I JUST WANT TO CREATE

When I was working on the storyboarding episode of Anigen, I came across this tool, I guess you could call it a machinima tool, which offered realtime animation and moviemaking to what seemed to already be a large user base. Naturally, as fate would have it, I didn't save the link to this tool and now I can't find it. Still, I've been thinking about it, or the idea behind it for a long time now.

Pixar is by no means quaking in their boots based on the sample animations from these tools, but I still think the writing is on the wall. A new era is coming if not already here. People with ideas, who may not be able to animate one frame in a package like Maya will have the power to make their films. The reason I say this is because I am visualizing a combination of puzzle pieces.

Most of the users of these tools have no concept of filmmaking. They choose bad camera angles or fly the camera all over the place like 1st year CG students. They don't know lighting, pacing and many other aspects of storytelling. Of course I also keep in mind that all of this is based on what we are used to, sometimes culturally, and none of these rules came down the mountain with Moses. The point, though, is this: I have yet to see a big time studio animator or major pro Maya or Lightwave guy pick up these tools and try something. What would this artist create?



A pro artist picking up these tools and trying something is only one piece of the puzzle I see in my mind. The other is the quality of assets. Most users are creating with Quake II or Half Life or even the Sims. Not a lot of chance of getting Final Fantasy quality with those dated engines. But what happens when someone creates with the engine of Doom 3?

Not even from a video game standpoint, but from Machinima or what have you, Doom 3 is a tool for amateur developers to create stuff. Then the game as well; it's really almost unprecedented in terms of the power it provides people to do things. Obviously we're doing a lot of cool stuff with DOOM 3 the game, but now people are going to have something that approaches film quality in the level of visual presentation, on a real-time basis. So if you're in film school and looking to make animated films, this is the cheapest package you're going to get when the game comes out -- a lot cheaper than Maya.

That's what the CEO of id Software said in an interview with Game Arena. But Doom 3 will soon be surpassed. What about the quality of tools that will be found on the PS3 for realtime? I mean, there's going to come a point where just like Steve Job's showed that a modern Mac can render Luxo Jr., the first Pixar short, perfectly in realtime, it will take fewer years for a realtime engine to do Final Fantasy quality. I mean if a person were to go into Doom 3, and really change out every model and create entirely new content inside, how close would it be now? What could that artist create? That's what I am looking for.

I just want to create. I realize I am not interested in tools and feature lists the next cool thing in the next big 3D package. I lost interest in that a while ago. I am interested in the package not getting in my way!

COULD THINGS CHANGE?

Nick seems to have some plans for their popular anime series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is one of their top rated shows, that could be a move which takes animation in a direction many have been waiting for. I am refering to animation being taken more seriously in the western marketplace. While Avatar is most certainly a kids show and not the truly mature content many have longed for, considering where the U.S. market is and has been, it seems very much a step in the right direction.



THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER reveals that Nick will air the show weeknights at 6:30 pm, starting Sept. 25. An expanded online initiative will also be launched for the show. The special will repeat Sept. 16 at 8:00 pm and Sept. 17 at 4:00 pm on Nickelodeon.

Aside from primetime airings of the show, there are some major online initiatives in the works and a push for greater international penetration.

"AVATAR fans are among the most interactive in Nickelodeon's history, so along with this special, which is full of captivating martial arts and incredible adventures, we've added another way for viewers to engage with the show," said Tom Ascheim, evp/gm, Nickelodeon Television. "For the first time, fans that go to nick.com will be able to create their own AVATAR character and animate their own ideas into fantastical adventures — landing some of their scenes on our air."

The show is going into its third season on TV which will bring the episode count to 60. Nick and Paramount are also releasing a six disc box set of the entire first season. Good thing if you didn't start buying the individual discs. That should have hit shelves yesterday. The show is also being specially localized for European markets where they will get versions which include sneak peeks, episode highlights or online message boards, whatever is popular with that particular demographic.

Will this lead to an anime revolution of primetime, mature content on the air in the U.S.? Not likely, and certainly not anytime soon, but it may at least show that animation can be bigger and reach farther than other media and that should lead to its being taken, at least, a little more seriously.

Life From The Garage

I recently picked up the remaining two Jam Packs for Apple's Garage Band music software to expand my library. By expand I mean up to 10GB of new sounds and loops! It's really amazing the creative power Apple stuffs into just one of the apps that is part of the iLife suite. It's fuel for the imagination.

When you get to the point where if you can imagine it, you can create it, your have the right tools and have come to the right point with them. When, however, you get to that point soon after opening the box, you know the creators have done something right. Garage Band gives me creative power I have never really experienced before. I felt a bit of this when I got Kontakt 2, but it was still very complex and there were some difficulties. By difficulties I am talking the level of tweaking one might do that I am sure professional musicians consider "par for the course". That's fine, but I believe it is a measure of difficulty that the indie can't afford to have in their way.

Compare creating a beautiful forest in Vue 5 with creating the same in Maya, Lightwave or 3DSMax. How great is the distance from mind to screen? I know many artists will defend their favorite tool to the death, if you're in the garage, the future is not in these tools. The indie isn't standing in the studio looking at rows and rows of pristine 128 channel mixing boards, and glass windows into the audio recording room with $1000 microphones. No, we're in the garage. Personally I think more magic happens there.

