Pre-production Pipeline

Even during pre-production, a project can rapidly become a mess if you are not careful. In this phase, the assets to manage are:

• script (for us, a Celtx project)
• breakdown ( a document with shot by shot list for the movie)
• storyboard images – one per shot, in our case typically done in Gimp
• animatic – usually generated from modified storyboard images, but sometimes from .blend or other files, the animatic is a draft of the movie with minimal animation (camera anim, few in-betweens per shot, etc).

moving into production, we also need to manage:

• shot file or files
• production reference library
• production edit

Adding a shot can be an ad-hoc process: assign it a name and number in the breakdown, make a storyboard image, then work on any number of source gimp and blender files to generate some .pngs or .avis that are finally referenced in the sequencer. Rinse and repeat, and you end up with hundreds of disorganized files, touching any of which will break the animatic edit–a situation far from ideal.

Organization

If you look at Jarred’s earlier post , you can see the beginnings of the solution. We had some issues from using a patched Blender and were still looking at a lot of manual work to add a shot into the production. Most of these problems we solved with a slight re-organization of the preproduction directory:

As you can see, the main folder contains source files (which should eventually be moved to their own subfolder), the breakdown and the edit. The source files generate the shots: all their filenames begin with xxx_yyyyyy, where xxx is the shot number, and yyyyyy is the short description from the breakdown. These are all checked into SVN. A subfolder called images/ contains various subfolders, one per shot, with the name xxx_yyyyyy. These contain every image, image sequence, movie or other file that is referenced by the edit.

Now we no longer need a modified Blender, since we don’t need to edit the names of the image files, just their paths.

Introducing Geppetto

The next step towards improving anything is coming up with a cool name. To wit, ‘sequence_add_and_rename_shots.py — our former Python script for resequencing shots — becomes Geppetto, for the puppet master himself.

Ordering the Edit

Now our directories were organized, but the edit looked a mess! it would be nice to have each shot as a strip, not a collection of strips and effects. So we used Blender’s metastrip feature, which basically allows you to encapsulate any collection of related strips in the sequencer (strips in Blender are like clips in other editors) with one ‘metastrip’ – kinda like a strip folder. We gave each of these the name xxx (the shot number)- now when you look at the edit from the top view, all you see is shots, not the layering of all the background, foreground, etc. elements coupled with effects and transforms to make them move.

Hooking it into Geppetto

All this organization makes things easy to automate. Geppetto currently provides an:

• ‘Add Shot’ Button which lets you type in the shot number and name and then does the following:
  1. Adds the shot to the breakdown (you no longer edit the breakdown by hand, but use Geppetto instead)
  2. Creates a source .xcf file with the name xxx_yyyyy.xcf , adds, and commits to svn
  3. Creates a folder of the name xxx_yyyyy in images/ and makes a .png single frame in it
  4. Links the image into the sequence editor as a strip at the current frame position
  5. Encapsulates the image into a meta strip with the name xxx
• ‘Remove Shot’ Button: basically lets you type in which shot to remove , and takes it out of svn, the edit, the breakdown, everywhere. The files go to a junk folder so you don’t lose it for good.
• Shot List, with each shot getting:
  1. A text field you can edit to change the shot number
  2. A commit button to push your change to svn and the edit – basically this is for the editor/director to resequence a shot, or (not implemented yet) change the shot description refer to Jarred’s post for details
  3. An update button to update Svn and get new shot images in. Basically, if you or someone else changed the source .xcf for a shot, this gets those changes in automatically – details upcoming in part 2!

And finally, Jarred has made a prototype of the next feature, not yet rolled into the main code (drumroll, please): stay tuned for the ‘Make Movie’ Button in part 3!

While Bassam’s been editing the animatic in the sequence editor, we’ve been feeding him with boards and exploring a little with some concepts. A few days ago Pablo did some great designs for the train, and lately we’ve been doing some for the station.

Edited: Added the train concepts.

In the process of editing we found troublesome bug in the sequence editor where animation data gets linked to newly added sequences – this seems to be connected to old deleted strips. In an attempt to avoid this he’s been using a python script I wrote ( based on a suggestion by Colin Levy) that renames all strips with new unique names. This is a stopgap until we report the bug…

sequences rename script.py
(don’t worry, we’ll submit a bug report- it took us a while to figure out exactly what was triggering the bug, but we think we can make it repeatable now)

Well, first of all, I’m gonna to introduce my self: I’m Pablo Lizardo from Argentina, to be more accurate I’m from here! sooo far away!! As Fateh and Bassam told in the latest post, I was accepted as intern to “work” for the next 3 months in this awesome project called “Tube”

I came just six days ago, so all is new for me, luckily all the people in the team and at the hampshire college are great and really kind. So there wasn’t problems with the adaptation time. Before I start talking about the project, I want to make a special mention to Bassam, Fateh and Jarred who give me all I need, and are always asking if there’s all going right!

