Terminated

Though it saddens me, I have put this project on hold indefinitely as I pursue an education and career in the film industry. If I ever find myself to be established enough to devote resources to a pet project, I would love to complete my film "Desktop." But as it stands, that will not be happing in the foreseeable future. The Amazing Wooden Man Project has been officially terminated.

Animation, and Why I Will Never be a Hair Stylist

Well I realized how long had been since I last updated this blog, and decided I should get to it. That was two weeks ago. I've kind of been putting it off for a while now. The reason? Well the progress I've made hasn't been quite to my standards. I've been mostly working on giving life to my characters(s) through animation, and giving my one female character the "stylish shoulder length hair that is a color somewhere in between orange and brown" that the script calls for. I can tell you that it was much easier to type that innocent little line of text than it is to actually create the hair. When creating computer generated hair, you have precise control over every strand on the head. You'd think this would make it easier, and in a way it does. But in real life, no matter how bad someone's hair looks, it still looks like hair. In computer animation, bad hair can look like a blob of something sitting on you characters head that in no way resembles anything close to hair, even when you stand ten feet away and squint your eyes. It's really rather frustrating. But needless to say, I now have much more respect for hair stylists than I have ever had before.

So when I haven't been impersonating a hair stylist, I've been practicing animation. I can tell you, it's some pretty tough stuff. You have to look at it like your an actor. You have the same tools actors do, timing, body language and such. But I would argue that animating is many times more complex than acting. Actually I would go so far as to say that an animator is the ultimate actor, the über-actor. The animator is not just one character on a stage, he is all the characters, at the same time. Every movement that is seen must have been put their intentionally by the animator. All the little things a stage actor does with out thinking to enhance his performance must be fully understood by the animator. Nothing can be done by "feel." Where an actor is required to "stroll casually," he does it by feel. No one has to tell him how to stroll. But an animator must fully understand the every nuance of motion in a stroll, from the timing of the arm swinging to the bounce that might be seen subtly in the feet. So thats what I'm working on. Both the understanding of motion and recreation of motion.

This is one of the walk-cycles I've animated for practice. I'm hardly happy with it, his body jerks back with every step as if he is being hit by some force, and his legs snap forward as he walks. So I really wasn't going to post it, but then I remembered that this blog was about my progress, not my best work:)

Screenplay Completed

UPDATE: You can download the file here. Password: j394h.264

So it has been a couple of weeks since I last posted, but the reason for that, I am happy to say is that I have been writing the final draft(s) of the screenplay, and did not want to post before it was complete. Anyway, I made a few final adjustments this morning, and it is now finished. I haven't decided where (or if) I will post it online, but for now, if you would like to read it, send me an email at jchambone@gmail.com and I'll send you a copy.

I think I wrote my first screenplay when I was around eleven or so. It was supposed to be a take off of the myth of King Midas, and was an ugly thing, about two pages long. Later in my middle school years, as I delved deeper into stop-motion animation, I wrote four or five screenplays. I had oh so great plans for each one, but only one of them was ever actually filmed. Needless to say, I knew nothing at all about writing for the screen. I'm sure if I could read them now, I would be quite entertained. Sadly, it was in those middle school years that I discovered that you could password protect word documents, and I am unable to open any of these old screenplays that I have on my computer.

I have progressed a bit since then, but I still have had no formal instruction as far as screenwriting. So before I even began writing Desktop, I took some time read and study bits and pieces of a few of my favorite films. Each one had a different style, and as I looked at them, I realized that each had a vert different purpose. For instance, in the movie "Cast Away," with Tom Hanks, the writer presents you with this wonderfully vivid description of the opening shot.

"The Texas plains, horizon to horizon, nothing but the browns

and ochres of earth and the blue and violet of the sky. The

sheer scope of it sinks in: the blank slate of nature, the

absence of man."

But comparing that to the beginning of Pixar's "Toy Story," we see a bit of contrast.

"A row of moving boxes lie on the floor of the room. They

are drawn up in crayon to look like a miniature Western town.

The bedroom is lined with cloud wallpaper giving the

impression of sky."

While the excerpt from Cast Away paints a picture in the reader's mind, the sample from Toy Story just gives the facts of the setting. So why the difference?

Cast Away was an original screenplay written by William Broyles. Toy Story, on the other hand, was developed collectively by the men who were pioneering the company we know today as Pixar. The difference? The creators of Toy Story, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Andrew Stanton just to name a few, had the funding and support of Disney to make a movie. They didn't need to convince anybody to produce there movie. The purpose of the screenplay for Toy Story was strictly to provide a story structure for the movie that was going to be made. Cast Away on the other hand, did not have that assuredness of production. For all Broyles knew, his movie might never be a reality. He had to write in a compelling enough manner so as to make a producer say "Hey, I think I want to spend 90 million making this film." A hard selling point to say the least.

Now with Desktop, I really only had the same need for a screenplay that the creators of Toy Story did, to provide my story with a structure. I wasn't trying to sell it to anybody. But I still put a lot more into it, artistically and descriptively then I probably needed to. This is because I can see every shot, every movement, and every other nuance of the film in my mind. I can play see it play straight through, just like it would on screen. The problem is, only I can see it. And my purpose in the screenplay of Desktop, is to change that. To get the vision that I have out of my mind, and be able to show people exactly what I want the finished film to be.

Working...

