FIRST KONTAKT

Well, I finally had opportunity to dig into Kontakt 2 since installing it. When I first got it, I converted some older work to the new sound library so I knew the difference in sound quality, but now I have spent a bit of time playing with it and creating something specifically for it. You can listen to a piece of that by clicking here.

Still, writing music without purpose can be very difficult. I suppose it's a lot like beta testing software with nothing to actually work on. Suddenly I remembered this PSP show I was supposed to be doing. Visions of creating motion libraries with Motion Mixer and IK Booster came flooding into my mind. I guess I should get back to that. Pretty soon, I'll have something to write music for.

Needless to say, I have already found tons of expensive sound libraries for Kontakt that I absolutely have to have. Where does one find time for all this?

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Walking Tall

So I walked to Von's this morning. It's not even a full mile away so it was an easy jaunt. Still they had nowhere near the selection of organic produce I am used to getting at whole foods. I picked up a few items anyway and walked back. Of course, I can no longer carry a week's worth of groceries at a time either.

So enter the world of online grocery shopping. Apparently this enterprise failed miserably in the U.S., but seems to be thriving overseas. Still, we seem to have Albertsons and Vons doing it over here. Someone suggested I try Albertsons.com for online grocery with delivery. So I checked it out. They had organic bananas.

Next I decided, even though I was just there moments ago, to try Vons.com. To my surprise they had quite the large organic produce selection, including my favorite gold pineapples that get two or three of every week at Whole foods! Needless to say I will give Vons online a try.

On the other hand, Trader Joe's, which I know carries some decent organic products is also less than a mile away and I haven't checked them out yet. I want to give that a try as well. While online grocery may be convenient, exercise makes a better animator. So right now, I think I'd rather be walking tall.

MODELING ANIME CHARACTER

I was asked recently about what method of modeling I used to get such an anime look to my characters. Although I answered the writer directly, I also wanted to post about that with pictures to illustrate my points, so here is what I wrote:

Getting the right look isn't about a method of creating models, I believe it's about reference. Without good reference, no amount of modeling skill is going to achieve the result.

Try to imagine modeling a Dodge Viper. If you have nothing to look at, how far will you get? SO what's the best reference? Photos would be a good start, but can only go so far. The actual factory design specs would go a very long way. A physical model of the Viper combined with factory specs would be ideal. The level of reference gets the result and not the method of modeling or even skill of the modeler.

So what's the best reference for anime. The shows on TV? No. Characters can be drawn completely different from a front view, to 3/4 view, to profile, because they are hand drawn. The best reference is, just like with the car, a combination. Physical models help. Popular anime figurines are available anywhere now. Different from a hand drawn character, the figure must look like anime from every angle, this means it will work in 3D. The next best reference is video games. Games like Soul Caliber, Dead or Alive and Final Fantasy have the very character style I was seeking and they are already 3D models. I believe if they were cel shaded, they would be some of the best looking anime characters around.

At the time I worked in the game industry. I was always looking at the greatest game magazines around, particularly those that focus on console games and not PC games. Console games have more anime style games from Japan and I would really look at the characters.

Imagine this: Go to a toy shop and buy a figure of, say, Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. Buy an actual Japanese figure and not one of the American (like McFarlane) productions if you really want to make an anime head. The McFarlane stuff is very high quality, but looks very little like the actual Japanese figure in my view. Anyway, now take this figure and actually draw a grid on the head as though it were the sub-division surface cage. (make sure you draw with something that comes of
easily) You would very soon figure out the best place to put the points and polygons to get that style of head done in 3D.

In other news, I just thought I'd mention how amazed I am with Kontakt 2. After the long install, it was easy to setup and get it running with my current pipeline, and WOW what a sound. The interface is one of those, "So easy I can instantly get in and use it, but so deep it may never be truly mastered." type things. More on that, the motion library topic and others as things develop.

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IT'S OFFICIAL

My old, tore up Geo Metro died the death about an hour ago. The amount of repairs the car actually needs would cost many many times more than the car is worth, which is next to nothing. To do a minor repair to get it running temporarily would simply postpone the inevitable for how long... how long?

I guess it's time I set out to walk back to work.

