Flys in Field at Sunset Adobe After Effects Animated Still TEST

A still image animated in Adobe After Effects (AE).

I added camera movement (an AE camera with a controlled 'wiggle' expression), animated lens flare (using in-built lens flare plug-in in AE), camera grime (a still image of some dirt which was composited on top of the footage using 'screen' mode in AE), heat haze effects (in-built Particle World plugin in AE), and animated midges flying over the long grass (using Trapcode's Particular plugin).

The great thing about this technique is that it is so simple!
Say for instance you need a shot for your movie but you don't have the time to go out and shoot it becasue the location is too far away or it doesn't exist anymore, well you could just use a still image (or photoshop a series of still images you found on the internet together) and animate it.
You have complete creative freedom to add or remove elements as you see fit.
Combine this with 3D projection/Camera Mapping and you can get more depth into your shot.
And you can of course add greenscreen-ed actors or live action objects into your shot to make it seem more real and full of life and realistic.

Tools used: Adobe After Effects, Trapcode Particular.
Music: Winter Sonata OST (When the Love Falls) - Yiruma.

"To Shoot A Rurf" - November Critic's Choice on MISHORTS

Sorry we haven't been updating in a (loooong) while, but we've been busy with other projects that have really eaten away with our time.

Anyway, here's some news;

"To Shoot A Rurf" is one of four films chosen this month on the Mishorts.com website as part of the Critics Choice.

The film was made back in 2007 and was created using Blender 3D and other Open Source software programs.
Directed by Shane Sheils and Paula Sheils, it is one of the oddest movies you are ever likely to see!



From the MiShorts site:

Guest Critic: Michelle Thomas

Michelle Thomas (aka Coco Forsythe) sits on the advisory committee of the British Independent Film Awards and has been a FutureMovies editor and reviewer for the past five years. Her ‘proper’ job is in film marketing and although preferring indie/arthouse fare, she confesses to enjoying a bit of mindless entertainment now and then.

To Shoot A Rurf

An impressive noirish animation depicting the effects of long term drinking. If that sounds like some sort of Government Health Warning, its not; with black humour, original style and fantastic sound design, its miles from Drugs Are Bad, Mkay style messages. Set mainly in a gloomy backroom bar and the protagonist’s dingy flat, this is an extremely accomplished film, deftly creating a sinister atmosphere with its clever use of lighting and colour. A film for anyone who has ever regretted that last drink.

A Polish Winter Wins Best Short @ Athens Jewish Film Festival

Our Holocaust-themed animated short 'A Polish Winter' has won best short film at the 2010 Athens Jewish Film Festival, Georgia, USA.

Directed by Shane Sheils & Paula Sheils, A Polish Winter tells is a moving tribute to the children murdered in Nazi death camps in Poland.

Sci-Fi Short - Location Design images

Here are some images of the location that the Sci-Fi 3D animated short is set in.

You can see that it's a grimy, dark spaceport room with a bizarre television set as the focal point!

All models were created using Blender 3D and all textures were made using The Gimp.

Click on the images to view full-sized.

More images to follow soon....

Adding Camera Movement to Video Footage in Blender 3D

Adding Camera Movement to Video Footage in Blender 3D

For our latest short film I wanted to add very subtle camera movements to simulate a kind of hand-held feel to the action.
There are three ways I could go about this:

The first would be to animate the camera jittering about while doing the animation.
This would lead to longer rendering times of the backgrounds especially in scenes requiring lots of ray tracing and mirrored reflections.

The second way would be to render the scenes with a static camera and then import these sequences into Blender Sequence editor and apply the ‘Jitter’ plugin.
This would render faster but the jitter not very convincing.

The final way would be to render the scenes with a static camera and then import them back into Blender, project the images onto a 3D card which we can then add (limited) camera movement on the X and Y axis, as well as zoom.

SO this is the technique that I’m gonna use.

Ok, what’s the purpose/benefits of doing this?

