Bruce Del Porte

Congrats Zach, two great shorts. Have you printed them to film or are you showing them as video? Any chance of a quick summary of what was included in the new renders.

Fiendishly good fun Well done Nancy

Great character, I look forward to the video! Nice job

This week is up, it is time to move on. I added some frames as he loses his hat but I think it is still too fast to read really well. I would probably need to entirely reblock the scene to give it enough time to be obvious and right now the schedule says I don't have time. Fortunately it isn't an important story point and really has no role later, I may just take the hat out altogether. I may work on the transition on both ends of the scene, too as time permits. Next, we move to restless Dad using a noise outside to sneek a peek and enjoying the fresh snow but seeing the noise is only a dog. Scene 5

Maybe something to think about if you plan on animating him. you might need one more vertical row of splines on each side of the lower jaw centerline. When you go to rig his face, you will want the mesh resolution. I don't know what his relaxed neutral look is, sometimes when you model with the character with his mouth wide open you have trouble animating it and hitting an oo and oh pose. It is an interesting looking character, perfect for a Halloween piece. Keep going, what will the head look like?

Unless the knobs will have a close-up shot, they look fine. The lines make it obvious what they are and the rig looks good. Lighting all black objects is very difficult. Crank it to ELEVEN!

Great model, great render, great image. Well Done!

You can attach a photo of a feather to the AM hair feature for some interesting plumage.

I tweaked the tail a little more and added his hat falling off from the leap. It happens pretty quickly, and doesn't read real well. There may be too few frames to do it effectively and leaving it on for the whole shot has problems with his head out the window, I'll tweak it some more but I may nix it and leave it on the bed if I can't make it work effectively. Thanks for the cat tail intel, I dropped it down to just the tip as he looks out the window. With hat

Hey thanks for watching, In this take, I tried to quiet the tail down some but I still wanted to show some emotion on Dad’s part. In the first couple of shots, I show a house asleep anticipating Christmas. The kid who you would normally think would have insomnia waiting for Christmas morning is asleep dreaming and it is Dad who is awake with the excitement of Christmas Eve. Since Dad is looking away from the camera, I need the tail to show his nervous anticipation as he uses a noise (exaggerated is its description as a clatter) outside as an excuse to get up and look outside hoping to get a glimpse of Santa. At the end of the shot, I want the audience to be led to look outside with Dad, leading to the next shot that will be a POV of Dad’s view outside where I (the poem) will introduce Santa. By the time the shot gets to the window, I want the tail to subtly sustain the anticipation but the main focus to be looking outside. Anyway that’s my story interpretation and cinematic intent. I don’t think I’m there yet but I still have some time left this week. Dhar, yes, these are great models, it would be a crime not to use them. Thanks Scene 5 Martin, I'll put you on the Chrismas card list!

Great piece John, I've always liked that model. Keep at it Steve, we all have to work hard on walks.

Getting much better! You might want to shorten her stride a hair, it might reduce the popping when the right foot makes contact. She is also a little flat footed at the high point. Remember, she is levering her weight over the planted foot and catches her weight on contact. Usually at the top of the pivot over the leg, you are on the ball of your planted foot and the CG is over the ball. Her leg should be strait. I tried a similar test some time ago, girlie walks are difficult, especially if you are trying to make the same cycle look good from all angles. For movie making, you have the advantage that you only have to look good for the camera. Maybe to keep it simple, try optimizing for one viewing angle. Keep at it. My try I didn't even bother with the arms, I worked on the hip action. Yep, toon girls wiggle when they walk!

It is midweek and this is the basic scene of shot five. I still have to add in his hat and do a lot of polishing but this is the basic idea. His tail seems to take over the scene when the idea is that he is looking outside to investigate a noise. I may reduce the size of his tail and try to keep the wag below his shoulders. Scene five WIP

A good start, it will look better when she is moving forward and the feet stick to the ground. One comment, from the side, it looks like her hips are a little far back, not quite over her feet. There are also a couple of pops where her feet change direction for one frame. Maybe a little more hip action will sell it. Good secondary action.