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MY MISTAKE

Ok, I didn't do anything with it. It literally took hours to install the 15GB sound library. I think I went to bed about 3:00 AM, having done little more than install and read the manual a bit.

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THE TIME HAS COME

Ok. I did it. Now let's see what I can do with it!

Now I just had to add a note about my old orchestral library. It came in two versions on a single CD, which included many other materials. That means the entire orchestra fits in under 200 MB. Someone had this to say about it:

You've heard these samples many times before even if you don't recall as they were a staple of television scoring in the nineties.

Kontakt certainly costs a bit more, but it comes with a 15 GB sound library. You can imagine that there will be a difference in sound quality.

Now don't get wrong. The Edirol orchestral library is actually leagues beyond anything I had before it, and if you're on a budget I would still totally recommend it to this day. It will also run on anything, whereas Kontakt requires a supercharged system to load a few sounds. So Edirol has served me well. I just wanted to point at that difference.

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Sound Mind

I haven't disappeared off the face of the earth. In fact, I have just switched gears for a small spell and have been messing with music. To what end I will not yet say, but I am pushing my orchestral library to the max and have greatly improved my sound. I think it may be time to purchase Kontakt 2 though.

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MIXING IT UP

So it really does work. I don't know if it was intended to work this way from the start, but now it is all too easy. Thanks to IK Booster's ability to load and save it's own motions, it becomes the idea tool for quickly creating a library in Motion Mixer, a tool I just finally got to work.

When I worked at Westwood Studios in Las Vegas, I learned of non-linear animation via Kaydara's Filmbox Animation package. This tool had one of the most intuitive and easy to understand animation mixing tools I ever played with. Naturally when I heard of Motion Mixer for Lightwave, I expected something similar. That's not what I got unfortunately. I struggled with it for a time and eventually gave up.

Well, after reading the manual on the latest version of Motion Mixer I see it has come a long way. I don't understand every facet of it yet. I don't even come close, but the ease and speed with which I just mixed a couple of motions I recently created shows me that my library dream is no longer just an idea or hope or wish. It's here!

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Made For ME

My good friend Ino, over in Japan, has written some of the best tools for Lightwave 3D for the past few years. I found out that it is more than worth it to keep up with what he's doing, as there is considerable power given to the user who does.

Using IK Booster in combination with the Dope Track, another tool from Ino, you get a separate timeline which comes along with an IK Booster menu. I am told other programs don't do this, showing everything in a single timeline. To me this seems totally counter intuitive. Of course, I realize that not every user works the same way nor desires the same experience. I know that some animators like to get into individual motion channels and all kinds of things I will never bother with. I guess the method of IK Booster was made for me. I'll tell you why.

Ever since I saw videos of how Ray Harryhausen animated those skeletons in old Sinbad movies, I have wanted to animate like that, nay, thought that animation should be this way since computers and home 3D apps existed. Now I can do that! You see, I am a pose based animator. I key everything on a particular frame to create my pose. With a single timeline, that meant keying also my lights, cameras and anything else in the scene, only to have to go to the graph editor and delete it all later. I know that could get into selection sets, locking items and set what could be keyed and not, in other words, waste a lot of time I would rather spend having fun animating. By having a separate timeline, the Dope Track, I can quickly and easily key everything as I have always liked, and know that it only affects my poseable character. Yet I can still see my separate keys for lights, camera and other tools in the normal timeline. I don't have switch to some other graph editor or select a different set of items to see that. It's always there for me. It eliminate steps and makes everything quick. Eliminating steps is essential for doing the kind of work I do.

I would never want the Dope Track to be merged with the standard timeline. A lot of the power of it and the IK Booster menu, as it is, would be lost. Things would actually get slower and harder to do, requiring more steps, more clicks, not get faster and better. I write this, of course, knowing that very few animators animate in such a simple, old fashioned way as I. I've seen guys with multiple graphs open controlling individual channels of individual bones on individual frames and really getting complex. That's just not me. I guess, like I said, the method of IK Booster and the Dope Track is more made for me.