Well, firstly, this method involves putting an image onto a plane (or any shape – but mostly a flat plane) and then using a 3D camera to perform simple pans, rotations and zooms on this image.
By doing this you can achieve some simple camera effects like handheld jitter.
Its not 100% accurate but it will suit some scenario’s and it is a great little way to do some useful cropping and post-processing on pre-recorded/animated footage.







It’s really easy to set up a 3D viewing plane:

All you need is a Camera and a Mesh Plane.
When inserting the Camera and the Plane, press ALT+R and then ALT+G to clear their rotation and location co-ordinates.

Then drag the Camera back on the Z-axis far enough so that you can see the Plane in the Camera View. Press CTRL+A to clear rotation/location/scale.

Now press the ‘0’ key on your keyboard to enter 3D view from the camera’s perspective.

Now, I’m working in this instance with footage that has dimensions of 720 X 300 pixels.
(For the actual film I will be using dimensions of 900 X 432 pixels but lets just use 720 X 300 for this example)

In the Render Buttons panel enter 720 X 300.

Now scale your mesh plane in Edit Mode so that it fits perfectly inside the camera view.

Fig 1: The image before being scaled to fit the camera view.


Fig 2: The image scaled to fit inside the Camera view accurately.


Enter UV edit mode and select all the vertices and Unwrap using “Project form View Bounds”. (It helps if you select a single still image from your image sequence and import it separately into the UV window so that it allows you to visually line up your plane to the correct scale)

Go to the Material buttons tab and add a new material to the plane.
Go to the Texture buttons and add a new texture to the plane – select an image sequence or movie. Enter the amount of frames you want to use in the box to shows up.


Go back to Material buttons and select Shadeless (and TEX FACE if you want).
In ‘MAP INPUT’ choose ‘UV’.

See the enclosed image for settings (you may note that I was using an image sequence with an Alpha channel).


Go to the render buttons panel and enter the output frame size you wanna use.
In this instance it’s 720 X 576 (PAL).
You will notice that the top and bottom of the 3D viewport fame has increased.
This is because the frame size I choose before (720 X 300) was intended to give a ‘letterboxed’ image.

Make sure Ambient Occlusion is turned off when rendering or else you will end up with the sky showing through in the background and increased render times.

Now that you are all set up, you can move the Camera about in 3D space and animate it using IPO’s.
You can zoom in on selected areas, or do pans and rotations.
Remember that when doing pans and rotations you need to be zoomed in slightly (or a lot!) or else you will end up with a strange looking cropped image.
This is why I rendered my initial sequences of the film as larger than my intended output size – 900 X 432 instead of 720 X 576.
This means that I can zoom in for camera movements without the image getting blocky or pixellated.
Add ‘jitter’ camera movements that zoom in and out and pan from side to side and up/down using IPO curves.
Be careful not to over do it or to add too much movement as it will become disorientating – and look a bit crap! Subtle moves will help add to the general feel of your movie.


Experiment with this technique and see what else you can come up with!


Shane Dwarfed Films

Blender Sci-Fi Short - Vicious Bug Character

Here is the re-designed bug character from our latest short 3D animated film.

Click on the image to view larger.

The previous model I created for the film just didn't feel right so I did a complete overhaul and redesigned this one yesterday then completed the texturing and rigging late last night.

It's a nasty-looking winged bug that I feel fits perfectly with the style of the film much more than what we originally had.

The lead character - which you can see in a previous post - is a slob-like, chain smoking, fat, lazy, bum!
The razor-fanged leech-shaped fly fits the whole stylistic design we want the film to have.



I mentioned in an earlier post about the lighting and how important it is to the look and feel of this short.
The atmosphere really depends on having the correct lighting setups for the particular scene tone.
Get it wrong and you run the risk of messing up movie, so I'm spending a lot of time working out the correct lighting setups and how they will work with shot angles and how they basically make the character models look.
Bad lighting can destroy a good model!

Keep tuned for more updates on this film which is being made using Blender 3D and other open source/freeware software.

New Sci-Fi Short Being Made with Blender 3D -UPDATE

Well, here's a cropped test image from some of the experiments being tested out during the making of out as yet unnamed Sci-Fi 3D animated short film.