Many studio artists in the 3D world are used to spending months on a single shot in a film, a shot which they likely didn't do all of by themselves. The indie wants to do entire scenes, if not an entire project, in that time. For this reason, the future is going to be in these low cost, $99-$199 dollar specialized tools that give the user unprecedented power while taking the nonsense out of the way. I suspect many veterans will say that if you take away advanced shader nodes and function editing or complex scripting, the program is crippled, but let's be real. That studio artist is getting paid, and probably paid a lot, to sit and noodle with those things for days or weeks on end. Some music programs have graph editing an complex scripting too, but I have never encountered anyone who would expect the garage musician to spend weeks or months tweaking a 3 second segment of a rap song.

Some might say Vue 5 is not a $99-$199 tool. Sure it is! I bought Vue 5 Infinite because it came bundled with Lightwave 9, but go look at the comparative chart for the different versions of Vue. With the exception of the Eco System, I have not touched one feature in all my work with it that cannot be found in the cheaper versions. As powerful as the Eco System is, most who have used it know that you are likely to invite yourself into a world of things that will never render unless you have the huge studio render stack of 45 machines to chew on it. Now really look at what Vue 5 Infinite has that the others don't. Things like "Detailed node previews in function editor" or "Advanced control over the indirect lighting engine". Yes, these things might be essential to the studio artist at ILM, who may only work on the lighting aspect of a shot, but do you see what they are doing with the different versions now? This is the future in the garage. The person who must have this function editing, scripting and control over every indirect light bounce, is the person that will be sitting and waiting for a studio to hand them millions of dollars to make their movie instead of just getting out there and doing it.

Think about it. I am talking about a mindset here. Studio versus the garage. The person whose mind is so fixed on that level of control which I would see as noodling things, will likely never except their movie being shot on DV or even HDV. They would never except using Poser and Vue over Maya or XSI. They will say these "lower" tools don't deliver the quality. If someone shows it can, then they will say it doesn't deliver the quality they require. It's like the guys who must have everything in their video in 4:4:4 color space, available only on cameras costing tens of thousands of dollars, instead of the 4:2:0 of HDV. We all know the benefits and deficits of color space in FX and compositing, we don't need to hash through these things, but in the end, if you're hung up on this you're only stopping yourself from making your movie. You should accept that you don't really want to make your movie unless Jerry Bruckheimer funds it. These are the same people who must make that particular movie instead of considering what they have and making a smaller movie that is actually feasble. If you really do want to make it, get out of the studio and get into the garage, and start there.

THE GRAVE OF CHRIST

Did you know that Jesus went to Japan to become a rice farmer? The BBC has a very bizarre story on an old Japanese legend which states just that. The idea is that he escaped his fate in Jerusalem and fled to the far east to live out his days peacefully farming in Japan. Ancient Hebrew documents discovered in the northern countryside in the 1930's tell of the life and death of Jesus in that region and have led to one of the biggest tourist attractions in the rural area. There are, according to these documents, even descendants of Christ still living in the area. The documents, however, mysteriously disappeared long ago.

This isn't the only such legend in the east. There is the famous stone on Mount Koya in Japan which tells in Syrian the tale of the apostle Thomas and his arrival in Japan after trekking through India and China with his message. In China there are stories connecting their legends with Noah, Solomon and other biblical figures. There are even stories of how kanji, the Chinese writing system, have encoded in them the tales of the garden of Eden.

Anyone who views manga and anime knows that religion, legends and mythology have been the genesis of some of the greatest stories to come out of the medium. They also know that the creators often freely pick and choose from multiple religions and legends and combine them in whatever fashion suits their creation and their characters. Many in the western world take offense at this, but the eastern view of religion is entirely different than the possessive view in the west. When was the last time you heard of a Buddhist extremist?

It would be impossible for us as creators to exhaust the world's legends in the creation of great stories for today. It is, however, possible for us to trip over the same overused legends until they run dry. The world is full of stories and it only takes a little research, especially in this internet age to draw them out. Not every story has to be based on ancient legends of course. That's just my personal fascination. Stories can come from and go anywhere with the help of the net, and they need not end up where you expect. After all, the descendants of Christ in northern Japan happen to be Buddhist and not Christian.

CAN YOU IMAGINE THE SPEED?!

Can you imagine getting 350 KB per second download?! That's a megabyte every three seconds. 10 MB every 30 seconds! 20 MB in a minute! That's on a 3megabit down connection I have. Some people have 6!! Imagine getting 1MB down per second!

A standard 45 minute TV episode at near DVD quality is usually 350 MB. Imagine downloading it in 350 seconds. You see the future on the web? In Asia where they didn't have the old infrastructure holding back like in the U.S., they already have fiber optic systems in place with even greater speed. Realtime DVD quality streaming anyone?

We have to think about the future in planning our products. Old media should be the last thing on our minds. DVD is a great market and a growth market, but it really is on the pioneering edge of the new, not the old. But aside from DVD, consider how long it will take to get your project made and ready sell. What will the market be like then? We can't know the future, of course, but we can look at trends rising today and be mindful of where our projects might really be seen. If you're starting a feature project today, seriously consider that by the time it is done, it may only be in a world of digital delivery.