Ladies and gentlemen... the storyboards are complete; the animatic is cut... and so this week I present to you a VERY special Work In Progress: The first draft of the Character Development Teaser Trailer.
I spent all of today just cutting this thing from the animatic. I hope it give you guys a quick peek into what the story is going to be about, but without spoiling it all.
I am a week out from the scheduled feedback session, and already, the actors are clamoring to see the cut. I have some final sound effects and panels to insert - there's some fodder for a couple of Process Diary entries for the next couple of weeks, right there. Once I have feedback, I will possibly be taking some time-out from the Process Diary to work out a few revisions.
Now a bit about the trailer. To create this trailer, I've used After Effects for the title sequences, and Final Cut Pro for the edit. The music is called "Ravenous" and credit goes to User Spinilius on www.soundsnap.com.
Soundsnap is a fantastic database of free (both cost-free and royalty free) music loops and sound effects for just this sort of production. I've actually used it for my entire sound effects track, which I will show you a bit of in the next week or so.
I'm in home territory now, cutting this trailer. I work in advertising, and cut promos, tv commercials, and info-torials every day. It's not that hard to sum up a story in a few sentences once you have a story. The usual trailer formula goes something like this:
A place
A mission
A reason to go on the mission
MOVIE TITLE
Story by: insert name here
Starring: insert names here
MOVIE TITLE
Coming soon
Of course, there are many other variations on this. I've said before I don't shy away from formula - it is there for a reason, and can greatly assist you in marketing your vision. But take a look at this classic clip from a few years back which pokes fun at the whole movie trailer phenomenon:
The point of a teaser-trailer is simple: give the audience something to chew on; something to pique their interest - something which yells out "Hey - this show is for YOU. Come watch it!"
I hope this does the trick. As you can see, I've used the animatic shots to tell the story. As time goes on and I begin to replace the animatic with 3D renders, the trailer will again evolve.
So please, comment here on the blog, email me at flawedprefect@gmail.com, and just SPREAD THE WORD about Character Development.
I'm on the home stretch, now. I've storyboarded and rough-cut the first two acts for episode 1: Market. I flew through about ten pages last Sunday, and my wrist hasn't been this sore since... well before I was married.
I discovered that because Act 3 is predominantly action, I needed to find some really cool poses and angles. I've been fairly lucky being able to draw most things from imagination, but sometimes, I get stuck: If someone is pointing at you down a ten millimeter lens, is his elbow obscured? Where does his shoulder go? How big should his head be in comparison to his hand - or more importantly: his finger? How then, do I put this in my rule-of-thirds grid?
It taxes the mind, and that's when I need to take a break, and then take some pictures.
I am aware of many artists who cannot live without reference photos, and swear by them every time they are asked. Take a look at Jason Badower's work, for example, and he often talks about taking reference pictures for his Heroes work (He starred as Mohindir in a couple of episodes a few months back, having no friends to model for him).
I thought I'd give it a go, and Anh was happy to be my photographer (tho... not so happy to be in the pictures).
I've outlined how I go from picture to sketch in the vidcast this week, but here is a side-by-side comparison:
As you can see, I can use my reference to work out the finer points of perspective, and then use a little imagination to go the rest of the way.
I've been posing as Minauld, Sal, Izmir, Corben. Strangely enough, Aziz seems to take care of himself... or maybe I am just not that thin anymore.
So at about 50 pages in (50x6=300 panels), I have to admit I have been taking a few short-cuts. Is it cheating? Heck no. Work out the philosophy for yourself, if you like, but to me, it amounts to this: If all 3D is a cheat, then surely every step of the process can be cheated if the opportunity so arises?
What I mean is that we take short-cuts when we can. Sometimes, I need three panels to be virtually identical, except for a small change. Here is an example:
Not that panel 2# - only the lid flips up. Panel 3# - Corben's expression changes. I copied the first image twice, and made the adjustments in frame to make two more frames. In all, the first frame took me three or four minutes; combined, frames 2# and 3# took me thirty seconds.
Anyways, that's it for this week. I am racing to the finish-line now, with but five pages of script left to go... but I have no idea how many panels that may take me.
This month is going to be a vidcast-palooza, and you guys deserve it. The final podcast for last month was recorded before the end of July, but the downloads kept on soaring. July boasts a total of 5,593 unique downloads. Not bad, considering the first month I began this podcast, my grand total was 20.
