Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterAnimating Elephants: HDTV CGI Production
May 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Dan Ochiva
Directed and written by S.D. Katz, Protest is a plaintive, dream-like meditation on elephant extinction and one of the first CG animated shorts produced at HDTV resolutions (1920 x 1080).
Katz, partner and co-founder at Pitch, a Manhattan-based animation and live-action studio, developed Protest as an in-house art project. His tools of choice: Discreet's 3D Studio MAX (he obtained the final look via Release 4's greatly improved rendering engine) and Adobe After Effects for compositing.
The elephant's IK (Inverse Kinematics) include the rolling motion of the shoulders, as well as the transfer of weight during foot plants. Added realism came from movement details: masses of muscle and fat combined with the flow of loose skin over the bone structure.
Protest plays entirely in slow motion. Since Pitch did not find slow-motion footage to model upon, animation director Chris Gilligan decided to create the elephant walk cycles based on real-time footage with keyframes created at each frame. Pitch then time-stretched the animation in MAX to the appropriate slow-motion speed. The animators worked on the timing and other aspects of the computer-generated frames to yield a smoother, more fully animated look "on ones." (This is a classic animation method-animators position each frame by hand to avoid the mechanical quality of computer frame interpolations.)
One of the toughest challenges in Protest was a close-up of an elephant's foot stepping on a stone surface.
"We wanted to see the skin fold around the toenails and spread as the tons of pressure became concentrated on the foot," explains director Katz. "Animator Brendan Gallagher built the foot in several sections, distorting the polygonal mesh around the non-flexible toenails. This was better than using procedural distortion tools which have a CGI look."
The animators also encountered challenges in building the elephants' skyscraper jungle. The first few models turned out to be too complex and bogged down the workstation when placed in a scene. To solve this problem, animators mixed high-resolution and low-resolution files for each street. They then chose individual resolutions, based on a building's proximity to the camera, for each scene.
Pitch shot hundreds of photos for textures. This research also helped determine how the streets and the buildings should reflect light. "Creating a photo-real city in daylight is usually done with miniatures," according to Russ Dube, executive producer at Pitch. "Blade Runner and The Fifth Element avoided sunny CGI, but our artists have achieved a remarkably detailed daylight world entirely in the computer."
The largest city shot, based on an Andreas Feininger photo, called on classic illusion tricks of film matte painting and scenic painting for the theater.
"This is probably our most painterly shot and one of my favorites," Katz states. "To me, it's more fun to let the viewer fill in the details of an illusion even though they are unaware that parts of the image are actually missing or have less than full detail."
Protest debuts as the opening film for Wavelength Releasings' All Digital Tour.
Wavelength Releasing's precedent-setting, All Digital Tour is scheduled for simultaneous screenings at the Director's Guild Theaters, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and various London venues. (Subsequent screenings are also scheduled at INA's new media gathering, Mediartech '99, in Cannes, and in Stockholm and Dublin.) The satellite multicast will showcase Katz's Protest and Lance Weiler's The Last Broadcast-produced in HD and DV, respectively- and is sponsored in part by Manchester, England-based Digital Projections. (DMD- type projectors will be employed.) A few weeks later, George Lucas will use DP projectors for a four-venue release of the Phantom Menace.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.