Eircom are crap!

Ok, this isn't connected with film, but I just have to say that Eircom are crap.
Eircom is the main telephone/internet supplier in Ireland. For years they had a complete monopoly of the market and even when other service providers entered the market a few years back, Eircom still managed to have a stranglehold.

They are constantly telephoning us with various 'great' offers and promotions yet when it comes to the basics of actually supplying a reliable service they fail miserably (not that their competitors - I use that term loosely as many of these companies are spin-offs of Eircom).

Recently they have been updating their webmail service. All well and good, but not when the service can be off for a whole day while they mess about!

Internet and broadband speeds in Ireland are laughably slow and I wish they'd get their act together and sort it out.

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!

More images form Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique

Some more images from the short film.

Mr. Humpfninkel - Old Folks Home model Location

The Old Folks Home location from the Mr. Humpfninkel short film.
Creepy looking, aint it?!

Rendering out composited frames for the film takes time and isn't helped by the fact that each shot has to be checked a number of times for colour correction on different monitors to ensure everything looks exactly as it should.
You can't trust computer monitors - especially laptop screens. The colour difference can vary greatly from massively oversaturated to dull and lifeless!


More images to follow.

We've also been very busy composing and recording the soundtrack for the film. Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique is gonna have an orchestral score as opposed to the dark and eerie music in To Shoot A Rurf.

By the Way, you cancathc To SHoot A Rurf at the Animation Bloc Party in New Tork this month (July). Visit Animation Bloc Party's website for more details.

Shane

Mr. Humpfninkel - Images

Been difficult to connect to Blogger.com lately. Why is it so damn slow????

Anyway, Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique is coming along nicely.

Here's some more images from the film.



NB: Compare the above image with the similar un-graded image from the previous post.
Colour grading makes a huge difference to the final output file. The colours are richer and you may notice the enhanced sense of depth of field in the image above compared to the previous versions.

Mr. Humpfninkel - new image

Here's another image from the film.

Mr. Humpfninkel - another image

Interior location for the 3D short animated film "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique".

Entire movie created using Blender 3D.

OSCAR Character on Blendernation.com

Just checked Blnder.org and Blendernation websites today and spotted the free fully rigged character OSCAR I made available is featured on them.

You can visit the Blendernation website here http://www.blendernation.com/2008/04/17/oscar-free-rigged-character/

Go ahead and download OSCAR. He's free for both commercial and personal use.

Shane

Mr. Humpfninkel: New Bus Model

Here are some images from Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique of the bus model.
The previous bus model I created was crap, to be honest!
This one is much better.
Modelled in Blender 3d.
The lighting in these mages is a bit rubbish and you can see the crappy approximate ambient occlusion artifacts. But these are just quick renders to check how the model was shaping up.

And it looks much better than the old version!

Shane

Mr Humpfninkel: Napoleon Costume Early Test

An image of Mr. Humpfninkel in a Napoleon Bonaparte-style costume!
The costume is un-textured so far - that's why it looks rough.
Rendered on a gradient background and with flat lighting.

Mr Humpfninkel: Wearing a gaz mask while vacuuming vomit!

The heading pretty much describes what's going on here, I suppose.
It's the lead character form our latest animated offering, "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique", displaying his vacuum cleaner product in all it's 'glory'.
Why is he wearing a gas mask, you ask?
Well, why not!!!

Bcakgrounds are being rendered seperately in multiple layers so this is just an animation still with an alpha channel.


More images to follow.

Mr Humpfninkel Short Film Update: Blender Fluid Sim

In our latest animated short Mr. Humpfninkel’s Sales Technique, the title character (an inept door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman) is required to get sick. Yep, that’s right – vomit!

We initially intended to achieve this using Metaballs but then changed our minds and went with Blender’s fluid simulation instead.

He reason for this was the quality and realism of the FX. Our initial scepticism was based on the sometimes fiddly and random nature of the fluid simulator when we’ve used it before (We used it for the liquid pouring from the Rurf bottle in To Shoot A Rurf, but used metaballs for blood, the ‘mirror snake’ and a plane multi-subdivided and with a wave modifier for the river in the ear canal sequence)

Here are some early tests.

