A Polish Winter -Colour grading in Blender 3D

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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

New images from new movie

Here's a 3D model of a cattle train car from our latest short film which is in the pre-production stage at the moment.

More details about the movie will be revealed over the coming weeks.

New Movie in Production

This is a character model from our latest short film which is in production.
The image shows four facial expressions to test the character mesh for any irregularities.

We're going in a different direction with this one compared to Mr. Humpfninkel (which was a comedy) and To Shoot A Rurf (which was a surreal tale).

We can't give you any plot details at the moment apart from saying that the movie is set in eastern Europe in the 1940's and concerns a young boy.

Follow along with the entire production as we post images and a breakdown of the entire production/editing/musical scoring on this our latest project.

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.

Sony Acid Pro and Vegas are crap!

I don't know how many times Acid Pro and Vegas have let us down. Sony are great making hardware but when it comes to software they are pretty weak.
Very unreliable and unstable.
Crashes in the middle of doing very simple audio edits.

And what makes it worse is the fact that it sometimes (more than just 'sometimes' actually!) creates bad backups that will not load!!!!!

Unfortunately there is just so much of "Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique" already pieced together in Sony Vegas that we can't start again in another editor.
Our initial aim was to do all the animation and video editing in Blender 3D and the cleanup and sync in Reaper - a shareware product. But Reaper is weak on it's visual capabilities. It simply cannot cope with video playback properly - which is a terrible pity because Reaper is probably the very best audio editor I've ever used. Fast, reliable and well designed.

I really wish Sony could've spent more time creating a competent editor rather than focusing on overloading their software with unnecessary frills and gimmicks.
They should take a long, hard look at Open Source software to appreciate the value of reliability and stability over cosmetics.


Shane

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!

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