Film Festival success for "How Europe Got Its Name"

Our short animated film "How Europe Got Its Name", 6 min, has been selected for public screening in the "New Beijing International Film Week". This is a big step forward for us and we are very very happy about it. You can see it in the festival program at:
Link to Beijing Fest 2009 Selected Movies
"How Europe Got Its Name" appears a little over half-way down this page.

Backgrounder for new readers: the democratisation of film-making makes production easier for us (yay), and easier for zillions of others(uh oh) so selection panels can be choosing as little as 5% of what they receive. Why Beijing? My 1980s successes were often in non-English speaking cities. Our movies this century have been collecting rejections from US and NZ festivals so when "How Europe .." was ready, I thought it was time to revisit the wider world. I liked the style of this festival and the film-makers connected with it - you can see what I mean by using the above link and looking around the festival site.

"How Europe Got Its Name" version 1 was made in 1 weekend when we were competing as "Team MITCIT" representing the Manukau Institute of Technology in the New Zealand 48 Hours Furious Film-making Competition. It was wildly ambitious to do a speed-film-making competition with modelling clay animation but we did get it all shot and we got a panic edit version over the finishing line with 2 minutes to spare. We won a small audience-favourite-vote award for 3rd place in our heat.

The Beijing Festival entry is the completed "Version 2".

We can not show you the complete movie on the web yet because we are exploring its film festival and commercial potential. I do plan to post about a 30 second sample soon.

"Unsharp Mask" filter works well with digitised film

I have been doing more digitisation of Super-8mm and Standard-8mm movies dating back to 1962. I ran across "Unsharp Mask" in the GIMP manual and I find that Ulead Video Editing software also has this in its video filters. Looking good - on careful inspection results do not have any better detail but they seem to look better. I have found that other sharpeners do bad things with film grain but Unsharp Mask seems to handle graininess well. With "The GIMP", I am using the default settings. With "Ulead" IMO the default settings go too far and I am using relatively gentle settings of "15%, 15%" on the 2 controls provided.
Ref - info with image examples in "The GIMP" online manual:
http://docs.gimp.org/en/plug-in-unsharp-mask.html
"The Unsharp Mask filter (what an odd name!) sharpens edges of the elements without increasing noise or blemish. It is the king of the sharpen filters..."

Music to my ears NOT

Maybe I am turning into a very old fogey, but does anyone else object to social conversation being made impossible by playing loud music? Bronnie and I got into a film-makers party at "Galatos", (well we are "emerging" film-makers!), and we had a great time meeting interesting people, but that blasting music meant that conversation was conducted by yelling at close quarters. We worked it out that we could escape outside into the street to talk and the street filled up with exiled smokers and talkers with it being a little annoying and a lot funny that the bouncers were obliged to deprive we street people of our drinks. It seems that smoking and intelligent conversation are now the twin evils of society requiring the perpetrators to be put outside. Nice party MIC but next time lose the music, we film-makers are not out-of-it nightclub bunnies requiring music to cover for an inability to communicate - we are actually the articulate ones.

Effects just got easier - DAZ Studio can output PNG

DAZ Studio (www.daz3d.com - basic toolkit free) is the 3D posing and animation software I have been getting interested in recently. In earlier posts I have been writing about adding a bluescreen background in "DAZ Studio" then following that up in the video editor software with compositing. Today I looked for rendering movies to a sequence of .PNG files and I found it. And even better it did what I wanted which is to render no-background as transparent. This is good news because a sequence of .PNGs supporting transparency (alpha values) is going to composite better than any process where a colour needs to be changed to transparency. I don't know if this is new in version 2.2 or whether it was there before and I missed it.

3D Animation Example

Following up the previous entry with a "For Example" - this is from one of my students:
"Victoria at MIT" on Youtube
Ricky has animated Victoria in "DAZ Studio" with a plain "bluescreen" background. "Compositing" with photos and video done in "Ulead MediaStudio Pro 8".

