Final Film: Txcala (with a fancy new end credits board)
Honestly there's so, so much I could say at this point; I've gotten used to noting the major changes to uploads with each blog update, but it seems redundant for this final step. Not everything is 100% at the level I'd like it, there's niggling errors with animation; things I knew about before and things which have become more apparent having seen it a few times in the theatre. But at this stage I'm content with the level it's at, and can leave it to rest for a few months.
Since noone really follows this blog, I've liked using it to vent my thoughts, and I'll say it once, quietly, here, that I'm pretty proud of how everything turned out. I didn't know how much of a challenge it'd be to take a project from absolute zero, and turn it into a film, but I think for a student who three years ago knew fcking squat about 3D, this is a pretty decent effort.
When I joined Dawson, I was told it was "the other" animation school in Montreal. You know, "the one-for-people-who-applied-for-CVM-but-didn't-get-in, resorted to." Had I been more confident and proficient in French, these blog entries would probably have been for a different course, for a different school, and in a different language.
A bunch of us googled the graduate's films when we were in our first year, and we understood where the Dawson reputation came from; there were definitely a lot of solid, technically proficient films; some really well crafted films, some with fantastic ambition, but the students didn't have time to polish these 4 minute long epics... Those with stunning animation, were stuck compromising, using Goon and Morpheus; while those with custom rigs were still stuck in animatic and block phases. There was nothing that rivalled stuff like Le cinquième jour, Swing, Il était encore une fois... when I'd first had aspirations to go into 3D, those had been the films I'd been told were the benchmark. If I wanted to get a job out of school, that I needed to rival those films. But our teachers here at Dawson would say that Dawson's programme ran circles around CVM in every aspect. I didn't see it, but I wanted to. I was really inspired by Valerie Lim, and the films done by Snowmen in 2013. Ian and Sam particularly, who'd really hit a new level of finish with their films. They had a look, an atmosphere; they were immersive. When I watched Sam's I just remember thinking "Holy shit, how is this a student film".
Since noone really follows this blog, I've liked using it to vent my thoughts, and I'll say it once, quietly, here, that I'm pretty proud of how everything turned out. I didn't know how much of a challenge it'd be to take a project from absolute zero, and turn it into a film, but I think for a student who three years ago knew fcking squat about 3D, this is a pretty decent effort.
When I joined Dawson, I was told it was "the other" animation school in Montreal. You know, "the one-for-people-who-applied-for-CVM-but-didn't-get-in, resorted to." Had I been more confident and proficient in French, these blog entries would probably have been for a different course, for a different school, and in a different language.
A bunch of us googled the graduate's films when we were in our first year, and we understood where the Dawson reputation came from; there were definitely a lot of solid, technically proficient films; some really well crafted films, some with fantastic ambition, but the students didn't have time to polish these 4 minute long epics... Those with stunning animation, were stuck compromising, using Goon and Morpheus; while those with custom rigs were still stuck in animatic and block phases. There was nothing that rivalled stuff like Le cinquième jour, Swing, Il était encore une fois... when I'd first had aspirations to go into 3D, those had been the films I'd been told were the benchmark. If I wanted to get a job out of school, that I needed to rival those films. But our teachers here at Dawson would say that Dawson's programme ran circles around CVM in every aspect. I didn't see it, but I wanted to. I was really inspired by Valerie Lim, and the films done by Snowmen in 2013. Ian and Sam particularly, who'd really hit a new level of finish with their films. They had a look, an atmosphere; they were immersive. When I watched Sam's I just remember thinking "Holy shit, how is this a student film".
When I started work on my film, I kinda wanted to be that bar for future students; I wanted to be the David, the Karl, the Roxanne, the Val, or the Sam of the year. Someone who would make future students think "Holy shit, well if that was a student film, if they did it, there's nothing stopping me from doing it better." I was ambitious, I wanted to be part of that push that actually made this programme the uncontested best-of-Montreal. I think we can compete on an animation level, definitely. We've got some fantastic production teachers here at Dawson, but I think it's gonna take a few more generations before we have films that really don't just look like student films. I have this vain desire to be remembered by future generation, so I don't want my stuff to be forgotten. If however in 3-4 years, Txcala just looks like an average Dawson student film, I'll be really happy for the programme.
Txcala for me was a project that I went into kinda appreciating the challenges it would present. Omar's feedback on my animation had ignited something within me, and I knew that I would need to so something heavy animation if I wanted to go in that direction. But I didn't like the idea of using premade rigs for this film. I wasn't in a position financially to go for something like iAnimate who provided you with the pretty ones, and I didn't want to compromise, getting something cheap but kinda ugly, working on a project that I'd stop caring about because I knew that it wasn't really mine..
So I built my stuff from the ground up. I'd seen films with shitty rigs kinda fall flat in the past, but I wasn't a very proficient rigger, nor a modeller. So I did what I think any student in my position should do, take every available rig on the internet, and study the crap out of their topology. The terms and services of the rigs tell you not to, but I deconstructed every rig I could to find out why Bonnie's hands look like shit in every reel, to learn the differences between autorigging setups; A making-of Frozen s just come out? There's 3 frames where you can see Elsa's topology? I screencapped that shit and traced over them while I sculpted.