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This Might Just Be Cool

Thanks to IK Booster's ability to both load and save motions and poses, creating entire libraries to be mixed with the Motion Mixer may be far easier that I thought. Just like working on a video game, you could create each motion you want for your character and save it in a separate IK Booster file. Then just open the Motion Mixer and while it is active, load them in on tracks.

AN ALL NEW WAY!

It pays to keep up with the times. Last night I went through the Lightwave 3D manual to learn about the Motion Mixer, Dope Track and IK Booster. Well tonight, aside from having taken care of the issue involving hands mentioned previously, I dove head first into IK Booster and started setting up my character.

Imagine being able to do true Ray Harryhausen style posing of your figure, with total control over how everything works and works together. Imagine being able to set this up in a matter of a couple of minutes. Now don't get me wrong, it took some learning, but this is my first shot at it too. After some mishaps and deleting everything, the setup I am now using took two minutes at the most to get going. It's that easy! Take a look at this example video by William "Proton" Vaughn and see for yourself.

Now using this technique necessitated some changes to my standard skeleton. These were good changes in my view because it meant fewer bones. Some of the bones I normally used were simply not necessary here. Also, multiple roots sharing the same pivot point slows the process down when it comes to quickly selecting and dragging things. Speaking of pivot points, with IKB you can do things that would never be possible with normal IK. Imagine being able to drag any bone to pose your character and if necessary being able to affect the pivot point of the highest parent, the object itself. If you can't imagine it, I will just say that makes quickly creating dynamic poses extremely easy. It's IK without the hassle.

I certainly have a ways to go on learning this tool, but I am sold on it as the future of all my character work. The next step is using it in combination with the Dope track and Motion Mixer. I don't even want to go into the possibilities or this post will never end. Copying and pasting poses, even from one character to another, baking keyframes, smoothing motions, loading and saving motions for future use. My library idea is starting to materialize!

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At Hand

Not all improvements are universally better for all situations. Looking at this skeleton, which you have seen in previous posts has been greatly simplified, you will notice it has bones for the entire hand. Now you may remember that I gave some very good reasons in my Chaos DVD as to why I didn't do hands as part of the skeleton. I think I said that a single hand can have as many bones as an entire character.

Hands are similar to faces in the realm of animation. Watch any anime and study hands. With the exception of shots which specifically focus on a hand doing something, for which I might make a special case anyway, animation of hands is very pose based. This is still ideally achieved with morph targets.

When I was at Rainbow Studios, Bruce Hall, one of the creators of Deadly Tide, created a high res hand for a character. He completely rigged it with an old tool called "puppet Master" in Lightwave. With this rig, he went on the create a very large library of poses for the hand, each which could be saved as a morph target. Now this was before the days of endomorphs, where the target is embedded in the model. So he saved out a nice list of objects. Still it was a phenomenal success for what we were doing. Since all of our male characters used the same hands, that library had real legs. With endomorphs today, it would go even further, because you could totally change the hand model, even to create the female hand, and still keep all those targets.

Basically, while building the complex hand skeleton was good for those experiments and doing high definition stills, when it came to actual animation, it was slowing me down. I can see it getting even more problematic when used in conjuction with IK Booster and Motion Mixer. Just too complex for my tastes. I will basically do a scenario like the above mentioned technique by Bruce Hall. This should bring a reasonable level of speed back to my cel shaded work. Combined with my plans to build libraries using Motion Mixer and IK Booster, I can see some of my old "what if" ideas of creating a body of cel shaded work coming to life!

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Reading

So I spent a bit of time going through the Lightwave 3D manual looking for and looking at the tools I didn't know or hadn't really used yet. There's definitely power to be found there that I did not at all expect. I can see that tools like IK Booster, Motion Mixer and Dope Track would have made certain aspects of working on shows like Chaos a lot easier.

Thinking in terms of what I wrote previously, I am considering a couple of things. First, my new characters may be all IK Booster setups. Next, using Motion Mixer, I may start to build true libraries finally that will just speed up production overall, especially as time goes on. Since motions can even be mapped to other characters which are not even identical, imagine what having a library of 100 motions would do for your production. I am seeing great possibilities for the future.

Machinima: A Concept?

