I wish you best of luck for the end of your travel.
Ara's Tale - short film wip
StephanRODRIGUEZ
#105
Yes Martin, 6 shots left, sound to be done, Phil will do my score, seems we are very close together 
Unfortunately I’m working on something else for the moment (vfx for a short film) and I’m not gonna finish before my 3 years anniversary (2 of February) …
loramel
#106
[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/final_cut.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/final_cut.jpg)
Finally the long awaited major milestone is here !
All major visual development is done and I have edited the movie to a final cut. This is not yet a picture lock, but what I call a timelock. Now the path is clear for Mikkel and Phil to do their magic and add sound and music to this movie.
Now that the edit is done I have exact numbers on the running time of the movie. Without the credits it runs 7:23 min or 11339 frames at 25fps, which is quite a good match to my estimates from 2010.
Speaking of numbers, here is the actual table of hours spent so far on the project:
----------------------------------------------
5:34 01-Script
43:54 02-Storyboard
73:54 03-Concept Art
14:48 04-Animatics
152:45 05-Modeling
76:57 06-Rigging
189:17 07-Animation
261:00 08-Texturing
228:11 09-Simulation
51:48 10-Project Management
131:54 11-Research
16:29 Editing
290:46 Lighting/Compositing ----------------------------------------------
1537:17 Total
Now a lot of tedious little bits of work still has to be done. Apart from a lot of fixing, I plan to spend some time on developing a proper logo, movie poster and finally give the official movie site a long needed overhaul. And not to forget, I am reallylooking forward to the song recording with Julia Schaller for Aras Song.
loramel
#107
As this short film is nearing completion, I want to share the movie poster I have done for the film.
loramel
#109
Finally all render/compositing jobs are done and I have now the full 1080p footage ready.
I still do have the intermediate multilayer renderpasses for each shot, in case there is the need to revisit some compositing tasks. The storage demand is quite huge for these (a single frame typically has ~140MB) , but it already saved me a lot of time and trouble. I guess I will only delete them once the movie is eventually released
The compositing pass creates the final frames which are delivered as OpenEXR files. Here we typically have 23 MB per frame.
I did some intense testing and exploring on how to best tackle the color grading workflow. As I now did a very close look to the whole color behaviour, I noticed that initially I had wrongly calibrated my monitor and had done the primary color grading in the compositing on a display with a gamma setting of 2.4. That means, that on a correctly calibrated display, the movie displays too bright and flat.
My initial idea was to apply the appropriate gamma correction in blender, but as already mentioned in my blog , I decided to try out DaVinci Resolve Lite. The new problem that this did create, was that I had to switch to Windows to work with this software. That in itself wouldnt be a big problem, but I soon found out that the display driver under Windows acts quite differently to the one under Linux. In fact I didnt manage, to get the same color dynamic under both OSes. I got the gamma setting ok, but for the white and black point I had absolutely no chance to get it to work correctly under Windows. The solution would be of course do buy a real hardware calibration tool, but that is not an option right now and I have to find an other way.
This different behaviour made me a bit uneasy and I did numerous tests on both platforms to learn how these differences show in the final color grading. That was when I learned that my monitor has a gamma drift over time. When freshly turned on, I need a correction of 1.20 and after 4-5 hrs I am down to 1.05.
What I do now, is to constantly check the actual gamma value ( using the cool test images at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/) and apply a correction if necessary. Its a bit tedious, but with this I get relatively reproducible results.
What got me a bit frustrated were the tests I did on my 40″ FulHD TV. It provides a load of settings, none of which seems to have anything to do with a gamma 2.2 setting
Most settings have blown out highlights or oversharpening. The 100Hz feature destroys completely the movie feeling. I really wonder how this movie will look like on the various displays when eventually released. This is something that is completely out of my control.
Anyway, for all those interested, I have a 2 shot sequence in 1080p for you to download and look at. I would really be interested how this sequence looks like on your individual display. With a correct gamma 2.2 display, you should see a relatively dark movie with stark contrast, but there is no completely black area. You should still be able to see features even in the darkest spots. But these dark spots should really be dark and not misty white washed. Please have a look and tell me how your viewing experience is and what display settings you have.
Narntson
#110
Hi Martin,
I’ve had some time to think about how my project will show up on the retinas of my viewing audience… I am not the most into tweaking tweaking at the end, I would rather get it right the first time on a complete render but the main issue is matching shots for continuity! I don’t mean to hijack your WIP thread so I posted a longer version on the main page to ask members about their methodology:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=7293324#post7293324
Anyways I had original hopes (on my own material) to render out a single pass without the fuss of color correction, then I soon learned I had to reconsider what was fine on my computer monitor was not on my HDTV. In my case, my plasma tv shadows crushed detail that I never adjusted in my computer monitor. Therefore after bumping up my pc monitor’s gamma the renders looked better on the plasma. I do plan on watching your scene at later in the day (will let u know) and when you finish your project will you give us a lesson on what you’ve learned and how to troubleshoot for optimal results? Thanks!!
loramel
#111
Hi Noah
Thanks for stopping by 
I am really interested on any posts in the thread you created. Looking at all these different displays, I began to suspect that there must be some way of ensuring that the material will be seen how it is supposed to be.
Now I am not so sure anymore that there is a single simple way. You have absolutely no control how your movie is going to be shown. Starting from the type of projector, color settings, screen type etc.
My approach now is to concentrate on a proper gamma 2.2 calibrated display and grade in such a way that a) my artistic intention is still intact and b) I am in a safe region, especially in the bright areas. On two of HDTVs I experienced a tendency to increase the highs and got easily washed out results. Staying a bit away from the possible maximum helped in this regard without compromising the look on the computer display.
