The Light At The End

This weekend I was at the International Filmmaker Festival in Kent, where The Light At The End was nominated for best animation. It was great - I did a ton of networking, saw loads of films and met some good people.

It was a nice introduction to the world of festivals, and I hope not the last I get to go to. My thanks to all involved, especially it's chief organiser Carl. If you're in the area next year and have time, be sure to check it out.

Oh, and Light won! A trophy for the shelf, and leaves for the web page!

It's been a few days now, and I'm really pleased with the attention that Light has had so far (it even got featured on CartoonBrew!). As promised, here's a little info about the creative process that went into the film.

I made a visit to a ragged coastline a couple of years ago. Waves crashed violently at the foot of a cliff, but up in the sky light rays broke through the cloud. The pairing of vulnerability and awe was something I really wanted to capture in a short film, so after a bit of image-gathering I put together this simple concept:

With the picture came questions. Had this person fallen or jumped? Why was he being saved? I wanted the film to get straight into the action, so I looked for a way to keep the backstory simple and quick to explain - hence the "broken heart" plot. Whether you've suffered it or not, it's something that everyone can instantly pick up on. The answer to the second question then came naturally - if he was being saved after a suicide attempt, he must have changed his mind.

The rest of the plot began to form. I made the most of having this "divine light" pick the guy up and move him around against his will, thinking up lots of different visual gags I could fit in. Without worrying about making it look good, I quickly boarded and began animating.

A couple of months later, I had around three minutes of near-final footage, but there was a slight problem.

It wasn't funny enough.

Parts of it were too confusing.

But mainly, it didn't mean anything. There was no message behind it, no underlying theme - just a quirky story about a man battling a light to get his phone back. Angrily, I went back to square one, this time thinking about the most important question of all: what effect does all of this have on out hero? It took a long while - longer than it should have - but eventually I realised: he becomes independent. All through the film, he's dependent on other things: his ex-girlfriend, gravity, the light.. But towards the end, he takes a stand - perhaps for the first time in his life. In the first version of the ending, the light just naturally peters out and he gets his phone back without really having to do anything. In the final, he grabs onto the branch, becoming an active controller in his own fate.

With that reworked, I re-animated the whole film, putting in more jokes (originally the girl texted back while he was already in mid-air, not stepping off). Finally, with the animation the way I wanted it, I moved onto rendering.

After taking some time away from it, I'd found that Taste Lab didn't look as good as I'd hoped it would. Technical details like subsurface scattering size and buffer shadow samples tend to go over my head, so with this film I wanted to opt for a very different style, with the mantra "keep it simple, but do it well". I turned to the excellent FreeStyle renderer for Blender 2.5, and did a number of tests to find the best look:

I'm not really a fan of toon shading, as I find it often looks too clean and kind of sterile, so I went for flat colours on solid objects, but made an exception with the clouds and anything else with transparency. And although the style meant I could ignore lights and textures, there was a serious amount of compositing needed to put each shot together:

Giving the film this kind of look let me focus on the animation and story, which, given it's been the main focus of this write-up, you can probably tell is where my interest lies. Judging from the feedback, those were the two areas that people liked the most, so I'm happy. I also learnt a lot about proper planning and pre-production, which is just as well because I really don't want to re-animate any more films from scratch!

A lovesick man is saved from certain death by a divine light, but is there a hidden agenda behind the intervention?

The focus this time around was on animation and storytelling without dialogue, hence the simple art style. It ended up taking more time to make than I intended (and lasts longer too - it was supposed to last under a minute) However, the tone of the story, and the balance between humour and tragedy, was really difficult to get right.

I'll post a few words and pics about it's development in the coming days, but for now I hope this film gets a few chuckles!

Song: Crazy Burn by Sepiamusic
Sound effects: sagetyrtle and datasoundsample, Freesound.org
Made in Blender 2.56

After Da New Guys: FTW, I stopped making films with dialogue to concentrate on communication through expression. I'm not ready to talk about it properly yet, but my next piece is going to feature dialogue and singing - and lots of it. So, I've been trying to figure out the best way to make rigs that support natural-looking facial movement (especially lips) for cartoon characters. This is just a rough animation test, and while not perfect has given me a lot of feedback on how to improve it further.

On The Light At The End front, I'm happy to announce that the film is now finished and has been sent off to a few festivals and screenings, and when it's OK to do so I'll post it up online.

This one's taking a bit longer than I'd hoped. It should be finished within the next week or two, but it's near finished enough for me to talk about it.

The Light At The End will be a dark-ish comedy, 3 minutes long, and will have a 2D hand-drawn look (even though it's just a post-production effect). I was inspired by the advice I was given at this year's Blender Conference, where it was suggested I go for a more simple style and do it well, rather than spreading myself too thinly over the texturing and lighting. It's a good fit for the film, and has been hugely liberating, letting me concentrate on the animation.

I'd like to see if I can get it into any festivals, so it might be a while yet before it's freely available. Either way, I'll YouTube at some point and hopefully give a few laughs.

Happy New Year!

It's funny, I promise. Completed: January 2011 Running time: 3:19 Watch it now!

Synopsis

A lovesick man is saved from certain death by a divine light, but is there a hidden agenda behind the intervention? Heartbroken Cliff has been dumped by his beautiful girlfriend Suzie. A desperate attempt to reconcile with her leaves him staring death in the face. As he battles supreme power to save his relationship, an important lesson in life comes to light in this dark comedy.

Background

After Taste Lab, I decided to experiment with a look that was cleaner, more simple, and which let me focus on animation and storytelling. "Keep it simple, but do it well" was the mantra, and after a lot of tests with the Freestyle Renderer for Blender, I came up with a style I was happy with.

Whereas the story for Taste Lab naturally formed very quickly, the plot of this film took many rewrites. I've tried to insert more pathos into it than my previous work, but it was a big challenge to find the right balance of comedy and drama, since both are fighting for such little screen time.

The Light At The End will again feature a great score from Chris Moorson. Big thanks also go to Dave Gallagher, who helped out with the head modelling of the main character on his 3D Appeal Now! blog.

Read my post on making The Light At The End here.

Watch it now!

Screenings and Awards

Stills

Credits

The following sound effects were used from www.freesound.org under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license

Apologies for the quiet time, but that's because I've been too busy actually making things to write about! This is just a quick note to quietly announce that I'm busy on a new film, and the much-delayed Da New Guys videogame sequel. It's been a mammoth undertaking - far larger than the first game - but it's very nearly done now. Perhaps a release this year? I'll step up promotion for it as we get closer, but check out the new screenshot in the meantime (click for full-size).

As for the new film, I haven't got anything to show about it just yet. I'm neck-deep in animation right now, and once that's over I can start making it look nice and release some shots of it. Though still a comedy, it'll be darker than the last films, so here's hoping the change in tone is a good one!

Stay tuned.