We are very pleased with the script and the production is moving along nicely.
Certain elements such as atmospheric effects and lighting and texturing are what are taking up most of our time working through.

We are using 3K textures for the characters that have been exported from UV maps in Blender to The Gimp where they have been meticulously altered and improved, then re-imported back into Blender and altered some more!
Then the process begins again until we get the look we're after.

The room in which the story takes place is not yet finalized and a few other elements in terms of 3D design.
The lead characters were designed and rigged pretty easily -it's the texturing and lighting part that requires lots of focus and attention.

So far we're not going to divulge any plot details apart from saying that the film is certainly gonna be one of the strangest and most bonkers things we've ever made!

Keep watching for more updates and making of details.

A Polish Winter – January Update

Here are some new images from the Holocaust-themed short animated film “A Polish Winter”.

The first shows the lead character – a young boy - walking through a snowy landscape.

The second image is a composited image that shows a previously seen image of the boy – except this time with background, lighting effects and colour grading applied

Colour Grading and Compositing

The most time consuming aspect of this film is (once again) the rendering of separate layers and passes which must then be composited together in order to achieve the final image ‘look’.

I personally love the ability of being able to alter and grade each shot in this way but it does tend to get very monotonous filing away every single frame of animation in particular folders rather than having to deal only with only a few thousand fames instead!

‘Grading’ is what gives a film’s images a particular ‘look’.

That could involve a desaturation of the films colours to give a more grey-tinged hue or could involve dong the opposite and increasing the saturation of particular colours in the movie to give it a more extreme look.

I prefer the look of strong light and dark tonal qualities, which emphasises the highlights and shadows of an image. It helps create a visual unity of each still image while at the same time making the character blend better with his surroundings.

I also don’t like the ‘plastic’ look of 3D animation and try as hard as possible to avoid this. I hate surfaces looking too shiny and perfect.

Another ting is depth of field: unlike reality, in the computer world it has to be faked. Also, in the natural World, colours need to integrate as a unit, rather than stand out on their own (unless it’s a deliberate effect). I find that reducing saturation levels, and compensating for a washed out type image by upping the contrast, really helps blend a shot better and make it seem less ‘computery’ looking. It’s not about making photo-realism – and the cartoonish-styled “A Polish Winter” is never gonna have to worry about that – but an attempt to make an obviously false World seem more ‘real’ and tangible.

It’s amazing how much time is spent trying to create an ‘imperfect’ image!

It’s amazing how much you can alter a films look in the colour grading stages: a sequence that seems pretty uninteresting can be immediately given new life and excitement by simply altering the colour levels and contrast settings.

Grading is mostly used to ensure a flow of sequences blend seamlessly.

Lighting animation is similar to real world lighting in that what looks ‘right’ from one camera perspective, may not look so good (or indeed, look terrible!) from another viewpoint.

On “A Polish Winter” I would set up the lights for each particular camera view and then have to alter each one in order to ensure nothing ‘weird’ happened: for instance, the character being light with a bright light from the left hand side suddenly is lit from the right side in the following shot.

Sometimes this is done on purpose when I want to create a highlight along one side of the character’s face when in partial silhouette, so as to separate him from the background (they do this all the time in Hollywood movies and TV shows like CSI). But when I’d cut to the opposite viewpoint I’d switch the highlight to the characters other side. This wouldn’t happen in real life but it’s an age-old filmic convention going back to the early days of cinema. It just looks good!

But with animation you can’t predict what way the entire animation sequence will look until it’s been rendered, so occasionally you might find that the highlight you set up for that character doesn’t work so well because the figure moves at angles that obscure the effect.

It’s moments like these that you sometimes need to get a bit creative in the grading department!

Altering contrast on particular colours can create artificial highlights. You can also create a glowing white-coloured mask of the character that you composite with the original footage in order to separate the figure from the background.

Making Snow

Because the film takes place in a snowy setting, our software of choice Blender 3D must calculate large amounts of particle data.