The first shows some gloopy vomit (the render is ultra-lo resolution) lit using approximate ambient occlusion and a single lamp.

The second shows a quick and dirty test (using open GI renderer - taht's why it looks crappy) of Mr. Humpfninkel getting sick. I know the image is small and very lo-res, but you should be able to make out that the vomit follows the movement of his head and his body deflects the flow of the vomit also.

All this talk of vomit is making me queasy!

More images and updates to follow soon.

By the way, Blogger doesn't seem to like Animated gif's so instead I use http://tinypic.com
to host them and link them to Blogger so that they display correctly on the site.

Mr Humpfninkel's Sales Technique images

Some images of Mr Humpfninkel from our latest animated short.
Blocking in all the actiona at the moment after sysnching up a fair amout of the dialogue.
More details and images to follow.

To Shoot A Rurf featured in Animation World Magazine

Our film To Shoot A Rurf is featured in this months Animation World Magazine.

It gets reviewed in the “Fresh From The Festivals” section.

An image from the film is also used as one of the main images on the front page of this months site.

AWN.com (Animation World Network) and is the biggest and best animation website on the net and they are responsible for Animation World Magazine, VFX World Magazine and the A.I.D.B (Animation Industry Database).

Here's the opening from that review:

Ever have one of those nights where you're just trying to sober yourself up enough to avoid a terrible hangover the next day, but you inadvertently take some mind-altering medication and are forced to confront the deepest, darkest recesses of your own soul instead? This film is kind of like that.

The review is by Andrew Farago, who is the gallery manager and curator of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum and the creator of the weekly online comic serial The Chronicles of William Bazillion.

You can read the review in full here:

http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=3590&page=2




*******************************

Salesman Short film: new image and details

New image form our latest short.
Named "Mr Humpfninkel's Sales Technique", the film follows the disastrous adventures of salesman Mr. Humpfninkel (pictured) as he goes door to door trying to sell vacuum cleaners.

The movie is quite obviuosly a demented comedy!

More images and details to follow shortly.

3D World Magazine DVD films

Busy making our comedy short film at the moment and have’n t been posting as much as we’d like to lately.

Image to and further details to come!

Anyway, we’ve been looking at the “Indie 50”, the DVD of short 3D animated films, which came with this month’s 3D World Magazine.

Highly recommend checking out the magazine and the enclosed shorts.

Lots of variety: the good, the bad and the downright ugly!

I won’t mention the bad ones – it’s all personal choice and opinion, I suppose – but I will recommend the ones that really impressed both myself and Paula.

“The Itch” – comedy genius.

“The Last Knit” – excellent.

“Birthday Boy” – academy award nominated short which I’m sure many of you will already have heard of.

“Ego” – absolutely amazing animation.

“The Wolf Man” – hilarious and completely bonkers!

There are others that impressed in terms of visuals and ideas (such as Tim Tom, Dragon Slayer, After You and a few notable others) but the ones mentioned above are really top quality.

Hey, don’t trust us – go judge for yourself by checking out these films online or borrowing a copy of the DVD from somebody. Or you could stop being a miser and actually purchase a copy of 3D World Magazine!.

Using The Gimp on Windows Vista

Anyone who intends to use The Gimp on their new Vista computer may become frustrated when they can't get the program to launch and it just seems to hang for ages trying to load fonts. Many will grow impatient and throw their computer out the window. Some may even curse The Gimp and refuse to use it on their lovely new machine.

But fret not! The solution is simple.
The problem lies somewhere in The Gimp trying to access Vista's fonts when it first loads. All you have to do is wait a few minutes (varies, but should take no more than 5 minutes) and The Gimp will load up as good as new. And don't worry, after this initial long loading time, The Gimp is set and ready to load up almost up really fast the next time you start her up.

Shane
www.dwarfedfilms.blogspot.com

PS: I had this 'problem' a few months back and wouldn't use The Gimp on Vista. Instead I started using Paint.net.
Paint.net is really good but it just doesn't have all the image editing abilities that The Gimp has.