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April 15, 2009

THE MAKING OF 'BATTLE FOR TERRA' PART 2

After years of success in short films and visual effects, the opportunity of a making a feature film was finally a reality. Director Aristomenis Tsirbas recalls the exciting and treacherous first steps in getting an ambitious independent animation off the ground.

With the Terra short being a big success on the film festival circuit, pitch meetings with studios and production companies quickly followed. One small upstart called Snoot Entertainment expressed serious interest in turning the short into a feature film, and after a couple of meetings it became obvious that they were a great fit with MeniThings. So we dove straight into the task of figuring out how to make the picture.

I originally envisioned Terra as a live-action dramatic epic featuring real humans integrated with photorealistic digital aliens and environments. But after some sobering talk with the producers we figured it would be utterly impossible to achieve a look good enough for our standards on an independent budget. So the next choice was to do it entirely CG. Tonally this would mean we’d have to go a bit lighter to make this project attractive to investors, which took us to the first phase: the script.

THE SEARCH FOR A SCREENWRITER

I dusted off my treatment from years past and expanded from a dozen pages to a fairly detailed 30 page document covering every scene in the film. Once approved we quickly settled on Evan Spiliotopoulos as the screenwriter. His writing samples ranged from historical drama to comic book levity, which made him the right fit for our project.

With the lengthy screenwriting process underway we were ready to set up shop. Since we knew this was going to be a tightly budgeted indie feature from the beginning it seemed overly ambitious to create an entire animation studio for a single indie project, so we looked around for an existing visual effects facility to provide the hardware and technical support in exchange for profit participation. Unfortunately we couldn’t make this work since one facility demanded too high a rental price and another required too much creative control. This would usually bury a project, but we refused to give up. We decided we could afford to at least produce the animatics in the hopes that the resulting work would land us further financing.

We rented a small office with 4 rooms and a common area. One room housed the server and 20 processor ‘render garden’, the second was my office with two computers (one for 3D animation, the other for editing), a third for Dane to make his new business office, and a forth to support any additional artists.

STORYBOARDING A FEATURE

In a methodology that would be typically considered backwards, Storyboarding came after I finished the CG assets.

This way I knew what my digital limitations were. After an entire scene was approved as a CG set-piece, I broke it down in the form of dozens of rough storyboard illustrations. They didn’t need to be terribly detailed since they acted as merely a personal guide for problem solving blocking, camera and pace.

I ended up modeling final geometry and pre-lighting 80% of the film. It was important to front-load CG work as much as possible in anticipation of a compressed production.

ANIMATICS PRODUCTION BEGINS

Due to the fact that this was a bare-bones operation, my responsibilities ranged from concept designer through to cinematography, animatics animation and film editing. The schedule meant I needed to do much of this at the same time.

With all assets modeled, rigged and lit, I spent an intensive 10 months producing animatics complete with temp sound and dialogue. This wasn’t simply a loose guide for production, but the first pass of every shot.

We devised a mini-studio pipeline that connected my two computer platforms and allowed distributed rendering via a 20 processor “render garden”. Naming conventions were kept simple so that shot names could be completely seen using LightWave’s built-in data overlay. No compositing was done at this stage to maintain a quick turnaround. LightWave 3D was used for animation and edited in Final Cut Pro.

The volume of work scheduled coupled by the need to produce advanced animatics meant I would have to let go of roughly a third of my story-boarded shots. So this meant I had to be smart with time management, prioritization, and distilling bigger story beats into smaller ones.

To help with action sequences, which have more shots-per-minute than regular scenes, we recruited two interns from a local art college to help up the shot count. For those assignments my storyboards were more detailed and realistically illustrated. However their inexperience with the software and with animatics in general meant I needed to act as both director and instructor. I also had to make sure not to give them overly complex shots while they were still in training. However one of our interns demonstrated some promising animation skills by over-animating the characters in his assignments. His eagerness paid off as he was ultimately hired as a character animator for the film.

We eventually added a couple of more experienced artists so that I could get a little closer to translating more story beats into the animatic.

A typical animatics work week went as follows:

Monday: Complete addressing producer notes from previous week.
Tuesday: Record temp dialogue. Draw storyboards. Begin animatics animation.
Wednesday: Complete animatics animation.
Thursday: Edit footage including temp sound design and music.
Friday: Producers make notes on edit. Begin addressing notes.

The animatics marathon was well underway, script was coming along nicely, but funding was still a mystery. Would all this grueling work pay off? More to come...
  










 
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