In one 500-frame sequence the storage space needed just for the baking of particle data reached over 2 gigabytes!

Side Note:

Just this morning I received another external portable storage device, which is mainly to cope with archiving all the files needed to make an animated movie.

Unfortunately the Western Digital device I got didn’t see to want to work on Windows Vista so I spent a bit of time looking up solutions on the Internet and trying to locate device drivers.

Eventually I got Vista to recognise it but then I noticed that this 320 Gig portable drive was formatted to the older-style FAT32 filing system which limits the amount of individual file sizes!

It took about 5 hours (yes, 5 hours!) for Vista to reformat the drive into NTFS format.

A previous Western Digital portable drive we were using worked immediately out-of-the-box so I can’t understand the issues with this newer disc.

Using Baked UV Maps to Cheat!

I’ve tried to cut back on long render times by baking textures quite a lot.

For instance, the snowy ground plane has had its textures and shadows baked into a UV map. This allows me to apply a shadeless UV mapped material to the ground that doesn’t need to use of valuable rendering time as the textures and all-important shadows are already there.

The main exterior scene area of the film is surrounded by barbed wire fencing that was originally modelled and designed as 3 dimensional meshes.

This seriously ate up CPU, so instead I created a UV mesh of barbed wire and fences, then baked shadows and lighting onto these UV’s. Then I applied these pre-rendered UV maps to simplified meshes and planes in the scene to replace the original complex models.

The result? Faster rendering and the ability to visualise camera moves in the 3D view port more efficiently.

‘Cheats’ and ‘tricks’ like rendering baking often take up a lot of time to set up in the first instance but pay off in the end.

Mixing a combination of baked texture planes in the background with fully modelled 3D objects in the foreground works very well.

Remember that the final image will be viewed as 2D, regardless of the fact that it was once a 3D object!

Baking textures and shadows onto meshes also helps prevent horrible flickering during playback of animated frames and can also allow you to create more complex and detailed multi-layered textures (you can edit the baked textures in The Gimp/Photoshop as much as you want and then drop it back into your scene to see how it looks).

Music Composing

We’ve also scored the main theme music from the film.

Mostly performed on harsh violin and cello, the sound is then distorted with heavy reverb. Other VST effects are added to the mix to boost the low end and liven up the mid-tones.

It’s haunting and really adds to the poignancy of the themes of the film.

More images and details about “A Polish Winter” will be added to the site soon.

New image from "A Polish Winter"

Click image to view larger

A Polish Winter -Colour grading in Blender 3D

Click on image to view larger.

Just a simple demonstration of the importance of colour grading images used in film production.
The image on the left is with grading while the image on the right is the unaltered original image.

A Polish Winter - image

Another still from "A Polish Winter".

The film is our latest short film and is set in Poland in the post 2nd World Wat period.
The still features the lead character - a young boy - but there is no background rendered, as yet.
Surprisingly, the films animation is rendering pretty fast and colour grading of the animated frames is very smooth also!


Click on the image to view larger.

A Polish Winter - new image

A new image from "A Polish Winter"

Click to enlarge

New film Update

Here's an image from the latest short 3D animated film were working in.

The film is called "A Polish Winter" and is set in Eastern Europe in the 1940's.
The young boy you see in the image is the only character in the movie .

As I've said in a previous posting, this film is a major departure from "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique" in terms of storyline and tone.
A Polish Winter is a moving tribute to the child victims of the Holocaust and indeed all children who were murdered in Nazi extermination camps during World War 2.

On a more technical note, A Polish Winter uses a different style from our previous films. The characters eyes are like little, black stones: for some reason we were just drawn to this kind of look for the boy. It makes him seem more innocent, possibly.
The lighting is still being thought out , but it will be more dreamy and ethereal - by that, I mean that the film will focus less on crisp details and more on an overall sense of mood and spirit to reflect the tone and substance of the tale.

Snow will play a major part of the film's design but we don't want to get too bogged down in a 100% realistic depiction of snow, but more an overall sense of feeling again.

