Animation: Short film trailer & frame stills

[Eyemagic]

Hey keith, very funny animation. I love the render style, very beautiful, and very cool characters too.

Congratulations.

:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

P.D: I can't wait to view the entire short.......:drool: :drool:

[grstovell]

Hey Keith! SUPERB WORK (as always)

Loved the style!!! It promises to be a great one! 8 mins??? that's a lot of work!
Can't wait to see it.


Hey... did I read your journal correctly? Is Big Idea going under? Or is it just their animation department?

-Greg

[keithlango]

Thanks. Yeah, 8 mins is alot of work. It'll be the longest short I've done yet.
Thankfully I've got some good help.

As for the question....Big Idea the company is still around, but the in-house animation studio was shut down.

Thanks for the kind words. I hope to be able to share some more stuff as it gets done.

:)

-k

[taylor]

8 minutes!!!!! :eek: I thought it was only 2! ahhhhh!!!


;)

[keithlango]

Originally posted by taylor
8 minutes!!!!! :eek: I thought it was only 2! ahhhhh!!!


;)

2 minutes is your animation quota for the week, so you'd better stop trolling CG-Talk and get crackin', Mr. Taylor!

;)

-k

ps: Jason is one of the animators helping me out on this project. So I gotta keep him in line you see. :)

[lildragon]

Do you ever do anything sub-par? :p awesome work as usual man, I'm pressed for time but I plugged ya on both cgtalk.com and 3dfestival.com. Be back later :)

Btw a nice leather whip will keep that Jason inline ;)

salud

[Ancient-Pig]

Wow, way cool

Always been a huge fan of Jason Taylor and Keith Lango...can't wait for the full short to come out

Good job guys

btw, is Micheal Comet assisting on this as well?

[ed209]

I'm very excited to see this finished Keith. The style is so unique, I really havn't seen much like it before. Any plans yet on submitting the finished film to some of the festivals?

[Indigo]

very nice effect... what's it called and how is it achieved (the scetch effect)?

[GavinG]

Wow, really awesome style...looks like its out of a story book


Gav

[Scandell]

I find the textures to be very interesting and unique. GREAT JOB KEITH! i cant wait to see the final product. (hey Taylor, are you still looking for a job?)

Cheers

[AWAKE]

Long live indy!


Nice stuff Mr. Lango.

[Rivendale]

Great style and beautiful renders, I love it!
Let me know when the DVD is out!;)

[little5points]

looks great! :)

there is a typo though, keith. I don't know if you care that much since it's a teaser

[pigwater]

:bounce: :bounce: need more. ..need more:bounce: :bounce:

great stuff

[Brettzies]

sweet! i like the simple clean characters and the overall look and feel. can't wait to see more. i sorta dig the music too although i feel funny saying that for some reason.

[Stephen Vyas]

Hi Keith,
I'm interested in seeing how the relationship plays out between the two characters and the conflict over the last flower? Oh and I just wanted to say I love the part where he fumbles about his glasses near the end and that glare. Very well done!

Take care,
Steve

[taylor]

mmm torturous schedules. . . :drool:

[urgaffel]

Sweet stuff Keith! I like the style of the render, it's a pleasant break from cartoony, cute and realistic. A more painterly approach... Really looking forward to this! Animation is great too :)

[John Lee]

Hey Keith

All i can say is OMG i really want to see this ASAP please. hehehe. Love the style! 2 years is a long time. I've benn working on a short for about 9 mouths now. How did you keep your motivation??

Keep it up

John Lee

[AVTPro]

Man. I hope what ever you have Keith, you left a twitch in Buffalo so I can pic up on it here.

Love the render. Sweet, especially round the edges.

Love that subtle twitch he does before his glasses pops off.

Love the music.

Thing I didn't like af first was the opening pan, the way it distorts the sky...but as soo as I opened the movie up full screen it was awesome.

Tells me this would look great in a theater. :applause:

[pearson]

What a great, unique look! Is this a render time effect, or are the textures just painted with big brush strokes? Reminds me a bit of that short Pixar did of a fisherman which had a watercolor effect.

Keep up the great work!:bounce:

[boxcrash]

Great job Keith, Jason and your team on this.:thumbsup:

I admire and respect you can push on through all that has happened, good inspiration you are.:) :thumbsup:

[FloydBishop]

Originally posted by pearson
Reminds me a bit of that short Pixar did of a fisherman which had a watercolor effect.

At the risk of sounding anal, it was not Pixar, but Pacific Data Images (PDI) who did the short film you are referring to. It was called "Fishing":

http://www.pdi.com/shorts/fishing.htm

Anyhow, nice look Keith. It's nice to see something that looks like this coming from a computer.

I like the snappiness of the animation as well. The attitude of the character with the glasses in the teaser is nice. The bit where he fumbles for his glasses when the new character shows up is my favorite section.