I'm sure many who read this have already heard of machinima, or machinimation, but for those who may not, a quick explanation. It is a concept popularized in the era of PC first person shooter mods which allowed users to, instead of creating games, create movies with a game engine like Quake or Half Life. You can read more about it and see examples at Machinima.com.

So an odd idea came to me. As you know I have been writing about setup lately, the upfront work which makes the later tasks of creating a show flow much easier. Well, when you think about the idea of creating a show with machinimation, that work has all been done to quite an incredible level.

Let's just say that, for the sake of example, you were going to use machinimation based on the latest greatest technology to do a show. For this example, let's just say you have the option of using the engine for Dead or Alive, the popular Tecmo fighting game. Let's also pretend that you are able to cel shade the characters.

Now the characters in Dead or Alive look and probably would cel shade better than anything I am currently working with. And think of the amount of setup that comes with a single character. A character has the motions for the bit of talking they do before and after each match. They have their walk and run cycles and, of course, tons of fighting moves. It's a virtual library that would be difficult to exhaust over the course of a series.

It's that library I really want to talk about. It's one thing to consider how cool it would be to play a fight in the game and then go in and place cinematic cameras to create a video, but let's imagine that for your own production, you put in the upfront time to build libraries that extensive for your characters. What kind of speed advantage does that give you in creating even entirely new scenes, stories and episodes of a series? If the animation library is portable across generally human characters, how much more power does that give you? Do you see the concept I am getting at here?

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Don't Neglect the Setup

A lot of my shots have been quick and seemingly easy to do as far as the 3D aspects are concerned, and so I would simply load a character, convert the bones and start posing. While this seemed like a time saving measure, in the end it was actually slowing me down. There are a lot of little things that go into setting up a character that really add up.

What I was missing was that each time I just started hapharzardly, I found myself having to setup the character's cel edge parameters and joint constraints on the skeleton. Also little things like setting the camera to the right resolution, setting the lights to the right values and getting the best joint deformations can end up leading to unnecessary post work after the fact. The speed is suddenly lost. The desire to quickly see things move across the screen could lead to rushing past essential setup work.

Even though it may seem like a but of work up front, even for the simple scenes it is best to get a complete character setup with all parameters, lights, camera, screen resolution etc. in tact and get it out of the way. This is actually where the speed comes from. It's the same idea as having a model in the first place in lieu of being able to draw that fast.

It's also important to know your tools and keep up to date with them. I was talking to PJ earlier about something I wanted to be able to do and he explained that the ability actually existed in one of the new features in the latest version of Lightwave. I just hadn't kept up. Often times new features may not be or may not seem of much use to a tried and true method of working, but every once in a while, there is new stuff that can really add to the production experience and make things go faster and more smoothly. I was messing with a somewhat recent tool, now about two years old actually, called IK Booster. I remember trying it out when I first heard of it and saying, wow this is cool, but I never followed it up. Just now I started messing with it again and was surprised at how powerful it is. Keeping up with tools like this can mean getting more done and raising the quality of the work.

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THE NEW SETUP

By no means have I actually bought a new setup, but I have been thinking, of late, about what will be the best setup not just for this show, but for the future in my work. One thing that may sound surprising to some is that this imaginary new setup would even include an Apple Macintosh system. So what exactly would lead me down this line of thought?

For a time I had been considering the next direction for my music needs. I talked to the experts and searched diligently on the web, even came close to actually purchasing something, another library from Edirol, which made the orchestra set I now have. It was seemingly impossible to get though, supposedly being unpopular, and so I gave up for a while. I still wanted to find that best music solution.

I was at Fry's Electronics the other day with PJ and we decided to pay a visit to the Mac section. On one of the machines there they had Garage Band, a music sequencing and loop based audio production program, on display with a keyboard. I played with it for a bit and felt that this is what I was looking for. It had the sound quality, the ease of use and broad base of options I was looking for. Of course, to get it, I needed a Mac. So I thought about buying a Mac Mini, which also comes with it. A fairly small investment, and my music needs are met, right?