We've done an awful lot of reading about the Nazi extermination camps (particularly the Action Reinhardt camps in Poland) in the build up to A Polish Winter. But this film does not aim to depict the actual camps themselves but to reflect more on the human loss of life that took place in those evil places.

More updates and images soon.

You can contact Dwarfed Films here with any questions or simply leave a comment on the site.


Shane

Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique - Complete!

Yes the film is completed!

A lot of hard work and dedication to get to this stage. We'd like to say a big thank you to our voice actor on the short, Sherman Alpert from New York.

We'll try and upload a lo-res version of the movie if possible too.

Mr. Humpfninkel - Update Music

We've been real busy lately with composing the score to "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique".

I've mentioned in an earlier posting how much more difficult it is to compose the music for a comedy as opposed to a drama or horror. Those other genre's are more forgiving when it comes to the soundtrack whereas a comedy requires much more thought and effort.
Think abut it - it's easier to play a bunch of random notes on a keyboard/synthesizer and come up with an acceptable horror score. You are more likely to hit minor keys and 'bum notes' that add to a creepy atmosphere.

But comedy needs mostly major keys with playoff minor notes at various intervals to break up and enrich the sound.

Over the weekend we were watching TV and the Leslie Nielsen "Mr. Magoo" live action movie was on. Terrible film but it features a fantastic comedy score. It really gave us a lot of inspiration. If a film that bad can manage to salvage the occasional (very occasional!) laugh purely through the use of clever musical interludes, it just goes to show how incredibly important having good music is.

I always say that a movie is 20% visuals and 80% sound!

Mr. Humpfninkel - Another Update

Here’s another update on the film “Mr. Humpfninkel’s Sales Technique”.

Attached are some new frames from the short animated movie.

The movie is being rendered in 1920 X 1080 Hi Definition – which is the first production we’ve used the format on so far.

It makes a massive difference to the output quality, as I’m sure you can guess.

“To Shoot A Rurf” was rendered at a DVD PAL standard scale of 720 X 576 and although the overall image quality was good, I feel that it would have really benefited from being rendered the way “Mr. Humpfninkel…” is being made.

The image quality is so clear and sharp and there is no loss of picture details – which is so important when there has been so much effort put into little details throughout the film.

Even if something is only going to be on screen for less than a second it should be clearly seen - otherwise what the hell was the point in putting it there in the first place??!!!

On the audio front, lots of time has been going into producing a quality soundtrack.

“Mr. Humpfninkel…” is a completely different feel to “To Shoot A Rurf” or even “Opera Baby” and the music need to both reflect this and really contribute to the overall mood of the movie.

“To Shoot A Rurf” was very sparse aurally except maybe for the big singing number in the night Club sequence towards the end. Overall it was a very sombre movie in the audio department.

“Mr. Humpfninkel…” is a jolly little movie and writing ‘jolly music’ or a ‘comedy score’ is much harder to achieve successfully than a horror or a drama.

Until the next update,

Shane

To Shoot A Rurf at Animation Bloc Party New York 2008

I've already mentioned this before in one of the other posts I'm sure but I'll give it a proper posting here now.

Our 3D Animated dark, psychological short To Shoot A Rurf is showing at Animation Bloc Party in September.

If you've been following this blog (or it's main blog over at www.toshootarurf.blogspot.com) you'll be aware that the film was produced using Blender 3D and other Open Source software in a period of 6 months.
The film has screened at a host of festivals and events worldwide, and was given detailed features in both Animation World Network and Directors Notes.


If you're in the area you should go and check it out!

Mr. humpfninkel - More Images

Some new images from the Short films "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sale's Technique".

To Shoot A Rurf at Animanima Serbia Film Festival

To Shoot A Rurf is playing at the Serbian Animation Film Festival Animanima in September.

The festival runs from Sept 10th to 13th.
I just scanned down through the lineup and there is some excellent films being shown there.

If for some reason you happen to find yourself in Serbia around that time, then I'd highly recommend going along to the screenings.





Shane

Humpfninkel New Image

New image.
Look at the little guy waving. Nice!