This is purely empirical knowledge and even in this only tested on a few selected displays, so I might be totally wrong.
Narntson
#112
Okay I looked at the clip from my wife’s macbook pro (Gamma 2.2) and it looked great. The PC looked great with windows media player! How did you export your movie BTW?
loramel
#113
Good to know it worked on your systems.
For exporting I used ffmpeg under linux to create the h264 movie clip you have seen.
This was just a first test to see what can be done using this tool.
When released I will have to provide several versions for different playback targets. Currently I am investigating very high quality settings, which are compatible with the bluray standard.
loramel
#114
I declare the visual development for Aras Tale as finished 
.
This is not 100% true, but I declare it nonetheless. Actually I still have to do the lipsyncing for two shots. This will be done after Aras Song is recorded, which will happen this very weekend.
The lipsyncing part should not interfere with any visual developments done so far. I just have to adjust the lip movements to Julias voice, feed the shots into my render pipeline and be done with it. You can be sure to hear if this turns out to be different
For the sound recording, I purchased a very simple but quite capable recorder device, a Zoom H1. It records uncompressed WAVs at a sample rate of up to 96kHz and 24 bits.
I got some very helpful tips from Mikkel on how to approach this recording. One of his tips was how to build yourself a cheap popfilter, which is an essential tool for the song recording. You may know the filters from images, where a big round net is positioned in front of the microphone.
I built mine using an old badminton racket and a pantyhose !
This filter works amazingly well. With this type of professional gear the recording session with Julia should go like a breeze
And finally, I put some stills directly taken from the picture locked directory for you here on the thread. Looking at them as stills reveals quite some problems an shortcomings, but used in the actual movie they work pretty well.
( The images are actually links to the full 1920x1080 images, but somehow they do not open when you click on them, so just follow the link and you will get the full resolution)
loramel
#115
I guess doing the lipsyncing as the last step in the production of a movie is not what you would call common practice. It is not even good practice. But then, thats just another first, of the many others encountered during production
After the recording session with Julia I managed to clean up the takes and provide Phil and Mikkel with a bunch of solid raw takes. Julia you did a fabulous job. Thank you !
While being swamped with work, Phil was able to do a very first draft of the song, mixing Julias voice (properly postprocessed) with orchestration. This first version is already very beautiful. Thinking back at the moment when I actually wrote the passage in the script, I never imagined to have such a touching song in my movie.
Again, this was one of those magic moments I encountered throughout the production, when individual pieces come together to form something new and this new is more then the raw sum of those parts.
Well, anyway, this finished song provided me now with the last missing part to finalize the visual part of the movie, which is the lipsyncing.
And it came to no big surprise that some lessons were learned,
again.
First, the rigging of the mouth sucked horribly in regard to create plausible mouth shapes for the song. But changing the rig at this point was out of the question, so I had to tweak a lot. Having a song with long held notes helped definitely here
Next, some decisions I made for speed improvements came now back to me to bite me very hard. For directional reasons and to fit the images better to the music, I edited the song sequence in such a way, that I used parts of some shots twice with different points of the song. Regarding rendertime this was a good decision, but, as you can imagine, trying to get this to work with lipsyncing is a big fail.
For one shot I was lucky, as Ara is only seen from relatively far away, and the overlap is at long held notes of the same vocal. Phew !
For the other shot, which is a closeup of Aras face, I had no chance to cheat in this way. I cursed the editor and tried to cheat anyway, until I noticed that in the edit I still had 14 unused frames at the end of the shot, which allowed me the shift the overlapping part by exactly this amount. And since the overlap was only 10 frames I was saved. Double Phew !
Another interesting thing to do, was not only to match the lip and mouth movements, but to also use the facial controls to match the emotional state of the song. I did some self observations how my lids, brows and forehead moved when trying to sing the song myself (it is a good thing nobody was in hearing range
). It is always an enlightening experience to observe what small movements of the brows can do the a faces expression.
The last two nights I managed to finish this final task as well and currently my render machine is humming along and creates the final renders. These will be finished on Sunday and then the visual aspect is truly finished and I am eagerly waiting for the sound and music department to fill in the missing pieces.
Its soooo close now
loramel
#117
It is not the first time the this project creates a momentum out of its own and steers to directions I have never thought of.
Today I managed to get a very generous offer from a local cinema. With the idea of supporting the local movie making community, I was offered to rent a full cinema hall for a local premiere of Aras Tale. The price is such, that I feel able to raise enough donations to get this actually financed.
This all comes with a catch, … of course
To ensure the best picture and audio I have to deliver the movie as DCP Digital Image Package, the actual world wide standard for distributing digital cinema content.
Fortunately there are free possibilities to be able to produce these type of digital media. But looking at the whole specifications behind this, I guess that there is a whole new world of things which needs to be handled correctly to get a working DCP movie.
What I would like to ask the community: Is there any knowledge out there, that could give me a good starting point and tips to start into the right direction ?
If you happen to have some experience with this, I am glad for any input you can provide.
loramel
#118
Production of Ara’s Tale is now finished !
The final files are uploaded for our testers for final screening. If no real showstoppers are found, I expect the movie to be released in a couple of days.
This will also conclude this very WIP.
Thank you all for watching
Goose80
#119
This is great news! I have been following this for over a year and a half myself, cant wait to see how such a project turns out in its final form. Either way it has been a wonderful inspiration.
Now to sit impatiently and wait after collecting all the dangling carrots that have been a joy to look at. 