A wonderful model Stian Bravo!

The mylar skinned insulating blankets are very expensive but you can buy a mylar helium baloon for a a dollar or two. They are usually silver in color. I like the lander model. One comment; There is no atmosphere on the moon so the light is fairly non-diffuse, shadows are harsh and very high contrast, almost black. http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/BROWSE/apollo16_1.html A very cool project!

Yes, these are the establishing shots to give audience the layout and establish the mood of a house asleep yet in anticipation of Santa's visit. The main characters, Dad & Santa, get introduced in the next couple of scenes. This is really a side project. School uses specific exercises to emphasize certain basic skills. Eventually you have to translate all these skills to movie making and you really have to practice that on your own.

Scene Four: Here I didn't change much, I fixed his hat and tweaked his eyes. I experimented making the bedspread using cloth sim but I don't have the knack for it quite yet. Since it isn't important to the story, I left it for another day. The Trolley Wood material on the picture frame above the bed was strobing for some reason. Removing Porcelain seemed to abate the noise on the frame. I wasn’t able to do anything about the noise in the decal, probably because of the angle. So far, I'm on schedule but the hardest scenes are ahead of me. Scene Four

I didn't see the nose penetrate, thanks Rodney. Yes, critique away, I can't possibly see everything. Thanks Edit: It was a quick fix Nose Fix

Introduction: I’m remaking an old Christmas video called “Twas the Night Before Christmas” that I did three years ago. As I completed scenes, I thought I would blog them here for general discussion of animated short making and have everyone critique what I am doing. I originally did this piece as a video Christmas card however in my ignorance of delivering video, most of the people I sent it to didn’t have the bandwidth or a powerful enough computer to view it. This year I will make it into a DVD and hope for a wider audience. I started about the first of July and am shooting for completion by December 19th. While I would love a lot more time, I am going to make as many improvements to the original as I can in the allotted time. This gives me a chance to mail DVDs for Christmas and there is a local art-house movie theater that uses a digital projector that has agreed to screen it on the 19th as part of their Arthaus Microcinema Series. http://chaosartspace.blogspot.com I’ve shown other cartoons there before and it is striking how good some of them look on a theater screen. Original Video 25Mb Background: I’m currently half way through the courses of Animation Mentor and need a real world exercise to practice the theory I have been learning. While the original piece has its charm, it is clear it could use some animation and cinematography improvements. I’m not much of a modeler so most of the models are adaptations or right out of the Hash donated collection. This year I plan on substituting the Santa Cat from the Extras CD for the two models I used before. I also will change from subtitles to a voiceover. Other than that I will reuse most of the previous characters and sets with some new tweaks. Shooting Schedule: There are 25 planned scenes. There are five sets and three main characters and a some extras. I will combine shooting scenes as much as practical. I will be compositing character action onto fixed sets where it seems to save render time. Last time I didn’t really know about compositing and each scene was shot as one pass. Week 7/1 Opening (1) Week 7/8 Kids room (2) & Sugar plums (3) Week 7/15 Moma’s room (4) Week 7/22 Spring to window (5) Week 7/29 Wondering eyes (6) Week 8/5 Dry leaves (7) Week 8/12 Now Dasher (8) Week 8/19 To the roof (10) Week 8/26 Head in (11) Week 9/2 Down Chimney (12) Week 9/9 Stockings (14) Week 9/16 Presents (16) Week 9/23 Pipe (17 & 19) Week 9/30 Santa (20) Week 10/7 Complete presents (22) Week 10/14 Up Chimney (23 & 24) Week 10/21 & 10/28 Kat looking (9,13,15,18,21) Week 11/4 To all a good night (25) Week 11/11, 11/18, & 11/25 Slack and fix scenes that really bother me Week 12/ 2 & 12/9 Composite and editing Week 12/16 Produce DVD December 19th It’s Show Time and mail DVDs Note: The “Kat looking” shots are the Dad/narrator reaction shots to seeing Santa. I will do them last so I can vary the lengths of each one to keep the timing of hitting the music beats on track. This gives me a little slack on length for each scene. Workflow: I use Animation Master v13 for all of the sets and character animation. The conversion from 10.5 to 13 has gone pretty smoothly with no insurmountable problems. I try and shoot in layers and composite in Sony’s Vegas Video 6.0. I pretty much always keep a running WIP in Vegas and render out daily progress. I animate in AM and render TGAs continuously when I am away from the computer. If I keep track of file naming correctly the Vegas WIP is always the latest version. Some masked composites I do in Autodesk’s Combustion 4.0, I’ll try and point those out when I do and why. Everything is being done on a Dell Precision 670 w/ 2X P4 3.8GHz Xeon, 3GB. The schedule is tight and life always intervenes so I am going to have to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough” if I am going to make December 19th. Here we go! Scene 1 For this scene I wanted to improve the lighting to include some flickering to make it seem like the primary illumination came from the fireplace and to add a little dynamics to the scene. I rendered out the flames as a separate pass and used it as a gel on a klieg placed in the fireplace. It is hard to tell how many flickering is enough. Each frame took 18 minutes to render so I don’t get many renders to experiment. I tried to upgrade the sprites for both the snow and the fire. Originally I used the flames from the firepot project as is, I wanted to make the fire seem a little more roaring. I couldn’t get the brightness in the firebox and the shadowyness of the room on one pass to look good so I did them as separate passes and composited them together in Combustion because I needed to mask off the sides of the firebox. The left two stockings are a separate layer to allow for the firebox composite. I also added a render of one frame of the tree behind the window set to 75% transparent to look like a reflection in the window. I never could get the window pane reflection to look right. I changed the title from one of the stock Vegas 3.0 text pages to using AM’s Font wizard and rendering it in the flickering light as a separate pass. If I have time to improve it at the end I will redo the snow pass to make the startup a little smoother. Scene One Scene 2: Not many changes here. I did a little modeling around the window sash and added the snow from scene one. I also added a tweak or two to the lighting to add a little flicker from the TV. Scene Two Scene 3: I redid the Sugarplum Fairy and changed the sprites. Originally I had candy canes as the sprite but they didn’t read all that well. Technically sugarplums are candies so the candy canes were correct but I wanted to add some color so I made the scene a little more abstract. I tried to improve the yawn but other than that, Shaggy is the same. I did the fade of the back wall in 10.5 and there was a strange line as it went transparent. I never could figure it out. I just faded it in Vegas this time. The Sugarplum Fairy still seems a little stiff. Her rig is old and sort of sub-optimal so if I have time I may rerig her and do this scene over. Scene Three

