two different versions of the spot. During the  months of December and January we were loaded with 14 projects due on the same date! One of those projects was to show off Dell’s packaging design for the Adamo laptop.  To help the compositors, Jeff Greulich our Modeling Lead jumped into After Effects and comped this spot.   It had a much warmer feel (see original version) until we applied a Berlin style treatment to it in color grading.   Made it feel a bit more Euro.

Note from Joel:  I had some extra time and took it into the direction I had envisioned initially (see alternate final version).

After debating which version we would submit, we decided to go with the current final version.  We came together and felt like it focused more on the product and there was less information in the background that could distract.  So, we’re not giving you much on production processes, but we thought it would be interesting for you to see two different ( viable ) rendered comps.

The final version after color grading:

Alternate final Version:

Original Version:

A couple of weeks ago, Dell launched a new teaser video promoting their upcoming laptop “Adamo”. This video shows robotic arms putting together numerous computer components to form this ultra-slim aluminum laptop.

We were fortunate enough to work directly with Adamo’s designer, Nicolas Denhez with Dell’s Experience Design Group.  This was great because we were able to get first hand access to what this laptop was all about, and what he was wanting to achieve. Following Nic’s lead on the desired mood and style, we went for a slow paced high-tech ethereal feel.  Some of the videos we really liked and wanted to use as reference were Chris Cunningham’s  Bjork music video “All is Full of Love“, and Joseph Kosinski’s “Saab.Blackbird“  commercial.  There was definitely a desire  to promote the craftsmanship involved in the assembly of the pieces.

On the production side, we used XSI for pre-production, animation and rendering.  Tim Crowson modeled the robotic arms in Luxology’s Modo.   They were then brought into XSI for rigging and shading. The arms design was based on some concepts drawings done in house, but when came time to model, we needed to figure out how things moved. We went over the range of movements we needed based on the storyboard and 2D animatic, then modeler and set up got together to figure out how to achieve them. According to Steven Alley, our set up artist, the ” rig was a simple IK setup with up vectors and path constraints”. (I tried to get more out of him about it, but he told it wasn’t anything to brag about… so I guess I won’t. )

Shaded wireframe view of robotic arm modeled in Modo.

Different surface renditions rendered out of Modo. We were experimenting with some shaders that had some Sub Surface Scattering. Ultimately, we decided to go with a non translucent shader.

On the rendering and compositing side, we used your regular passes such as color, reflection, AO, Depth. It took several stabs to get the anodized aluminum surface of the Adamo laptop just right by using a tiny flakey/grainey surface and XSI’s architectural shader.

We’ve been able to create a nice little pipeline to go between XSI and After Effects, and export camera moves, nulls, etc… For Adamo we exported the camera data, and animated nulls to drive the position our particle emitter in After Effects. We chose to do particles in AE fro a couple of reasons. First, there was minimal interaction with the environment ( just a bounce/slide on flat surface).  Second,  we could achieve the look we were going for much faster using Trapcode’s Particular.

]]> http://www.magneticdreams.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=175 4 http://www.magneticdreams.com/blog/?p=27 http://www.magneticdreams.com/blog/?p=27#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 04:02:23 +0000 Chris Harkins http://www.magneticdreams.com/blog/?p=27 Magnetic Dreams recently completed the opening animated sequence for the Nashville Predators NHL team. A challenging but fun project to produce. Following the artistic direction of Joël Gibbs, the artists brought concept to completion. This animation plays on the JumboTron before every game.

First we must give props to John Hussey and Greg Page at PK Pictures (www.pkpi.com) in Nashville and to Randy Campbell at the Nashville Predators for giving us so much creative freedom.  They are so great to work with.

From concept to completion, this project took about 4 weeks.  The main purpose was to get the crowd excited so it needed to be dynamic. Typically for this type of sports spot, our storyline is that the client’s mascot destroys the rival teams’.  So we came up with a plot where the Nashville  Predator hunted down the opposing players as they are trying to take over the city. We tried to give each enemy player specific characteristics to clearly distinguish them.  Beyond the story, this project was interesting to us because we were allowed to explore a new artistic direction from years past (we’ve created a jumboTron animation for the Predators every year since 1998).  The style we we were looking for was somewhere between Batman: The Animated Series and Team Fortress 2 .  The style conforms to chiseled edges with sleek silhouettes.  Even if a character was viewed completely back lit, we wanted them to be recognizable by their outline.  The client didn’t want a dark Gotham look so we had to keep things colorful.

The predominant 3D package that Magnetic Dreams uses is Autodesk Softimage. For compositing we use Adobe After Affects.

The storyboard/animatic.

Our minion flock needed a leader. Who better to lead the pack than a man whose eyes glow like the flames of Hades? Our initial concept had glowing vapor emanating from the eyes....but we ran out of time...

We wanted each character to be unique from their counterparts, so this character is tall and skinny. We styled his animation from Olympics speed skating footage and poses.

His design deviates from his colleagues, but his position enabled us to design a character that was a bit more unique, giving him an easily identifiable outline. We originally animated the Goalie like a tank. He moved forward without skating. We liked that approach since it made him seem less agile than the others and was funny. Ultimately the client wanted him to skate so we had to change his animation and remove the dust cloud emanating from behind him.

He's the small fast enemy. We wanted the Predator to use his enemy's speed to destroy him- in the spot, the Predator checks him into a building!

Side view conceptual design of the predator. The angles were very important to accentuate the features of the skeletal and muscular structure.

The 3D render of the predator. There is little deviation from the concept sketch. The sabers ended up looking rather goofy, so we scaled them down. The shader used for the Predator is a stretch from previous years. Historically, he always been straight up chrome with blue and orange decals. This year we tried to push him into a more stylized look, and made his decals a little more tribal looking.

A pass-by-pass composite of one of the shots. As you may notice, the last frame shows a particle dust cloud that was later scratched from the final delivery.

This is the original spot before the client made changes. The significant differences are the particles coming off of the goalie’s character.

Credits:

You can find out a little more about this crew back at the Magnetic Dreams website.

Concept / Storyboard:

• Rickey Boyd
• Joël Gibbs
• Chris Johnson

Modeling / Texturing / Lighting / Rendering:

• Jeff Greulich
• Chris Harkins

Rigging:

• Steve Alley

Animating:

• Andrew Atteberry
• James Coakley Jr.
• John Hamm

Particles / Special Effects:

• Joël Gibbs
• Don Culwell

Compositing:

• Joël Gibbs
• Judd Eschliman
• Rhea Borzak

IT:

• James Ramsden

Audio:

• Jon Hussey [ of PK Pictures ]

And, ultimately, the collective efforts of EVERYONE at Magnetic Dreams.