[Zappa]

Hey!Keith,
Awesome !!love the original look and feel of the animation and rendering....looking forward to seeing more..preferably on the Big screen :applause:
cheers
zappa

[digital realm]

This short film looks very, very promising :applause:. We can't expect anything less from Keith. Now add Jason Taylor to the formula and we have a winning team. Looks really cool. Can't wait to see it :bounce:.

Mario.

[keithlango]

Zoinks!! So many posts, so many questions... ;)

First off, thanks everybody for the kind words. They really do mean a lot to me.

The style of the render is achieved in 3dsMax using Reyes-Infografica's NPR1 "toon" renderer. It does cel shading and toon lines, but it also has this natural brush media capability that I haven't seen used much anywhere. It took alot of futzing to get my head around the control of the renderer, but it was worth it. I'm also using Cebas' finalRender plug in to get the soft diffuse lighting feel. There's no textures in these scenes. The NPR1 plug in paints brush strokes right on the geometry and there's a ton of variables for adjusting how they look. I'm also doing a LOT of post work in After Effects for the look. As cool as the NPR1 plug is, the default renders come off a bit flat. So each shot has a 10 layer AE recipe that it goes through to get the desired look, and then that goes thru another comp for color correction, etc. The grass is straight up Maya Paint Effects with some post work to help it blend in.
The characters and camera work are done in Maya. I developed some export/import scripts in MEL and Max to get the animation over to Max for rendering. You can download those scripts from my website in the Tools section.

The film is being rendered at HD720 with the plan to line double it to a 35mm print. So a big screen is what it's being built for. When it's done I do plan on submitting it to a variety of festivals and such.

As for what keeps me motivated over 2 years? I dunno. It's an itch I just gotta scratch. I sure didn't plan on it taking this long so far. Once I decided that I wanted to try a non-photorealistic rendering style I pretty much added 10 months to the project for R&D to find the right combination of recipes to get the look I wanted and also develop a simple/robust animation transfer system from Maya to Max.

The music in the trailer is written and performed by The Rogues, a Houston based pipe and drum band. I doubt I'll be using a whole lot of bagpipe music for the final short, though. Pipes can start to wear on people after 8 minutes. :)

I'm really pleased to see that the animation is working well for folks. I wanted to establish a nice strong style and give some quirks and life to these characters. It's good to know that stuff doesn't go unnoticed. :)

Regarding if Michael Comet is helping with this... he did in many respects. I owe much of my ability to script in MEL to Mike, and I owe ALL my ability to script in Max to him. He's also helped by developing some little widgits and MEL scripts that I've asked for. The coolest of which is his superLag MEL script, which I think you can get on his website now (www.comet-cartoons.com). The other folks who have helped or are helping me with this project are: Mark Behm (concept art) Mitch Stark (concept art) Rob Dollase (story advice) Jason Taylor (animation) Arslan Elver (animation) and Keith Osborn (animation). The only one who needs regular beatings is Jason. Thankfully he doesn't bruise too badly. ;)

Anyhoo, I think that answers most of the questions. Thanks again everybody for the warm words of encouragement. Your kind thoughts are a great reward in and of itself and plenty of motivation for me to see it through.

-k

[Book]

Hey Keith, how very timely - A colleague was describing the renderer you were using on your new project last week, and here are some images! Looks great - can't wait to see more.

[S. J. Tubbrit]

Any chance of a direct link, none of the buttons on your homepage or the myopia site appear, I'm, just getting the little red 'x's.... :(

Would like to see it! :)

[ssalo]

Very GOOD looking renders and I l-o-o-o-ve your characters (and so does my wife when I showed them to her...).

Your tutorials at your site are also very good and has helped me a lot to get a grip on character animation. They go well hand in hand with Richard Williams' The Animators Survival Kit which I'm reading right now.

Anyway I know it's still a trailer but I don't think that your camera movements are yet there. They look maybe too slow and too...3d.... if you know what I mean.

Anyway looking forward to see this!!!

-Sami

[Khepri]

here the connection times out after a couple of secs downloading....
I guess Ill wait till this afternoon before trying again


stills look very nice though :D

[puddlefish]

hey, great work.

nice animation and good solid character designs.

the only thing i don't like is the camera work. it's a personal thing, but i think it's too cg ish, even for a cg film. it's too smooth, there's no sense of weight to it.

still though, looking forward to seeing more.

[steveblake]

First class!

Really nice to see the work done so far. Great style, warmth and humour. It's inspirational to say the least.

Looking forward to seeing what happens next...

[typeA]

best anything ever..../~ best thing i ever saw

[asparapani]

Hi there Keith. Just wanted you to know that the look you chose is refreshing. Can't wait to see the film.....looks interesting.:thumbsup:

[michaelcomet]

FWIW superLag is -not- available on my site...at least not yet. There's a max version also that I need to cleanup too....sigh.