Charlene's model is this heinous mix and match of things I learned by breaking down LWS's Claire, about 4 other generic "female" rigs from online, some fanmade Elsa busts, and some Ahsoka Tano. I overlaid everything on a Digimon fan character that I made in 2009, I used autorigging softwares to lighten my load, but tried to understand why things were rigged the way they were. TheSetupMachine, which is used, got me about 60% of the way there, and then I went back and deleted stuff, and replaced with features that I needed. I added face, added dynamics, things that I thought would make my animation prettier and cut back one time hand animating a lot of secondary.
I decided to pull inspiration for a story from something like Jurassic Park, because the Monster-in-the-Room genre spoke to me. Little kids would hate my film, the same way I hated the scene in JP where the T-Rex attacks the LandRovers when I saw it as a 6 year old.. but that's my favourite film these days, so even if my story was nothing-nothing, it played on an emotion that would ensure it had some degree of success.
Charlene's model is this heinous mix and match of things I learned by breaking down LWS's Claire, about 4 other generic "female" rigs from online, some fanmade Elsa busts, and some Ahsoka Tano. I overlaid everything on a Digimon fan character that I made in 2009, I used autorigging softwares to lighten my load, but tried to understand why things were rigged the way they were. TheSetupMachine, which is used, got me about 60% of the way there, and then I went back and deleted stuff, and replaced with features that I needed. I added face, added dynamics, things that I thought would make my animation prettier and cut back one time hand animating a lot of secondary.
I decided to pull inspiration for a story from something like Jurassic Park, because the Monster-in-the-Room genre spoke to me. Little kids would hate my film, the same way I hated the scene in JP where the T-Rex attacks the LandRovers when I saw it as a 6 year old.. but that's my favourite film these days, so even if my story was nothing-nothing, it played on an emotion that would ensure it had some degree of success.
I modelled what I could for Character modelling, and used Charles' classes as an opportunity to start testing rigging setups. By the end of Semester 4 I'd retopollogised and re-rigged about 4 times. Over Summer I juggled fulltime work, Summer school, and remoddelling, rerigging, and working on an animatic.
By the time I hit school in Semester 5, it was time to really start working.
I could probably count on my hands, the number of times I left school before 10pm in the final two semesters. There were days I was so tired I wanted to cry. There was one day at about 4am, after I'd been working continuously for 2 days trying to resolve one of my worst rigging issues, when everything broke so utterly and completely, that I ragequit and drew up a plan to go live in the woods as a lumberjack. I was discouraged because I knew that if I'd just gone for something simpler, that I wouldn't have gotten myself stuck with every rigging issue known to man. It was immensely satisfying to fix these arbitrary, abstract problem solving puzzles, but it was a mental strain the likes of which I've never faced before. I started talking aloud to my computer (I named her rustyBucketBay), trying to work through the issues. She didn't talk back, but it helped, and I pushed though, and broke through that barrier. Altogether I had about 3 moments like that over the past year, where I just felt like things were so dark, how would I ever be able to make it through to the end, but the only way forward, was forward. and I wasn't prepared to compromise.
Once I got to animating, things became easier. My first animation tests showed me that my 3 months of rigging was still awful, and I lost a chunk of my Christmas break working on film and doing French courses. By January 20th I think i'd finally solved the rigging nightmares, and felt confident going into semester 6 because it was animation! That's what I was gunning for so it should have been easy. Despite all the complications I had, I managed to stay ahead of the curve and got stuck into layout sooner than most people, but there was stuff I'd never attempted. Quadrupeds, ones with mayaHair simulation, held together by nConstraints and nCloth... that shit is nightmare fuel, not that I slept enough to have nightmares, mind <3
I had issues translating my animatic from 2D to 3D; but I had good advice to follow, and asked for help when I couldn't go forward alone. Maintaining a social presence in the class helped. I think if I had worked in a vacuum, left when class finished and skipped every second Tuesday, I'd have fared a lot worse. Forcing myself to make deadlines, to ALWAYS hand stuff in for critique, it made me better. Even when I knew what I was submitting was shit, when I already knew what wasn't finished and what needed improvement.. taking critique on the chin and getting torn apart, made my film better.
I don't think enough people in the class really did that.
But I cared, I was invested in this because we're privileged to learn what we're learning and I feel that the work ethic you develop working on something like this says a lot about you. People see who cares, who stays, who puts in 60% effort and who goes for 100%. We're told so, so many times that this is the one time in your life you get to make something that's totally your own, and you have an entire year to invest in it.
Maybe my story is throwaway, my characters are silly, but I loved them and I cared about what they represented enough to invest every second of this last year towards them. I even wrote this obnoxiously long final blog post, which isn't worth any marks! because I felt like I kinda owed it to myself to really wrap things up properly.
So that's kinda it; I've got more film stuff floating around, and I'll post that sometime too; but this is kinda it for the "keep track of progress" stuff. This year i've really come to appreciate the importance of pursuing something you're passionate about, and consciously working towards something. I've learned a lot about ambition and motivation and sacrifice from myself, and I don't really know where I'm going with this but I feel that if I don't end on some psudo-Braveheart speech, then three years of invested energy will just fade into a weak sign off, and everyone reading this (all 2 people) will be let down. So do what you love, do what you're good at. Don't squander your opportunities, and make the most of the journey. The more difficult it is for you, the more you'll appreciate the destination.
I've never gone so long without making some stupid comedic remark in a blog post.
Tomorrow I'll start sharing this film around; but because I love you little blog, I'm putting it here first <3
Ka kite anō
Ka kite anō