"AVI mp4" I didn't know that was a Microsoft option. Is the final video file an .mp4 file? Did you use square pixils at 425 x 350? What frame rate did you use? Did you use Quicktime to compress the video or something else? I have Vegas and can use MainConcept Mp4 or Quicktime, neither gives me an AVI. I guess I'll have to experiment. Thanks Bruce

Great spoof, I loved it! There wasn’t a long list of credits so I assume you did it yourself, that is quite an epic. Some really nice models and sets. One question, what codec did you use when you uploaded it to youtube? Even using a lossless codec, after their compression, I seem to get a lot of distortion. Your’s looks great. Good job Bruce

Thanks guys, The bit from the Onion is close to what I was thinking but too much to animate in a day (or year for that matter), so yes, use your imagination with the Onion as your guide. I tried doing some gradient blurring in post to get a heat effect, subtle, not really satisfactory. Maybe a lensing sprite of some sort although I shutter at the render times? A thought problem for next time. Blur heat attempt 2.5MB Bruce

A quicky I did yesterday afternoon. Best wishes Zarqawi (2.5MB)

Hey gang, I've been away on family stuff and haven’t been doing much. I did this piece a while ago for the Howard Stern Film Festival. They got 2137 entries and announced the winners last week. The winner got $30K in cash and prizes. Unfortunately I didn’t make the final nine to be part of the TV show. It might as well be seen here. Bruce