Animation &SpornFilms 03 Oct 2006 09:02 am
My Film Is Out There
- I guess I should have been crowing last week about the fact that my film, The Man Who Walked Between The Towers, is now available on ITUNES.
Just go to: ITUNES MUSIC STORE,
go to: MOVIES, click on “SHORT FILMS,
click on “SHORTS”. It costs $1.99.
- Speaking of this film, I say, with a bit of humility, that I’m overwhelmed by some of the recent comments about this movie of mine. Particularly so about Mark Mayerson‘s review on his site. Since I have such respect for Mark’s articles and posts, I was a bit overwhelmed at first. Let me tell you, it’s certainly nice to read such positive comments about the work. Thank you.
- Thanks to Amid’s Cartoon Brew notice about the article in the NY Times. This is a survey of the recent spate of cg feature failures glutting the market.
I expected, eventually, to read such an article since it’s been obvious that things haven’t been going well for some of these features. (Open Season opened this weekend to cheers for the $23 million take – bringing it into first place. But that is a far cry from the $90 million negative cost – not to mention the ad budget. It doesn’t look promising as a success story.
However, as Amid points out, the article gets interesting when we are able to hear, for the first time, that there is poor blood between Aardman and Dreamworks. Obviously, in making Flushed Away, Dreamworks tried to take some creative control, and the fur flew. Hence, they have separated ways, and Dreamworks will no longer be distributing Aardman‘s films.
More power to Aardman for not giving in despite the loss of a nice contract. It’s not often one hears of animators who stick to their guns despite probably financial loss.
on 04 Oct 2006 at 11:14 pm 1.David Nethery said …
Michael,
I’m interested in the techniques you use to make your films… “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers” looked hand-drawn, but also looked hand-rendered. Was it on cels or some digital ink & paint process ?
DN
on 05 Oct 2006 at 9:28 am 2.Michael said …
Hi David,
I always want my films to look hand drawn and hand colored if I can. They are hand drawn on paper by real old-style animation. Scanned into photoshop and colored there. The coloring for “Man Who” was done by scanning a couple of large, prepared pre-painted areas of color. These were pasted into the areas of the characters. A color for the flesh tones, a color for police uniforms etc. We made sure that the colors were moved around so that they would flash from frame to frame as it would do naturally. On top of this we added rough-pencil colors. Philippe’s black tights were areas of black line over black line over grey. Lots of cross hatching done by hand rather than photoshop filter. The coloring, for the most part, was done by those who animated it. I did some of Tissa David’s coloring; Ray Feldman did a good share of it.
The art was composited in AfterEffects to match the pre-recorded voice track. Music was written to the rough assembly. Some day I’ll look into the Montage system; that may help get the results I want. It seems to be working for Paul Fierlinger.
on 07 Oct 2006 at 1:23 pm 3.David N said …
Thanks for the glimpse into your production process.
Yes, Paul Fierlinger is the guru of Mirage (aka Aura, aka TVPaint) and is a strong advocate of paperless hand-drawn animation.
http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/products_mirage_studio.php
I’ve been using Mirage for over a year now. Haven’t used it yet for a completed project , but I’ve been enjoying playing with it. I use it with the Cintiq tablet, but Paul F. prefers (and makes a strong case for) using regular Wacom tablet , like the Intous 3, rather than the much more expensive Cintiq. I can rough out drawings on the Wacom Intous tablet, but I’ve never been able to get used to doing clean up on the regular Wacom tablet, because my traditional animation training has made me so used to the rotating animation disk to get a nice line on the final drawings. The Cintiq tablet rotates , so for me it’s more like drawing on a traditional animation table. Paul prefers not to have his hand “in the way” of his drawing, and the lack of rotation doesn’t bother him. Mirage (Bauhaus Software) plans on introducing a rotating drawing window (vitual “disk”) in a future release of Mirage. The rotating drawing window feature is already available in TVPaint Animation , which is being sold by a different company than Bauhaus. TVPaint and Bauhaus (Mirage) used to be partners, but there’s been some sort of split, so each company is now marketing their own version of what is essentially the same animaton software. However, the latest version of TVPaint Animation does have a few features that the current version of Mirage does not have (such as the rotating drawing window/virtual disk) and I am told that the next update of TVPaint in November will introduce a proper Exposure Sheet for organizing drawing layers. The current Mirage and TVPaint use a horizontal timeline system along the bottom of the screen, rather than a vertical Ex-sheet. I’m an old fogey and creature of habit , so I want my Ex-sheet !
http://www.tvpaint.com/tvpa.php?lang=2