Well, that's not the whole of it. While my music needs are not yet met, I also considered the future of my production in general, the tools that would improve my work. Regardless of whether or not I get into the Macintosh, I knew that my new setup for the future would include some form of powerful desktop system, and THIS:

Yes, the folks over at Bauhaus Software have given me the dream. I thought a lot about the difference between a system like this and having a WACOM Cintiq. In the end I decided that while at home, using WIFI, my tablet would be my Cintiq. I don't need both, and then I have the advantage of taking the Mirage NOMAD out on the road. I would have loved to have had this when I was in China. What it came down to though, was with this plan, there was no place for a Mac Mini. If I get Mac, it will be the powerful Dual G5 desktop system. Of course, that's not something I'll be running out to get anytime soon. So what about those music needs then?

I found my answer in Native Instruments Kontakt 2 Sampler. This was not an easy decision, as you know I spoke much of GigaStudio and The Vienna Symphonic Library in the past. But what I found was that first, Kontakt not only contains a scaled down Vienna Symphonic Library in it, but it seems much more designed for my needs, whereas Gigastudio is generally meant to occupy its own hardware, meaning a whole system just to run Gigastudio. Listen to the demo tracks on that Kontakt page. Could I possibly go wrong?

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SKELETON TIME

There comes a time when one has to take a step back and really look at what they're doing and ask whether or not they are really making progress. You may remember some time ago when I posted the above image and wrote about the next generation skeleton that would drive my characters. This was certainly a good move in some respects, but was it the best move all around?

There are two issues here. When I did that I had created much more advanced 3D characters which had three or four times more geometry (polygons) that what I had done before. They were being prepared for HD resolution work and going for much more realism as I moved towards a feature. The characters were rendered at much higher subdivision levels and it all worked well. Of course, now I am doing a show for the PSP and yet I continued moving forward on the same line of thought.

The second issue is this: I have said over and over that I desire to do a show that looks totally 2D. To that end, I do a lot of 2D drawing in, on and over my work. There is, however, a point of diminishing returns. One of the reasons I started using 3D was to enable me to make an anime show at speeds far beyond what I could draw. If I find myself painting over and touching up every single frame I do, that ability is actually lost. I need to get the look I want and regain the speed of Chaos.

There's nothing wrong with advancement of technique, but it's the end result that's important, right? When I started doing HD tests, I noticed that my models and deformations didn't hold up, so I changed them. That apparently doesn't mean, however, that it flows backwards and that using the same techniques on lower res material gives the greatest looks. For the new show, you may remember, I needed thicker lines and it had to look good on the PSP screen. Suddenly, things fell apart and I found myself doing way too much 2D "fixing" of the 3D work.

Higher subdivision levels and complex bone setups may have been great for an HD res show with super sharp lines and detail like Ghost in the Shell, but thinking along the lines of doing a show like Naruto, the key is to simplify. Subdivision levels should be low and the skeleton should be as simple as possible. A return to the old ways, using a skeleton from Understanding Chaos, and dropping the subdivision level on the model to 2, even lower than the Lightwave default, solved my problems. I could go on about speed of working etc., but this is probably starting to get boring, right?

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They're Out There

Someone just sent me a link to Nelson Hurst's website where he has been doing original flash animation in the vein of Ninjai. The doesn't appear to have been updated recently, but the movies are worth a look. I am generally not impressed with Flash animation, but make sure you view his fight sequences. Very impressive.

People are out there doing it! I get sick of hearing how it can't be done, and so many people still believe it can't. What more do they need to see? Those who have a dream and a bit of determination will make something. Who cares what others say about whether or not you can do it or if it will be successful? If it's what you want to do, and it is where your passion lies, then you only need to begin. Keep practicing, keep learning and let everything fall into place.

Also keep checking back here. ;) I will talk about image processing next.

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Search Engines

Search engines can be funny things at times. Here are some of the most interesting and sometimes unexpected phrases, entered into the Google search engine, that have led people to my website:

kill bill anime

kimi ga nozomu eien

makoto shinkai

cultivate your hunger

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evil court jester

kakurenbo

andrew loomis download

female superhero

guess the sound

mocap calibration

mortal kombat 3 domination

osaka mp3 hans zimmer

patti duffield

once upon a time hd

online anime and manga coloring page print outs

pj foley

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naruto 2d animation software

ninja scroll tv techno

Referenced

Reference can come from all quarters of the globe. Not just speaking of visual reference, which with the internet available to us, can be had a the click of the mouse. Creation of artistic content can involve the need for reference on many levels, particularly in the creation of story or character driven works.