Well right now I'm working on a couple things. Firstly, my lighting set up. In computer animation, to recreate the effect of light in the real world, I have to "light" my scene(s) with virtual lights. The actual placing of the lights is not hard to do. But it gets a little tricky setting them to create a convincing, natural, look. I thought I had this all squared away quite a bit ago, but when I added a stack off loose papers into the set, I realized that I had it wrong. The stack of papers, instead of looking like a pile of individual papers, just looked like a solid thick white shape. I've spent a lot of time today looking at other peoples lighting set ups and trying to fix mine. I've had a couple "breakthroughs" that didn't amount to much, but I'm pretty sure I'll have it worked out by tonight or tomorrow.

I'm also working on a book. A computer generated book, not a actual book. This also had some lighting issues which will hopefully fixed along with the papers, but the main issue is that I have to be able to animate pages turning. There a couple different ways the I can do this. I've tried two of them, with limited success. The first worked, but was tedious to set up, while the second was easier to set up, but didn't work that great. I'll probably revert to the first method, but I haven't totally decided yet.

Oh and also, I have dropped the first draft of the screenplay and am moving on the the second draft. This is is because I wrote myself into a corner with the first draft, and to resolve the story I realized I would have to go back and change stuff that I had already written, so to keep the process clean I thought it best to move on to the second draft. So thats pretty much where I am right now, but now I must leave my computer and go outside and weed. More to come soon.

Learning the Art

Well I'd like to say that I haven't posted anything for the last twelve days because I've been spending all my hours on the film, working my butt off day in and day out. But as you've probably guessed, this is not the case. The fact is that until yesterday, I'd gone for almost a week without touching the project. My reason? I was frustrated. Really frustrated.

Sometime last week I decided that I was going to have a hardcore production day. I would sit at my computer all day, and not so much as think an unproductive thought. I would go all day, IM nobody, not check facebook, not even tempt myself to look at the latest tech news headlines. Surprisingly, my day went as planned, and I spent my entire day practicing animating my character. Now I'm assuming that as your reading this your sitting down. If you were to stand up, and just stand there, you would not be standing still. Your arms would be loosely swinging, and your chest would be moving slightly as you breath. Your body would be making a million other minor motions that you could hardly identify. You couldn't stand perfectly still even if you wanted to. Even when standing still, a character is alive and moving. The only character that isn't, is a dead character, and for the most part I'd like to keep my wooden man alive. So I spent all day working on creating realistic motion for a character that was standing still. It kept looking better and better to me. But towards the end of the day, I made some changes, and didn't save the old version. I looked at it, and was farther from being satisfied then I had been when I started. I looked at an older version, and that looked just as bad. So thats when I shut down all my software, and tried not to think about it. Luckily, yesterday I started up again. I worked on the screenplay a bit, started modeling(creating) a book that will be lying out on the desk. So thats where I am right now. As soon as I publish this I'll get back to work, and hopefully my next post will be a little more about success then not.

The Set

The first image you see here is the larger portion of my set, the left side of the desk. There will be a bit more clutter laying around in the final product, stacks of papers, maybe a book or two, but I'm leaving it as is for now. The guy in the picture frame is a man named Ton Roosendaal. He practically created the software that I'm using to do this project, and still heads up the development out in Amsterdam.

This second image is the beginnings of my original set. It was going to be an old office, with the desk in the center, the idea being that a graphic artist worked there. But instead, I dumped that idea and went to the black emptiness that you see in the current image. Why? Because creating a full sized room would have put my character, Jack, up against an crazy oversized world. I didn't want that. I wanted him to be in a world that was perfectly his size. The room would have made him look much smaller, even with while keeping the camera in close to him.

Jack

Here, I present to you, my Amazing Wooden Man. His name is Jack. It's kind of a play on the rock band, Jack's Mannequin. This guy is a fully posable character, he can do anything I want him to. It took me about a weekend to create him, and then many more weeks to "rig" him, that is creating a virtual skeleton inside him so I can pose him, like a toy action figure. The one thing you'll probably notice about him, is that he's kind of missing a face, and no, it's not because of the pretty much nonexistent production budget. As a matter of fact, for a while I toyed with the idea of showing his facial expressions through a "pencil drawn" face, as if somebody had scribbled a smiley face on his head just for the heck of it. As you can see I gave up this idea, mostly because I wanted to focus on the showing his emotion through his physical character, his motions, the way he holds himself. Why? Because I think that is really the essence of animation, bringing characters to life. Making them feel real enough that you, the audience, can relate to and almost see them as real. Look at Luxo Jr., the Pixar Short with the little lamp that hops around. If you haven't ever seen it, you can check it out here. It's a very short, simple film, that has influenced and partially inspired mine. The lamp has no face at all, and he can really do nothing but hop around. Yet you can still feel what he's thinking. You see the simple emotions in this little lamp, his enthrallment with the ball, his childish disappointment when it's gone, and his total excitement when he finds a new one. This emotion is one of the biggest things that I want to see in my film when it's complete. Now you might be reading this and kind of laughing to yourself. Maybe animation isn't your thing, and you'd rather have intense action films like the classic Matrix, or Rush Hour. Well to tell the truth, I'm a bit of an action flick fan myself. I really enjoy seeing a good well done fight sequence. Then why am I so enthralled with animation? Because the same basic idea applies to an intense live action film, as it does to a cute humorous animated short. That idea: story telling. And I suppose that what I've been getting at through this whole post. I said that showing emotion through a character is the essence of animation. But animation is only part of the whole film, only one part, that works together with all other aspects of the film to tell a story. And that story telling, is the essence of filmmaking. It's an age old tradition, and an art. An art that I've set out to learn.