So this week, I began to cut my animatic. I have still got pages to storyboard, but in amongst the insane amount of drawing I've had to do, I managed to put aside an afternoon as re-record the Sydney cast. Osman gave a cracker performance as Sal Wedge, the disgruntled and under-appreciated Sand Boat loader.
I think I'm getting the hang of this director shtick! With Osman, I found that actually acting out the lines and allowing him to add his own personality helped him get into character and stay in character.
You'll hear a little of his performance in this week's vidcast, as I show you how I go from storyboard to animatic.
I go a bit fast, and for this I apologize, but you can see the programs I use and the methods I employ to export the individual frames from the storyboard sheets for use in a cut.
The programs I used this week are Photoshop CS3 and Final Cut Pro 6.03 - courtesy of KFilms (where I work). I'm actually quite relieved to have these tools at my disposal, as KDEnlive is not nearly up to snuff with the editing side, and I use FCP every day, so I can cut quite fast.
Photoshop is like the more expensive and flashier big brother to GIMP (which I have been using to sketch out each panel) and the reason I used it is because I needed a fast way to export individual frames from the 6 frame sheets into an exact-sized panel. The math goes something like this: 40 pages to date, 6 panels per page. 40x6=240 individual panels to export.
I could sit there and crop out 240 panels by hand, paste them into a comp and align them... OR I could be smart, and set up an action in Photoshop which does this for me.
GIMP at this stage can only do an action via Script Fu. And I'm not too good with scripting. For those interested in trying their hand at saving some scripts for GIMP, check out this page: GIMP SCRIPTS.
So why - I hear you ask - did I choose to make pages with six images per page? The answer is this: I can easily import each page into a pdf document for a future producer or studio to look at. It is far easier to flick through 40 pages than 240 images, and they can have a hard copy of it printed to flick through at their discretion.
So it's not a mistake (for once lol).
So this is how I got six images off each page and into FCP:
First, I had to set up an action. An action is basically a way of recording a bunch of tasks you know you are going to repeat over and over and over, then saving them, so you can apply it to other images.
The action I set up would crop each frame out of the page, and export the single panel into a folder of my choosing. I did this by setting up guides on the first frame, filling in a black square, then duplicating the black square five more times. This gave me objects I could snap more guides to.
I then switched off the black square layer, and began to record the action.
I set up a new action in my "custom actions" folder. Then i record the following steps:
Crop image 1#
Save as SB01.tga to folder: Animatic
undo crop
Crop image 2#
Save as SB02.tga
Undo crop
Crop image 3#
Save as SB03.tga
Undo crop
Crop image 4#
Save as SB04.tga
Undo crop
Crop image 5#
Save as SB05.tga
Undo Crop
Crop image 6#
Save as SB06.tga
Undo Crop
Save file
Close file
After that, I hit the "stop" button in my actions window and this effectively saves the action.
In the vidcast, you can see what happens when I apply that action to another board. This saves me a lot of time, you could imagine, but I still have to go back and relabel each export so that they number SB001.tga through to SB240.tga
Even so, the bulk of the work is done by Photoshop for me, and that's a good thing.
Next, it's time to import all the stills into FCP. Now I am a stickler for setting up a job template for all my work. In FCP, I set up an audio bin, and edits bin, and a stills bin. Audio is where I put the voice recordings; edits where I save my timelines, and stills where Import my freshly exported still frames.
I drag the still frames down to my timeline, and edit as I would footage, in a 16:9 comp. I found that the frame I was working in is actually slightly wider than 4:3, so cropping was minimal, and the compositions looked fantastic in 16:9. I only had to adjust the odd screen up or down to get the framing spot on - you could imagine my relief.
Editing is essentially getting the timing of the words to match up with the pictures. I am about 8 minutes into the first cut. This is looking as tho the pilot might actually fit into 15 minutes after all.
Creating the animatic takes very little time for me, because it is simply trimming the stills to time, and not drawing them. As I've said before, looking back over the work I've created thus far, I can see holes appearing, and putting them into the animatic, it is more obvious when something is missing - a pose, a shot, a cut away. I will be getting into how to fill these gaps in a future podcast, so stay tuned.
Special mention this week to my studio - KFilms. They were kind enough to allow me to use the work macbook and the software tools to produce the work for this week's vidcast.
KFilms is a post-production agency in Ultimo, Sydney. We handle all sorts of media - from digital signage to TV commercials. We can take your promotional package from go to woah.
Paul Caggegi is a Sydney-based Video editor and 3D Motion-graphics designer. He is currently working on a short sci-fi anime vidcast series entitled "Character Development"
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