Well, do I’ve mentioned that the town/city (Northampton, MA) is really beautifull? i think not! All the buildings and houses are like the movies

Another little thing to mention is that all has a lot of patience with me , because my english is really bad XD, I guess that get laughs at my back! But i think that i’m learning a lot, so i think that in … 3 months I’ll be ready to communicate with english people

Lets talk about important things! The food is really strange, I miss the argentinean food! but I must adapt to this new forms of eat! I feel lucky because I came with Yerba Mate.

From the first day I start to work in the Nerdodrome,It’s a very nice place where a lot of cool things happen!, There’s also a project called Caldera which is produced in the same place, fortunately here we have a lot of new computers to do all the work together without disturb to anybody.

In the project, I’m mostly dedicated to draw some boards for the animatic. So I’m doing a lot of 2d stuff, sometimes i have things to do in 3d but not too much. I don’t have problem with that because I love to draw and make sketches!

Here’s some images that I did in this few days. Keep on touch for more blog updates!

- Pablo

Hi

I have had little time to make my early template model for the Gilgamesh character. This is a template model that I will be using to finalize her. At this point I have not pushed the features much since I am mainly worried about the general feeling and the topology of the model. We will probably create multiple versions of her to test out different styles that is why it is very important that our template model is extensible. At this point the model needs some anatomical corrections, some fixes since it is an early progress model. But I am not worried about them much now.We will have some time to fix them later.

As you can see my base mesh does not have any topological concerns, things like edge loops are not pronounced in the model mainly because those kinds of concerns would limit your workflow and might get in the way especially during sculpting and testing out proportions. It is always best to start out loose and slowly build up along the way.  What is very important is the looseness and lightness of the model. Once we have a satisfying looks we can always find many different ways to transfer all the details  and structures over other models.  Blender offer variety of them.

Fabulous concept artist Redo/Superbad/Juan Angel has been cranking away at Gilgamesh drawings, working towards nailing the final character design. In response to his fresh batch, the consensus, as far as I understand it, goes something like,

\m/_  ( ^ _ ^ )  _\m/

Clearly, we are excited to be getting so close.

The character’s development is part of a funny secret history of the Tube project that Bassam left out of his introduction. If challenged on its revisionism, being enamored of post-modern hijinks, Bassam will claim that the alternate history is entirely framed by the word “somehow” of his first post. Like Shahrazad, I promise to divulge the story nested there — tomorrow, so to speak — but I will need visual aids, a chalkboard and some mad cartoon science.

3D animatics are very good for roughing out camera angles and motion, whereas 2D animatics help bring the focus back to the character (eyelines, facial expressions, emotion, interaction) much better. To get back to the feeling of the movie, I wanted to do 2D animatics and focus on what the character was doing, but still have a way of roughing out and testing shots.

Each shot was done as one or many drawings either on paper/tracing paper or in gimp, with the backgrounds seperated into layers, allowing for limited animation in the sequencer. For tricky shots I resorted to UV projection of sketches onto blocky objects in seperate blend files. Then I edited everything together in the sequence editor. For speed, I kept a bunch of the old 3D animatic shots around, since they didn’t have to be redone.
To rough out the shots in 3D I built a ‘blueprint set’- a sort of 3D proxy in blender, and a simple 3D block character. Then I linked these into a blend file with one scene and 2 screens: sequencer and 3D view. ctrl-arrowing allowed me to tab back and forth.

I wanted to place a new camera at each shot and use a camera changer script. Unfortunately, the existing camera switcher from project orange no longer worked, and I wrote a new one- at first it had very bad performance, until I realized that blender often skips frames while scrubbing: you can’t just look for a marker at the current frame, you have to look for the most recent marker before and up to the present. This worked really well, so I added a button in python that added a camera at the current viewport with the typed name and a marker at the current time. this allowed me to go back and forth quickly from set to storyboard, adding cameras for each shot.

In case you’d like them, here are the scripts: add_shot.py and camswitch.py

More shots from the storyboard/animatic have been added to the media gallery.

Tube had one false start before the team effort. Based on an early script I decided to go it alone, and started work on preproduction. For the animatic I used blender, mainly because I wanted to plan the shots in 3D. Some of those shots are still there in the current animatic, though the overall structure of the movie has mutated considerably. As you can see, the animatic was structured as a ‘typical’ blender project, with a lib folder containing linkable groups (in this case set/character/other simple proxies) and textures. All the shots were in one sequence directory with blends numbered for shots (the ‘crap’ in the blend title stands for ‘crapimatic’- a reminder to myself not to do something too polished at this early stage.
(continue reading…)