A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of the Collin County Community College District. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.599.3142. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: July 10 All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Please submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Shawn Stewart, special contributor; Cody Lynch, special contributor; Dr. John Glass, special contributor; Amy Lenhart, special contributor; layout and photography by Nick Young.
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Animation giants offer a peek into their world
By Shawn Stewart
Special Contributor
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| Conceptual Art Director Christian Lorenz Scheurer offered a unique glimpse into the thought processes behind creating conceptual art for feature films. | The Industry Giants 2006: Giant Steps Forward computer graphics, animation and gaming forum at Collin offered students and guests a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the imaginative world of digital movie effects and video game design, not to mention a sneak preview of some of the summer’s biggest blockbusters.
Industry Giants took place June 10 in the John Anthony Theatre at Spring Creek Campus. Hosted by Collin’s Applied Graphics Design Technology department and the regional animators’ guild, A Bunch of Short Guys, Industry Giants included presentations by a distinctive lineup of speakers working in all areas of animation and special effects for film, television and games. Geeks ruled the day.
The audience at the John Anthony Theatre was full of self-proclaimed animation, gaming, film and computer nuts--myself included. It’s easy to tell fans apart from the “norms,” both by our casual dress code, (baseball caps, T-shirts, sneakers, socks optional) and by the number of acronyms and technical gibberish we sprinkle into everyday speech: Maya, MMORPGs, FACS, “parenting,” “ambient occlusion pass,” “mo-cap,” etc.
An impressive amount of technology was brought to bear on the forum. The Short Guys brought with them three cameras and a digital switcher to record the day’s events.
Christian Lorenz Scheurer – Visual Storytelling and Universe Creation Conceptual Art Director
Scheurer offered a unique glimpse into the thought processes behind creating conceptual art for feature films "The Fifth Element," "Titanic" and "The Matrix," and video games like "Final Fantasy," "Spore" and "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King." Scheurer is one of many team members whose work falls into the realm of conceptual art or pre-visualization, part of the pre-production process for most movies and video games.
He’s a graphic artist by trade, one who likes to dream up fantastic people, places and things. The more freedom he is given, the more outlandish his designs are. His work resembles that of H.R. Geiger ("Alien").
“All my pictures tell a story,” he said. “I always leave the viewer wanting to know more about the universe I’ve created.”
That’s why his concept art always has people in it, boarding a train or walking around, involved in some action... low-tech gliders mixed with high-tech cities. He calls this adding “drama” to a picture--the element of the unknown, the curious. On the video game "Final Fantasy IX," Scheurer moved from painting on canvas to painting directly into Photoshop, to save time and money.
“It was liberating,” he said.
Now, instead of having just one flat canvas, he could have “layer upon layer upon layer of images,” he said, which led him to conclude: “It’s great if you get paid on the job to learn new tools."
Pointing to one drawing, he added: “I could never have created that with markers and wash.”
Scheurer believes very strongly in creating back stories for all of his people, places and things. In fantasy, he says, this is particularly important, to help the audience relate to an otherwise alien environment. For example, he proposes that the movie Alien was based entirely on the lifecycle of the creature. There is the “facehugger” parent, the embryo alien implant, the violent “birthing” scene, and finally the fully grown alien terrorizing the spaceship.
“If the director [Ridley Scott] had told Geiger to avoid all of this history of the alien itself,” he said, “then there would have been no story.”
Scheurer created matte paintings of the NYC library buried under hundreds of feet of snow and concept drawings of the “supercell” hurricane for the motion picture "The Day After Tomorrow." He made cutaways of the electromagnetic spaceships for "The Matrix" and concept drawings of the historic ocean liner breaking apart for "Titanic."
Creating matte paintings is very much “a Zen-like experience,” he said. Since the artist is painting environmental landscapes, with lots of repetitions elements, the artist has to repeat to himself, “stone stone stone, rock rock rock, sky sky sky,” while painting. He told graphic artists in the audience to always question why something has to be the way it is, even when questioning the producer, the one signing the paychecks.
“They don’t always understand visual arts,” he said.
Why, for example, is it awkward to mix a Japanese building with a European interior? Even the guys who are “on the trigger for $10, $15 million” don’t always understand this. That’s why it’s important, he said, to occasionally step back from other projects and create your own material, “your own IP,” he called it.
Copies of his book, "Entropia," a fantasy story told through stamps, is available at Amazon.com. Examples of his work can be seen at www.christianlorenzscheurer.com.
Loni Peristere – Zoic Studios – Visual Effects Creation for “Serenity”
Peristere is co-founder and creative director of Zoic Studios (www.zoicstudios.com) in Los Angeles. His work includes creating special effects for commercial, episodic and feature animation projects, like "Battlestar Galactica," "CSI" and "Buffy The Vampire Slayer."
