If you’ve been anywhere near the Internet lately, you’ve probably heard that there’s been a lot of violent reactions to the likely-fraudulent Iranian elections (If you rely on television or newspapers to hear about current events, then you have an excuse for not knowing). While the streets of Tehran are filled with protesters and trigger-happy police, the pressure is on other world leaders to make a choice: acknowledge Ahmedinejad as President and condone his totalitarian tactics, or walk away from negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
This tense situation leaves a burning question in the mind of everyone in the world: what would this situation be like if the disputed Iranian President were a tarantula?
This femto-length film is my attempt to answer that question:
I don’t have much to say about this, as I feel it speaks for itself. I should mention, though, that once I figured out the best workflow, this film took an average of under one hour of work per second of finished animation. It’s 268 seconds, and I completed all the art, animation, and sound editing in less than a week. Granted, about 36 hours of that work happened consecutively; I totally would have done stuff like eat and go to sleep if it wasn’t due at 6 PM yesterday (it was a project for my Editing class). Nonetheless, a 3600:1 ratio of work vs. finished footage is, I’m willing to bet, significantly lower than mainstream hyper-expensive Hollywood productions, and would probably be feasible for a high quality film if only I was working with someone who was good at drawing. I’m not implying that I created a Pixar-quality film, but it’s technically on par with Dragon Ball Z, if not artistically.
I suppose I should be glad for the publicity on my post about how Pixar is overdoing it. Unfortunately, the nature of the discussion was mostly skeptical; I think that was my fault for explaining it the wrong way. So, how about this:
Pixar has $180 million to spare, and doesn’t mind having hundreds of people manipulating 400 yottabytes to create one film. Good for them. But that shouldn’t scare off the rest of us.
The barrier to creating great looking animation doesn’t seem to be time, money, or resources; it’s the misconception that those, in fact, are an obstacle. Video game developers constantly show us that there is the potential for great looking visuals without an excessive amount of polygons. The reason video game graphics don’t yet rival Hollywood CGI isn’t because there isn’t enough processing power for detail, but that there isn’t enough processing power for implying detail.
Simple depth of field can dramatically improve a low-detail image. By simulating the focus of a camera lens, not only is a more photographic look achieved, but strategic use of it can remove most of the ugly portions of an image. This is possible in Valve’s Source engine, and can look great, but it’s not practical for video games; about two frames of it per second can be rendered in real time. But movies don’t need to be rendered in real time – a three minute high-definition sequence from Final Cut can take up to half an hour to render on my laptop, but after that it plays back smoothly; Pixar, by contrast, produces films that would take a single supercomputer several million hours to render (that’s why they have a ton of supercomputers), and they too can be contained within a smoothly-playable video file. But by taking graphics which could, theoretically, be rendered in real time, then rendering it with realistic looking blur and smoothing effects at two frames per second, an independent animator wouldn’t need to have access to supercomputers with enormous hard drives to make a film.
Perhaps I was too quick to call Meet the Scout on par with The Incredibles or WALL-E. Jenni Chasteen’s comment about the lighting design was spot-on – Pixar has people who know cinematography, and Valve isn’t nearly as experienced. I disagree that it’s not even close, though; while it’s not great for photorealism, “cartoony” CGI is very possible to do with just a video game engine and blur effects.
Valve’s promotional movies may not be Pixar-quality, now that I think about it, but the technique and technology has the potential to be. In the hands of talented filmmakers, it’s wonderful for compositing onto live action. Is extending it to a full animated film that much of a stretch? I doubt it, myself.
Perhaps I’m uneducated in the ancient Hollywood art of Unit Production Management, but it’s baffling to me that WALL-E had a budget of $180 million. Yes, it was a gigantic Hollywood production, but consider the fact that all of its visuals were made by pressing buttons and waiting for the images to appear. Well, it was more complicated than that sounds, but that’s basically what they did.
I decided that I wanted to experiment with making a movie with a complete three-act structure lasting somewhere around 15 seconds. In extremely technical terms, I definitely achieved that goal, but most people will just see this as random. That’s fine with me.
Anyway, here’s a 15 second movie depicting Nintendo employees as people with D-Pads for heads:
If you’d like to see it in HD without full-screening it or if you’re reading this on a “mobile device,” check it out on YouTube.
I call this a “femto-length” film because it’s astronomically shorter than a “short film,” and the “femto-” prefix is smaller than both “nano-” and “pico-”. So yeah, that’s REALLY small. Not quite as small as “yocto-“, but this movie isn’t quite thatpointlessly short.
Maybe it’ll catch on. Maybe not. But if it doesn’t, I’ll cry.
In Other Words, Why Can’t Animated Movies Have $1,000 Budgets?
I suppose I should be glad for the publicity on my post about how Pixar is overdoing it. Unfortunately, the nature of the discussion was mostly skeptical; I think that was my fault for explaining it the wrong way. So, how about this:
Pixar has $180 million to spare, and doesn’t mind having hundreds of people manipulating 400 yottabytes to create one film. Good for them. But that shouldn’t scare off the rest of us.
The barrier to creating great looking animation doesn’t seem to be time, money, or resources; it’s the misconception that those, in fact, are an obstacle. Video game developers constantly show us that there is the potential for great looking visuals without an excessive amount of polygons. The reason video game graphics don’t yet rival Hollywood CGI isn’t because there isn’t enough processing power for detail, but that there isn’t enough processing power for implying detail.
Simple depth of field can dramatically improve a low-detail image. By simulating the focus of a camera lens, not only is a more photographic look achieved, but strategic use of it can remove most of the ugly portions of an image. This is possible in Valve’s Source engine, and can look great, but it’s not practical for video games; about two frames of it per second can be rendered in real time. But movies don’t need to be rendered in real time – a three minute high-definition sequence from Final Cut can take up to half an hour to render on my laptop, but after that it plays back smoothly; Pixar, by contrast, produces films that would take a single supercomputer several million hours to render (that’s why they have a ton of supercomputers), and they too can be contained within a smoothly-playable video file. But by taking graphics which could, theoretically, be rendered in real time, then rendering it with realistic looking blur and smoothing effects at two frames per second, an independent animator wouldn’t need to have access to supercomputers with enormous hard drives to make a film.
Perhaps I was too quick to call Meet the Scout on par with The Incredibles or WALL-E. Jenni Chasteen’s comment about the lighting design was spot-on – Pixar has people who know cinematography, and Valve isn’t nearly as experienced. I disagree that it’s not even close, though; while it’s not great for photorealism, “cartoony” CGI is very possible to do with just a video game engine and blur effects.
Valve’s promotional movies may not be Pixar-quality, now that I think about it, but the technique and technology has the potential to be. In the hands of talented filmmakers, it’s wonderful for compositing onto live action. Is extending it to a full animated film that much of a stretch? I doubt it, myself.