Bitfilm Festival: call for entries!

Bitfilm is an online filmmakers community based in Hamburg. They've got a yearly thang, the Bitfilm Festival, showcasing some fine-ass animation, and they've just put out the call for entries. Just click on the link to go to the site. It's all online, so you can grab a free membership (they've got pay for promo options as well, just so's ya knows) and submit your film YouTube styles. Multiple categories for Machinima, Flash, 3d, mobile, and composite FX films...ifn' it's animated, (or has animation in it) you can submit it! Just don't dawdle, cuz the deadline is just over a month away. Cheers!

Yo Jeaux! Q and A with Fred

Jeaux Janovsky over at Channel Frederator (remember them? Toon podcast, cool-ass red robot? Yeah, that's the guys, swell fellas.) tossed a few questions my way about 'First Time Out', featured in Fred 108. Here's me chewin' his ear off:

1) How long have you been animating Neil?

I got out of school summer of '95, been workin' since then, so...sweet joosy jebus, 12 years?!? Man, I'm old.

2) Mech-rabbits battling makes for awesome. What was the inspiration of this short Neil?

Too many episodes of Gundam Wing. After seeing yet another mechstravaganza where big awesome robots were being piloted by blank-eyed teens with all the emotive properties of a squashed banana slug, I thought to myself "Man, why don't they create a toon with giant mecha suits piloted by sumthin' that could actually USE a giant mecha suit?" Then an episode of Hamtaro came on, and something clicked. Or snapped, depending on yer point o' view. Originally, the main characters were actually gonna be hamsters, and I may still do that. If I do, it'll be one big valentine to Go Nagai.

3) The short could very well be a cut scene from the GunBunnies video game, do you have any video game aspirations for these cute and cuddly hardcore mech battling robots?

You hit the video game aspirations right on the nose, man! 'First Time Out' was meant to be a great lil' short film, but I also wrote and designed it to introduce the characters and story as a game environment. I'll be posting a 'proof of concept' of sorts, including a demo of how the game would play on the Wii (my platform o' choice) to the GUNBunnies website in early 2008. (www.gunbunnies.ca)

All of the vehicles and characters are game-ready art assets...I could drop 'em into an online game tomorrow if'n I wanted! I originally meant the film to be a realtime machinima piece, running online in Shockwave 3d...couldn't figure out how to code the cameras and lighting, so I decided to render it, but I kept all the art assets 'low poly' to evoke the look of an early/mid era GameCube or PS2 game. The realtime demos still exist, and I'll be putting 'em up online as well when I do the update. I'll update everyone on the RAW site when that happens.

4) What's your favorite videogame?

Tim Schaeffer's Psychonauts. Best combo of animation, design, story, music, voiceover work and gameplay ever, hands down. All that plus Richard Horvitz. Woot.

5) What are you currently working on?

A short lil' Christmas thang in Flash, featuring Emilio the Whooping Llama, a gaming podcast mascot character I designed about a year ago. There's a sample walk cycle and animatic snippet on my RAW page. (http://raw.channelfrederator.com/profile/TempleDog) Hoping to have it ready to submit for the Fred Xmas Xtravaganza, but if not, I'll post it on RAW.

I also included this pic...Zav in her battle armor with shield and OmniRifle. Originally, Zav was going to be the main character, but I decided I wanted the fact that all the characters are bunnies (or bunny-like aliens) to be a suprise reveal at the end of the film. So now she's relegated to a small role standing next to Deg (the green 'tech bunny') in the simpod hangar at the end of the film.

Thus ends self-promotion Fridays here on the TAIS blog. More later!

First Time Out

O.k., here it is, film fests be damned. A few production notes: started in 2002 as kind of reaction to the proliferation of cutesy toons from Japan (Hamtaro and Tokyo Pig, shtuff like that) and too many episodes of Gundam Wing. The main jist of the project was: Why not give a giant fighting robot to something that could actually use it? Like 1 1/2 foot tall day-glo bunnies?

I originally envisioned the project as being a machinima piece, fully realtime online in Shockwave 3d with code controlled cameras and all kind of fancy realtime bells n' whistles. When I couldn't get A) a coder or B) the time to learn Lingo, Shockwave's coding language, I re-examined the piece and decided that having a bunch of fancy-shmansy realtime interactivity wasn't going to add to the story or characters at all. So, I decided to just render the whole thing out. Modeling and animation was done in Plasma, a web-only version of Max discontinued before Autodesk bought out Discreet. Animated maps were created in Flash and exported as Mpegs, then mapped on in Plasma.

Bit ass backwards on this one...I designed and modeled almost all the characters and props before doing an animatic in Flash...I knew what elements and characters I wanted for the short, but the story needed to evolve visually. I created a full animatic in Flash over the course of 8 months, refining the story and dumping a whole lot of dialog in favor of action in the process.

Initial designs and model sheets were done in '02, with the modeling taking place in 03/04. Took a break, then started the animatic in July of '04, finishing in September of '05. In April of '06 I started the first scene, and finished animation in May of '07. Enter Drew Frohmann, that most excellent half of the most excellent comedy duo of Rub (Rob Collinet, Splashworks art director) and Tug (Drew), who together comprise the team known as Hot Dog Boy. Drew had a gig at a sound studio, Pirate Radio and TV, and Rob suggested he might be able to help out with sound.

We recorded the dialog at Pirate (3 1/2 hours and 63 takes for around 1 1/2 minutes), with Dan Branco designing fx, Chris Tim and Tim composing, Bill Turchinetz supervising, and Spenser Hall putting it all together in Pirate's Dolby 5.1 lab. Drew and production diva Tyna Myaerzke made it all happen after hours. All just for the kudos and a piece for the ol' demo reel...they, of course, rock the ass. Got the final mixdowns from Spense on Sept. 17th, just before heading off to Ottawa, where I managed to get a copy into the hands of my two college profs, Don Perro and Paul West, as well as Pilar Newton, Jerry Beck and Lev Polyakov.

That's that! The plan right now is to try Kalamazoo and Platform, amongst others. Haven't had much luck finding a fest that the film fits into, but I gotta keep pushin', cuz me Pirate mates worked too damn hard to allow this stuff to not get heard. Let me know whatcha think...feedback welcome, people! And thanks for watchin'.

TF2: Meet the crew

Ya gotta wonder, seein' these, if'n the doods at Valve are thinkin' of gettin' out of the gaming biz, and getting into the features. Any studio that can give us 5 kick-ass games on one disc, the recently-released Orange Box, and still manage to pump out shorts of this calibre (pun intended), well, it just makes me smile, is all. Pay particular close attention to the Engineer, my current fave of the lot. Gotta love a guy who can custom build a passle of great hardware and still pick a guitar...'specially with them gloves on. More later.