In the world of artistic content, sites like CGTalk contain incredible examples of the broad range of ideas and skills out there. Having books like their Expose series on your shelf can be a treasure trove of great visual reference. The web itself, just by reason of tools like Google image search, has proven to be indispensable.

When it comes to research and reference for creating deep characters with meaningful lives or involving stories, though, the web truly shines. I often come across, rather through search or someone sending me, many articles containing subjects that greatly interest me. Whether it be genetic engineering, archaeology, robotics, religious issues, things relating to prophecy or the generally unexplained, the web is host to seemingly no end of information which is not just good to know, but can lend depth to our creations in whatever genre. Bookmarking these things can be useful, but the web being what it is, seems to be constantly changing, and links die fast.

I decided to start creating local files for reference. Hard drive space is very inexpensive these days, and the latest web browsers allow you to save an entire page, with all its visual content, locally on your own hard drive. This way I can categorize the subject matter of articles into the areas of reference that I particularly interested in. All my genetic modification articles in one folder for example. This can be done with bookmarking, but even now I have links in my bookmarks that I don't remember what they are and they are dead. It may have been a great article on modern genetic science.

By having a local file, just like I have kept JPG images for visual reference locally for years, when I create a story or characters I can go to these folders and read, learn and discover ways to add depth to my creations. Over time, one can imagine how such a reference file can grow, and soon it can be a virtual library to help make better indie projects!

IT HAS ARRIVED!

I wrote about this before, but now I have actually gone and done it! Last week I ordered Vegas + DVD and it has finally arrived. Yes, the last remnants of old Adobe products on my system will be swept away. I want more. More than Premiere had to offer and Vegas gives me that and goes far beyond.

This bundle also came with the certified Dolby AC3 encoder software, which allows true keyframeable panning of surround sound to create true 5.1 mixes for your DVD projects. To top it all off, it comes with Acid Music Studio 5, with over 1000 loops and samples, and the Sony Pictures Sound Effects series sampler, which should be but a taste of the Sony Pictures library.

It's also fully HDV compatible, supporting realtime, yes realtime, editing and transitions with HDV material, for those thinking of an HDV indie film future. I know I have.

Needless to say, I have a lot to play with, and more will be sought out later this week, as I chase after more audio tools, but this will not stop the momentum of the first chapter of the show. This is motivating me to push further!

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MY FIRST DAILIES

I didn't post about this over the weekend, but I have actually seen it. Yes, for the first time ever I saw scenes from my actual show running on my PSP! All of my video research paid off. Now it's just a matter of doing many more scenes.

Getting the look right wasn't just about my PSP video research and proper conversions though. A large, and usually overlooked aspect of creating good digital media, is image processing. Yes, post processing plays a large role in creating the final look of my shows. I may have spoken in this before, or even showed it on the DVD, but things have changed a lot with the latest Mirage. I will post a bit about post processing and effects in the coming days, as new images arrive as well!

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WOW! Natural Media!

It seems the latest version of Windows Media Player for Windows XP actually plays DV files correctly. In the past, one of the drawbacks to working with DV on my system was that the media player always and only displayed a half res preview of the DV data. This was a limitation of "video for Windows" I believe.

Either way, it necessitated the use of an external preview monitor to see your DV correctly. I had to have my camera connected and outputting to TV to view the simplest preview. Well no more! I was creating a DV file and when I played it back it played full size. Not only that, the 16:9 flag was recognized and the player actually played it letterboxed. This will make working on my new show that much easier.

In other news, the folks over at Bauhaus Software, makers of Mirage have released a natural media brush pack expanding Mirage's paint tools to include even more real world style paint tools. This is already going to use in the new show to emphasize my focus on a very traditional look. More to come on that as things develop!

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DO IT AGAIN! DO IT AGAIN!