[FloydBishop]

Originally posted by michaelcomet
FWIW superLag is -not- available on my site...at least not yet. There's a max version also that I need to cleanup too....sigh.

What is this superLag, and where do I get some?


Blue Sky humor. Ask Oktay.

[KOKE]

Great work!!!!:applause: :applause:

I love the style, its so different to all those photo realistic renders (they are great too).

This shows how 3D can be used to manage new styles, as it gives us power not to emulate reality but to create our own reality :D

:buttrock: Keep up!!

[pearson]

Floyd, you are quite right! I couldn't remember, and was too lazy to look it up.

Keith - Wow, hard to believe that look (the brush strokes) is all renderer! I would have expected a lot more jitter from frame to frame. Very, very cool. I wonder why we haven't seen more people using this since it is commercially available...?

Best of luck at the festivals (when the time comes). How much is the drop to 35mm going to cost?:surprised

[keithlango]

Comet:
Oops. My bad. You still rock, tho. ;)

Pearson:
a 35mm print won't be as bad as it would have been 3 or 4 years ago when labs were charging upwards of $2/frame. These days there's enough labs and enough demand from the DV community to put the price within reach of normal folks. I expect it'll be about $400/minute or so to get a master transfer to film, and then each copy after that is just film stock and lab fees.

S.J. Tubbrit:
the buttons are using a java script thingie I believe (I built the site in Frontpage. I'm not a professional web designer unfortunately). See if you have javascript enabled on your browser. Failing that, here's the direct link to the DivX version:
http://www.keithlango.com/myopia/myopBigDivxTrailer.avi

Puddlefish & ssalo:
I hear your comments about the camera work. You're probably right. The trailer just happens to have 3 of the 5 slow moving establishing shots in the film, so the pace feels a bit off. (I admit that I'm not the greatest trailer editor on the planet. Far from it. :) ) Thankfully the whole film isn't filled with those slow, loofy shots. There's gonna be a good 180+ shots that are alot tighter than that when this is all done. Even so I'm not super happy about those longer shots just yet. But thanks for the crit. I'll be more conscious of that as I move forward. :)

KOKE & asparapani:
Yeah, I got bored with emulating photo-reality back around '96 and have been trying to find some different looks that let me be more playful with the imagery. Don't get me wrong, I still drool over a well done image with great textures and such. I think that style done well requires a great amount of skill, talent and patience. My problem is I have diminishing supplies of each. :) This is my second short in a row where there's hardly a single texture map in the thing and I'm just playing with color, light, composition and render to get something different. I was definitely inspired by Dave Gainey's "Fishing" when I first saw it back in '99.
I have an ad I clipped from a magazine years ago that says "Simplicity will get you noticed." It's an ad for these really cool, design-y stock images and the ad has such an interesting appealing design. It's taped up over my monitor as a kind of motto for my work. I share Pearson's wonderment that we haven't seen more of this rendering look since it's commercially available and has been for a good little bit.

Great feedback everybody. It's quite heartwarming to know that I haven't wasted all this time and effort. Thanks a bunch. Now it's time to go whip Jason so he gets his shots done on time. ;)

-k

[Deleted Vertex]

I looped your animations and studied them, its also good to know that you were once made stuff like "Yum-Yum".

Can't wait to see the final. Awesome preview!

[taylor]

Tito: Stop encouraging Mr. Lango to beat his team! Actualy. . . ummm. . . its just me he beats. That whip really smarts!
:eek:


Scandel: I'm contracted for another week or so, but after that I'll be looking for more work. Interested? :)


Master Lango (this is what he makes us call him): I'll have all my shots done in an hour. . . I swear I'm not goofing off on this forum. :hmm: ;)

[taylor]

:surprised

[thOrNes]

real nice character design !!!
i like the simplicity of your compositions, and nice rendering though !!! looking forward the whole thing ;)

[lildragon]

Bleh :rolleyes: and Jason it's not so bad, just ask Wiro ;)

Please be sure to render out some high res images and enter this into Expose http://www.cgtalk.com/expose you definitely have a chance

You have received the CGtalk choice award .Please feel free to display this image anywhere you like! Love it, love it.

upon receiving this award, it guarantees you a spot in the cgtalk gallery hall of fame (http://gallery.cgtalk.com) - which you are now placed

http://www.cgtalk.com/plug_award/cgtalk_award_may03.jpg

P.S. Please email me @ tito@cgnetworks.com for the award .psd file

salud

[keithlango]

Hey, thanks for the award, Tito! I'll definitely take a moment to send it in for Expose. Glad ya like the look.

