19 Jan
/ by Jan
The first scene reached “final” status last week (which means that it’s still in animatic state, but editing and character movements are frozen), so I was able to start working on the foley and SFX tracks. Foley refers to “everyday” sounds which are usually not noticed unless they’re not there, such as footsteps, cloth movements and sounds made by things the characters interact with. As you can imagine, this is a lot of fun! Here I’m denting an old PC-XT chassis from my attic. The small, rickety ladder adds some metallic resonance and rattling.
Also starring in the finished movie: rough gravel, giant cardboard boxes, power staplers, plastic buckets filled with water, styrofoam cups, a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, 7.5 miles of string, a singing woman,
18 Jan
/ by Matt
We’ve been in the media a little bit lately, and as the press we’re getting keeps growing and growing, the pressure keeps piling on!
Right now in the well renowned 3D World magazine issue 74 onwards, we’re featuring in the regular ‘production diary’ section. We will have an article each issue for the next six months tracking our progress as we forge ahead towards completion. The current issue also has an interesting article on open source software in the film/media industry.
There’s been a two page article about us and open source movie production in general in the German technology magazine c’t, that we forgot to report about when it was fresh, but it’s still in the current issue that’s in our local bookshop here in Amsterdam.
And last but not least, the second issue of the online Blenderart magazine is out, featuring amongst the other articles and tutorials, a set of interviews with five of the six of us here in the studio. Unfortunately and embarrassingly I’m the missing one, away from work sick for most of the week when the other guys did their responses, and never remembered to reply when I came back! So my apologies, Gaurav, Sandra and co! If you want, perhaps I could post my responses here :)
12 Jan
/ by Bassam
It looks like my computer has suddenly aquired Einsteinian properties; after anywhere from a few hours to a few minutes of use the clock starts running fast; avi’s playback to fast, the clock goes too quickly and the command “sleep 10″ sleeps for about 8 seconds only.
I’ve no idea how/why this is happening.. So this post is a bit of a cry for help- any ideas? could it be the CMOS battery? or anyway software (ubuntu linux, 64 bit version with a 32 bit chroot environment for blender and some other apps) could be responsible?
Don’t blame me if the movie seems a bit sluggish! It runs fine on my computer ;)
[edit] rebooting now, so my clock goes back to normal
( Erratic xclock video, 1MB MPEG4 )
-Problem Solved! At least for me, it seems that some 64 bit kernels and certain chipsets exhibit this bug; appearantly, it can be cured via certain boot parameters posted by some of you in this thread. In my case, since I run blender in a 32 bit chroot anyway, I just made my chroot partition a bootable 32 bit system. After a little struggle re-configuring my sound in the 32 bit environment, it appears that my clock is stable.
Huge thanks to all of you for your suggestions, research and jokes :)
9 Jan
/ by Andy
Cinepaint is commonly known as powerful open source tool being used in major film productions. It’s basically a rather old fork from GIMP with higher bitdepth (32 bits per channel), and export options to high dynamic range image formats such as HDR and OpenEXR. For loading image sequences Cinepaint uses a simple ‘flipbook’ approach, which is also a major difference from GIMP… but other than that both are (or rather were at some distant point in the past) pretty similar. Now I finally had some time to write about our experience with Cinepaint and it’s place in our project.
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3 Jan
/ by Lee
So after a very different (At least to us Aussies) and exciting New Year, It’s back to normal at the Studio. Shot production as always at this point in projects is steady and full steam ahead and Bassams wonderful rigging ability has made animating the characters a breeze, at least in the technical sense. With a good percentage of the animation complete we are now shifting some energy into the final sets and materials in preperation for the first batch of finals. By the end of this week we are hoping to have our first complete scene, and that plan looks like it will work out well!
Our thoughts on the next few weeks is to set up some small armies again: Bassam and Lee working only on animation (Bassam also directing too!), Andy and Matt starting to work now on Getting scenes to a rendering stage, Basse keeping things together with his great skills in both animation and Modelling, and Toni trying to come up with some great solutions for project needs to keep us going. For today just this small update on the plans for the next month, but expect quite soon some more blogs for the new features we are using here and more goodies!
25 Dec
/ by Jan
The whole team wishes you a merry christmas and a happy year 2006!
Ok, we originally had the idea to have a jolly Santa Emo here, but alas, the modellers had been fallen prey to the holiday spirit already. And sadly, all I can do is mirror spheres on checkerboards. I tried to put a red cap onto the sphere, but now it looked like Tim Allen. So, no pic here.
But you could gather around the fireplace and sing along!
23 Dec
/ by Matt
Well, if you’re wondering why our blog is so slow right now, look no further than to blender.org, where the latest version of our favourite 3D software has just been released to the world. It’s been immensely popular, linked all around the web, and the server is jittering on the floor in convulsions and pleading for sweet mercy.
Many of the great new features we’ve been requesting and talking about here over the last months are included, amongst the character animation rewrite, fluid dynamics system, particle system upgrades and hair rendering, the modifier stack, mesh and UV editing, rigid body dynamics via the game engine, and heaps more. Special thanks to everyone involved for making this possible, and wait till you see what’s in store for 2.41 ;)
18 Dec
/ by Bassam
We finally have the dialog recorded for our movie! It took one five hour session last Thursday at Earforce with Tygo Gernandt as Proog and Cas Jansen as Emo. We couldn’t have better voices for our characters. Both actors spent considerable time and effort understanding the characters and the story, aided by the animatic and by verbal descriptions from Ton and myself. The result? I can’t imagine Proog or Emo sounding like anything else- the performances are that good.
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18 Dec
/ by Matt
Well you’ve seen our characters, Proog and Emo, so it’s time for a long overdue look behind the scenes at their design process. We spent some time in the earlier days of the project really trying to get inside the character’s heads, defining their personalities and then building up their visual appearance around them. When we had some idea about what these guys were supposed to be, we took some time drawing concept sketches that we could then evaluate , select our favourites, or see what interesting ideas could be lifted or combined on the way to the final design.
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14 Dec
/ by Jan
Hi there, this is Jan Morgenstern writing from a currently particularly inhospitable part of northern Germany. I’m responsible for all things going “bonk” in Elephants Dream, and as some of you expressed their interest in occasional digressions into sound design and compositional topics in this blog, I’ve written a little blurb on SFX design for a scene near the beginning of the movie.
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