I've always kept my demos and trailers on my PSP™, but there was a nagging question in my mind about the format. I am so used to everything being anamorphic widescreen that I naturally gravitate toward that. It made since too since the PSP™ has a wide aspect screen. Still, there was more to learn.

I was researching PSP™ video today considering that I am soon to put one out. Most of the videos I downloaded from American sites was either 4:3 fullscreen or letterboxed with black bars on the top and bottom. Nothing anamorphic. I began to wonder if these were my choices. I can make anamorphic video, but it naturally appears squeezed when you play it and you have to go to the menu to zoom it in. This seemed fine to me, but the idea of putting out a wide market show with such a requirement didn't sit well with me so I searched.

I found my answer on a Japanese site. Since my reading of Japanese isn't great it took some effort, but I found the format I was looking for. Through PSP™ video 9, the same program I have been using to create video for the PSP™, there is a natural widescreen format which immediate plays filling the PSP™ screen. It was always there actually, I just never tried it, thinking it wasn't what I wanted. Now that I have seen it, in the form of a trailer from which the above image comes, and seen it on my PSP™, I know the format for my show!

Of course, for all the videos currently on my PSP™, I have to do it again.

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Olympic Notes

I finally saw the new Appleseed movie. I just couldn't get into it. Even though I knew intellectually that I was looking at something new and awesome, something held back the awe. Not always, the scenes of the big city did inspire awe on occasion. It was when the characters were on the the screen that I just felt something was missing.

I think the level of motion capture on the characters, which was done incredibly well by the way, left me constantly wanting to see them rendered more realistically, something like Final Fantasy, as opposed to cel shaded. At the same time, I think that being cel shaded led me to expect a more "cartoony" level of facial animation which wasn't there, leaving the characters devoid of life.

Even a movie as realistically drawn as Innocence is not without exaggeration in character expression and motion. The eye expects it, and misses it when it isn't present. Even though looking at stills of Appleseed would show that it is one of the highest quality anime projects around, in motion, the sense of awe and wonder that I had watching films like Jin Roh, Spriggan or Ghost in the Shell for the first time just wasn't there.

Some may remember a time when I did extensive music research in an effort to go entirely digital with my soundtrack creation. At that time, I settled on the Edirol HQ Orchestral Library and was introduced to the world of software synthesis. Luckily I made the right choice in that case and the Edirol package still continues to impress me to this day. Wishing to expand on that, though, the time came to do research again.

The one thing that I was missing in my music creation toolset was a "sampler". Having a sampler means almost unlimited expandability as far as the industry supports it. Gigastudio, which came up in my last research session, seems to be the most popular, but was considered out of my league and too much for my needs. It still is, but I wanted to delve into the possibility even more. So I found myself looking at KONTAKT.

This seemed like it might be a good interim solution for sampling. After to talk to composer/sound designer Shane Kneip, however, I found out some serious shortcomings of going this route. Rather than go into too much detail, I just say it involves CPU and RAM hogging and reasons why samplers should be run on a computer of their own. So where did that leave me? Well, back with Edirol. The orchestral pack I have isn't the only library they make. I figured that, for now, getting their Super Quartet library should do me just fine. One day, when I have a permanent studio, I will go the fill Gigasampler route, but that is another story...

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NEXT STEPS

After my experimentation converting video to the PSP, I have learned some things about how the video must look in order to come across correctly. A lot of what I have done previously comes across a bit faded and muddy. So a few things need to change.

Although the above image doesn't necessarily demonstrate it, a key issue I found in PSP animation is line quality. I know that some people (ahem... Rock) have always said that I need to use thicker lines in my cel shaded characters. Well, on the PSP, that is most certainly the case. It just looks better. As I finish touching up the last of the characters so that I can start this show, I will continue to search for that "sweet spot" where color and line quality make for the best possible image.

On another note, creating a show is one thing. Getting people to see it is another matter entirely. There are a number of web resources that offer information and/or discussion on topics related to indies getting their projects out there.

Hollywood Liberation Army

Movie Marketing Blog

A Lesson in Mediocrity

HD for Indies

These are a few good places to read. Also mailing lists like Webcinema, when they are active, offer many points of view on indie film issues.

Finally Animation World Network has some interesting news on the anime industry in Japan.

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