Mike King

Prep and Landing promo on youtube

Behind the scenes of Prep & Landing, the animated holiday special I helped to make.

Prep and Landing announced at last!

Yay! I can finally talk about what I’ve been working on since around last summer. “Prep and Landing” is a holiday special coming out this year on ABC. I’ve been able to work with a great team of folks. We’ve been able to revamp a lot of process, tools, and production management in order to make something approaching feature quality on a much reduced budget.

For me personally, it’s been a great opportunity to wear lots of different hats. In addition to the stuff I usually do like write software and shaders or work on shots, I was able to do some concept art (lighting key paintings) and also make a contribution to a matte painting. I’ve also been much more involved with directing the lighting and look of the final frames because the directors and art director have placed a lot of trust in me.

Can’t wait until the world gets to see it.

Here’s a teaser image that I helped to render out and then Andy Harkness our art director painted over. That’s Wayne on the left and Lanny on the right.

There are announcements in Variety and USA Today if you want to read more.

Glago’s Guest CGW article

You can read a great article about Glago’s Guest in the February issue of Computer Graphics World. Here is a link.

I’m going to add a few footnotes here to the article…

Although the crew based the pipeline on Autodesk’s Maya, they designed it to be independent.

This is true up to a point. We don’t ignore the fact that we are using Maya, but at the same time we don’t try to replicate functionality just so we can work without it. Think about recipe cards and their relationship to actual food. Our pipeline worked with the recipe cards. Maya files were like the food.

Yun-Chen Sung, who had worked on a lighting package for DreamWorks’ Shark Tale, created new lighting tools called Lilo…

Lilo was also used for applying shaders and adjusting materials in addition to being our lighting package.

Effects supervisor Cesar Velazquez… Effects animator Dave Hutchins

Actually, David Hutchins was the supervisor, and Cesar was the artist for the orb shots. At one point, we had pretty much every effects artist in the studio working on the short. We had close around 90 shots, most of which contained multiple effects elements or prop animation.

The nightly auto-render served as a troubleshooting tool.

The auto-render process and scripts were written by Mike Harris, a fantastic technical director. Every night, the process would query the production database for the list of shots that were done in animation and in inventory for the character effects department. We are using an evolved version of this process again on our current show.

Pixar’s Mike King helped the team develop the asset management tool, which they named Nani.

Another correction: I used to work at Pixar. But I have been at Disney Animation since late 2004.

Some trivia: Nani is the companion tool to Lilo, so we named it after Lilo’s sister from the film.

I also wrote a production notes & task database using Ruby on Rails. The intent was to make a more artist-friendly tool and help production management keep tabs on what was actually happening with pipeline data. The separation of show policy from the data pipeline helped to simplify the toolset.

iPlay, written by Sung, gave the artists the ability to look at the whole short and select what they wanted to see within a sequence.

iPlay lets you see the latest shots from any department that creates movies. So you can choose to see all the latest animation. Or just layout. Or just storyboards.

If you wanted to see all the latest lighting, but mix in animation where lighting shots are missing, you can do that do.

Kim Possible fan art

kim possible fan art

Here’s a painting I did in Photoshop of Kim Possible. Done in a few hours over the past week, mostly on Sunday. Trying an experiment with lost and found edges. I don’t think the shadowing on the lower legs is successful with the mostly white background. My lighting reference that gave me the idea to put the lower legs in shadow was a darker lighting situation.

 As usual, the more I look at it, the more I can find wrong with it. The biggest thing that bothers me at the moment is the lighting direction isn’t consistent.

My time is limited though, so I’m calling it good enough for now. More lessons learned for whatever my next painting is.

(posting a revised version)

revised kim possible by ~mking2008 on deviantART

Interview: Doeri Welch-Greiner on Glago’s Guest

Here’s a link to an interview with Dori Welch-Greiner, our associate producer on Glago’s Guest.

Click here.

Glago’s Guest

animatic test

I’m trying to get focused and get serious about working on a short film. As usual, I’m getting a little ahead of myself and testing out my animatic workflow before I’ve really got a story nailed down. This small test was done with Photoshop and Apple Motion. Looks like I’ll be able to do some interesting stuff without resorting to After Effects or Shake, which would require more money.I’ve got a couple of ideas for the short, which I think I want to keep to under 2 minutes so that it’s feasible to do in a shorter amount of time. The ideas are not much more than premises or set ups at this time. I really need to flesh out the characters and figure out how to make them compelling in very little screen time. Once I get the idea worked out, then I’ll start trying to get some people interested in helping. flyover animaticAdd to My Profile | More Videos  

Get out while you can!

Read this article from Variety about the increasing pressure VFX studios and artists face as schedules and budgets shrink while expectations rise.

An interesting CG post

I had a chance to skim through Keith Lango’s blog post while waiting for renders this morning. In it he asks the rhetorical question,”…how can we bring more of an integrated sense of artistry into the CG film production system?”

He’s got some interesting points, though one could argue that a lot of the principles are in place in one form or another in the pipelines of most major studios. The technology involved is mostly straightforward stuff. I kind of wish he provided more insight towards changing how people think about the process of CG filmmaking. He says:

Pipelines are fixed on paper first, in how you think about and organize your task and approval systems. It’s more about the bigger picture and less about what tool you develop… How you think about your primary goal in the system determines much about how you build that system.

Me, I think that’s the hard part.

Online hit ‘Broken Saints’ joins DVD canon

cnet.com has a story here about Broken Saints getting a DVD distribution deal with Twentieth Century Fox. Broken Saints is an online graphic novel that caused some serious waves on the Internet during its 3 year run.

I’ve watched some of the trailers, and the story/art isn’t my cup of tea. But I am impressed that they managed to create and execute an idea that so many viewers found compelling.

Now if I could just get off my butt and work on my own project some more. This kind of news always inspires me and depresses me. It inspires me to see that someone pulled off something cool. And depresses me because I can’t seem to bring any of my own projects to completion.

Anyway, here is a link to the Broken Saints official site.