He received a 2003 Emmy Award for his visual effects work on the series "Firefly."
Peristere graduated magna cum laude from the University of Massachusetts in 1995. He won the Paul Tucker Award for his short film “Twilight” in 1996. That brought him to the attention of companies in Hollywood.
“You must have a consistent vision of where you’re going and what you want to do in this business,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s easy to get off-track and lose your way.”
Though he discussed at length his work as visual effects supervisor on the film "Serenity," the theme of his presentation was actually “persistence of vision,” a double-take on the old film phrase, meaning “the phenomenon by which still images, when projected in rapid succession, give the appearance of motion.”
This is what makes movies and TV possible. Peristere redefine this phrase to mean “keeping a consistent vision” about who you are and where you are going, both in life and in the film industry. In the mid-1990s, through his work at a visual effects company, Peristere met Joss Whedon, creator of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer." The two became fast friends based on a mutual love affair of old movies, including ironically the musical "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." A scene from the movie became inspiration for a fight sequence in one episode of "Buffy." (In fact, Whedon was such a fan of old musicals that he created an entire song-and-dance episode of "Buffy" in season six. As comical as it sounds, vampires dancing and singing, the episode is actually quite touching.)
The two hit it off so well that Peristere was promoted to visual effects supervisor on the second season of "Buffy."
“Going to Joss Whedon university for my grad school was the coolest thing that I could ever have asked for,” he admits.
It took Peristere only a few minutes to use his first Whedon-ism, “uber-photo-reality,” to the delight of all us geeks, when describing a special effects shot. In "Buffy," everything is called uber-this or uber-that, for something extraordinary, like Buffy’s arch-nemesis “the uber-vamp.” During season two, Peristere perfected the technique of “dusting” vampires, or killing them. Dusting was a digital green-screen/morphing technique used whenever a vampire, after being staked through the heart, would fly apart like a cloud of dust. In creating the effect, Peristere admitted that he was inspired by the 1960’s Hammer Dracula movies. Often in Hammer films, Dracula would die either by sunlight or by staking and dissolve into what looked like a puddle of bubbling, wet, green sand.
In his effect, Peristere took that notion one step further, making it more visually exciting, by allowing this to happen in the middle of a fight sequence, on the fly. (This probably also kept the network censors happy, by cutting down on the amount of blood in what would have otherwise been a bloody TV series.) Dusting became a "Buffy trademark"--even made its way into pop culture vernacular, “I dusted him,” became a favorite saying, so much so that the Zoic website states, “[d]usting demons is our specialty. Zoic has proven themselves to be the experts on vampire effects.”
This is no idle boast. "Buffy" probably did more in its seven-season run to expand the vampire mythos than all the Hammer films combined. The series is a lovely example of pre-millennial paranoia.
“We have an ethical responsibility to create stories which live beyond our lifetimes,” said Peristere, who not surprisingly was a literature major in college and frequently references Homer and Aristotle.
“We must create stories that last.”
As a result, Peristere’s company, Zoic, won several awards for the series: nominated for outstanding special visual effects for a series, 2003 Primetime Emmy Awards; and winner for outstanding visual effects in a television series 2003 VES Awards. The company created many other digital effects for the show: magic potions, disintegrating demons, giant caverns and the “flat out destruction of Sunnydale” in the final episode. Peristere went on to serve as visual effects supervisor and second unit director for the movie "Serenity," another film by Joss Whedon, based on the TV series "Firefly." Over the past nine years, their working relationship progressed to the point where the "Buffy" scribe will often write into his script, “Spaceship flies through space. (Loni will come up with something really cool here!)”
Undoubtedly, Peristere hopes to work on the next Whedon project, the one about “that chick with bracelets,” as he called it, Wonder Woman. Peristere believes that the future of storytelling is in “the birth of the interactive narrative as a very realistic way of life. The technology that we are developing today in video games is going to allow us in the very near future to create very realistic worlds, people, places, things. It will enable us to have world-creation become the normal part of entertainment.” Let’s hope there’s still room for traditional narratives like "Buffy."
T. Dan Hofstedt – Sony Pictures Imageworks – Animating “Monster House”
Hofstedt is animation supervisor with Sony Pictures Imageworks (www.sonypictures.com/imageworks/company/bios/thofstedt.html). Hofstedt discussed his work on the animated “performance capture” feature "Monster House," due for release July 21.
Hofstedt is a wonderful and gifted animator. His gift for caricaturing both likeness and action of a character has served him well over a 21 year career in feature film animation. (Trivia question: His first job after graduating from Cal Arts, the Disney farm school, was as an animator on the Emmy Award-winning TV series, The Smurfs.) And he does wonderful voice impressions of his characters as he is giving presentations.