-k


ps: Jason, you catch a break this weekend. Dishing out all the beatings that you require has made my arm tired. :surprised

[malcolmvexxed]

Damn i'm working on a screenplay called myopia. Guess i'll have to change the name. Great work tho!:buttrock:

[barcode]

Really excited about this film! Your character design and animation is brilliant - when I first saw it in the November 2001 10 second club animation I couldn't stop laughing! It will be awsome to see an entire 8 minutes devoted to the character (is his/her its name "Sned"?).:applause:

[robertp]

LOL. This will be great once I can see the whole thing. Right now it just causes me to salivate. Malcolm, titles for films movies and other works are not able to be copyrighted. So you can still use that title. What can be a copyright is the script and film. each treated as a seperate thing.
Just goto the copyright office online and read about it.

Rob:D

[keithlango]

macolmvexxed:
Sorry about the name thing. I was thinking that by making the title long enough it'd be unique. Oh well. :)

barcode:
Yeah, I've been working on this idea since May of 2001. That Nov 2001 animation was a test to see if I'd like doing the animation in Max. It was also an experiment with making the characters talk and with pupiled eyes. In the end I decided to go back to the simpler visual style to be more iconic. They just look funnier with beady eyes. :) Sned was the first character I built for this film. He's the guy in the cart. His counterpoint (the guy with the glasses who chomps the flowers) is Nuph.
Don't ask me where those names came from. Some place in my murky mind. :surprised

robertp:
Thanks for the good word. Oh, and here's a towel. :drool:

;)

-k

[facial]

Woooow, So nice NPR stuff here, Very interesting design and nice effect. :thumbsup:
I love NPR stuff too, and please take a look my work and give me your advices to me, think you a lot.:)

[khaleghi]

that`s os amazing man:thumbsup: :applause:
I like the character very much :love:

[Frinsklen]

hey master Lango, just making sure I post something here...

The look you've achieved is simply amazing. So original, so inspirational. I saw the stills you had on your website some months ago, and I'm impressed to see how well it works in motion. I'm afraid you're going to have to write a tutorial about that one day, you have no choice... :)

All I can say is good luck, Keith, Jason and the others. I can't wait to see this finished.

[taylor]

Thanks alot Frinsklen! It's been a joy working with Keith on this very fun project. I can't wait to see it all finished also!

Mmm. . . NPR

[uucww]

:applause: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[keithlango]

Originally posted by facial
Woooow, So nice NPR stuff here, Very interesting design and nice effect. :thumbsup:
I love NPR stuff too, and please take a look my work and give me your advices to me, think you a lot.:)

Wow, Facial, those renderings you have in your gallery are really very nice looking. Great job in capturing the essence of traditional Chinese ink/water color. Your work shows alot of study and patience in capturing the heart of that style. Excellent work!
I'd be interested in hearing about your battles in trying to get this style. Are you trying to completely fool the viewer into thinking the work is a painting? Or are you allowing that your work is CG and that in certain ways it's going to be very CG feeling? What are your feelings about still having the Cg aspects of the project still show through? I can see in the gallery images you have that it's clearly still 3d, but it's different and cool looking even though it still has a CG core.
The trickiest thing about trying to emulate natural media in Cg renderings for me is that last little bit of analog randomness. In my piece I knew right away that the technology just wasn't good enough to completely fool anybody that what they were looking at was anything but CG art. So I decided to try and just capture a sense of the traditional, while not outright denying that what I was working on was 100% digital. I didn't feel the need to run away from the digital nature in my NPR stuff. In other words, I'm not trying to fool anybody into thinking that this is not CG. If folks say "Hey that's CG." that's fine with me. All I want them to say is "Hey, I don't care what it is, that's cool!" :)
I wonder if I'm the only one who doesn't really care if I get 100% traditional media emulation. :hmm:

-k

[uzik]

Would you also post links to the animation
files for those of us who can't view
them with browser plugins?

[keithlango]

Originally posted by uzik
Would you also post links to the animation
files for those of us who can't view
them with browser plugins?

Sure.

http://www.keithlango.com/myopia/myopBigDivxTrailer.avi
For DivX 5.02

http://www.keithlango.com/myopia/myopSmQuicktimeTrailer.mov
for Sorensen QT

Enjoy.

-k

[Linus Ericson]

Looks good, cant wait to see finish short... :thumbsup: production journal was intrensting to read....

[Dearmad]

Keith,

You're not alone on your traditional/cg issue above. I like both. The main thing I care about in any animation is a consistant art look- one that is congruent with the point of making the film in the first place. I also believe strongly in playing to the strengths of the medium one has chosen. :wip:

[uzik]

Very nice! Thanks for the links :)

Speaking as someone who has vision
problems the font weight could be a little
heavier on some of the small text. I
couldn't read the last panel of small
text at the small resolution in the
download.

I also wondered if animating the sky
(the sky texture is static) might be
a little better looking, but that's
personal preference.

[RedSilas]

I really like the render style! Great concept!

<>< :thumbsup:

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