IAFILM heading for 3D Animation

There's an indie response to "Beowulf" in our future

We the current IAFILM film-makers have decided to adopt the "DAZ3D" 3D computer animation technology with its libraries of ready-made characters and concentrate for our new direction on how far we can push this. Over the last 3 years, we feel we have "cracked" low-budget high-definition greenscreen production with human actors only to hit the social and human problem of not being able to get enough actors interested in staying the course of low budget indie movies even short ones. Other indies are reporting the same experience - cruel when accessible technology finally enables our visions. BUT 3D is doing trickle-down to the likes of us. I had earlier said no to this partly because of what I perceived as the lonely isolated nature of the process. What we are finding now is that we have links to a pool of wonderful voice characterisation actors who we relate to well because many of them are 50+ years old like many of us. We are finding that the voice/sound production for these movies is great fun with most of the tedium and stress of human-actor-filming removed. Risk factors like fights and stunts involving enthusiastic non-professionals (and horses!) are also removed. Kinda radio plays with pix added. We can still get into some acting to give movement guides to the animators but we don't need elaborate setups and costuming. Acting sessions can be very free flowing and we can see rather than a loss of human acting dynamics and experience we may well find a freedom here to create in new ways.

DAZ Animation gives us lots of nice safety nets. An actor suddenly can not make it to filming? We can run with a stand-in and voice-record the missing actor later. Critical actor suddenly going overseas? Haul him/her in front of the mic with those others we can round up to feed lines and we can survive. Or replace much more easily with another actor. Our real people partners can do a Ray Winstone/Beowulf and play impossibly pretty-in-the-Hollywood-way humans and any kind of fantasy creature.

Who are DAZ3D? Refs:
DAZ Website: http://www.daz3d.com
The basic software toolkit "DAZ Studio" is a free download after registration.
It comes with a minimum set of "3D Models" = characters and clothes. You need to buy in extra "actors" and buy "morphs" for them to get a range of characters out of one model. Prices are reasonable, we can "cast" our next 10 minute movie for about US$100 which is well below what we would spend on such a project made by other means. This is not a rave review by any means - this looks to me very much like an emerging technology and at present we often need to tell ourselves to "keep it simple". DAZ Studio works well with bluescreen backgrounds processed later in the video editor and it does the basics of animation very easily - I especially like its "puppeteer" method. With some ingenuity of approach we seem to have here a kit for making the alternative no-budget indie response to "Beowulf".

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAZ3D

48 Hours

The big film-making activity for this month has been competing in the "48 Hours Furious Film-making Competition" in Auckland NZ.
We drew the genre of "Juvenile Delinquent".
We went the same way as last year doing stop motion animation with modelling clay.
One speed-up technique, we did most speech as close-ups by taking only 4 to 6 photos with various mouth positions then throwing those at our 2 x editors to arrange along the timeline opposite the sound. Gets those editors involved early doing "parallel processing".
Best move for this year was to recruit voice actors from a band I worked with to make video clips. This band, the "Frank E Evans Lunchtime Entertainment Band" plugged us into a folkie network of actors, comedians, and children's entertainers and they were great. Soundtrack was directed and recorded as a separate operation some 30km away by my co-director who sent it in by internet.
Generally all went well although we were wildly over-ambitious and we feel amazed that we threw together a result that does kinda reflect most of the story but with the rushed final editing showing. I got it across the finish line with 2 min to go.
"How EUROPE got its Name" is based on a story from ancient Greece. Our ancient city of Tyre 1000BC was mostly made out of file boxes. We printed out paper sheets of computer-file brick, wood and stone textures and glued those on the boxes.
We had some modelling clay characters from last year and earlier movies that we remodelled. We were character and set building till Sat 4:55pm when we fired the first of about 700 stop-motion shots.

Our last year's modelling clay entry, "Dancing with the Pollies", similar approach, is on youtube as a tidied up version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD3WkV0sUGg

Reviewer "Godfather" writes:
"How Europe Got Its Name" by MITCIT (Juvenile Delinquent)
These guys always come up with something from left field, and this was no exception.
Where do you find inspiration for a Juvenile Delinquent story? Why, Herodotus, of course! For a claymation musical about a fairly obscure moment in ancient Greek history, this got a huge audience response. B-