He is a delightful presenter. Hofstedt is a 12-year veteran of Walt Disney Feature Animation. "The Lion King," "Aladdin" and "Pocahontas" are among his credits. Hofstedt served as senior character animator on The" Polar Express" from Director Robert Zemeckis. "The Polar Express" was the first film to employ Imagemotion™, the motion capture system developed by Imageworks. In regards to "The Polar Express," I have to admit not being overly impressed with the technology originally.
Unfortunately, the few scenes I saw from "Monster House," though beautifully animated and full of character, did not change my mind about the underlying technology, Imagemotion™. "Monster House" makes extensive use of “performance capture,” a new digital motion-captured technique in which actors are covered with luminescent dots and those dots are then recorded by the computer to create a representative wireframe image of the character’s body and facial movements.
Hofstedt called this a “rig.” Recording broad gestures--walking, standing, sitting--go back to "Titanic," 10 years prior, but recording facial gestures is relatively new. The computer uses an algorithm, called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to estimate emotions on the live-action actors and to transpose those onto the animated characters. (By comparison, in more traditional a keyframe animation, every nth frame is actually drawn by hand and then filled in by other artists who are known as “inbetweeners.”)
One lovely example of keyframe animation is the “monster house” itself, which is personified as a character in the movie, eating people and spitting them out. The monster house is animated as a traditional character, with facial features: windows for eyes, door for a mouth. The full resolution, or wireframe, “rig” for the house included 40,000 controls which could be individually manipulated to give the house character. Every shingle, porch board, and slat of siding could be tweaked and torqued to make the house bristle, frown, talk and even walk. It’s a lovely piece of animation that required no motion capture whatsoever.
By contrast, Imagemotion™, performance capture, or motion-capture as it is still called (“mo-cap”) is supposed to imbibe the animated character with movements which are more natural than can be otherwise achieved by traditional, hand-drawn animation.
Hofstedt calls tracing a “legitimate tool for animators,” going back to the loose interpretations of the early Disney animations to the more tightly “rotoscoped” movies, like "Heavy Metal." Historically, that’s correct. But after seeing several scenes of "Monster House" at the presentation, I’m not sold. I’m not convinced motion capture added much natural movement to the final look of the characters in this movie. The characters in "Monster House" are so stylized and exaggerated, caricatures basically, that traditional keyframe animation would have sufficed.
Hofstedt admitted that his animation team would simply use the actors facial motion data “as a reference point,” and would constantly accentuate movements, gestures and words to make them more dramatic or emphatic. That begs the question: Why use a motion capture at all? Unless the movie is aiming for photo-realism, like "The Polar Express," motion capture seems a waste of the time and talents of actors like Steve Buscemi and Jason Lee, who “play” two characters in "Monster House."
Or better yet, James Cameron’s "Avatar," which may include the first fully C.G. character that is indistinguishable from a real human being. Watch for a tricky bit of casting on this one.
Let’s hope that Director Robert Zemeckis can make better use of this technology in his upcoming, photo-realistic “performance capture” movie version of "Beowulf."
Scott Peterson - Digital Anvil – Designing for Tomorrow’s Game Platforms Game Designer
Peterson, with Digital Anvil/Microsoft Game Studios, gave a rather technical presentation on game console improvements and how designers are using increased power to create more visually compelling game environments. Peterson counts "Freelancer," "Brute Force" and "Enwor" are among his game credits and "Spawn," "The Nutty Professor" and "Spy Kids" among his film credentials.
DNA Productions – "The Ant Bully"
Dallas-based DNA Productions ("Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius") discussed their production and development work on the animated feature "The Ant Bully," to be released this summer in standard and IMAX versions. The animation was impressive, as one would expect from the makers of Jimmy Neutron, but the real key lies in the story. The original children’s illustrated book, though imaginative, got less than stellar reviews on Amazon.com. “With the current popularity of the animated movies 'Antz' and 'A Bug's Life,' this title is timed just right for success,” writes one reviewer of the original, “but the book falls short.”
Adapting 10-page children’s book into a 90-minute feature film is always daunting... so much story must be added. If anyone is up to it, DNA is. You can find their website at www.dnahelix.com.
The Applied Graphic Design Technology department at Collin is a graphic design and new media discipline within the Fine Arts division. Academic degree and certificate programs include: graphic design, 3D animation, digital video, multimedia, Internet/web design and gaming animation. The fulltime faculty are joined by more than 24 associate faculty who bring current industry expertise into the classroom. For information contact AGDT Professor Tom Ottinger, tottinger@ccccd.edu, 972.516.5089 or visit www.ccccd.edu.
A Bunch of Short Guys (ABOSG) is a non-profit organization that fosters education and career development for students and professionals in the animation and visual effects industry. The group hosts free monthly meetings on the third or fourth Saturday of the month.
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