I’m putting together 2min 30sec of motion graphics for an opening title sequence for How Do You Write A Joe Schermann Song.

It’s been a couple months working just with the Mac interface and it’s finally become too unwieldy. There are just too many shots, and I’m spending too much time thinking about naming conventions and copying files around every time I set up a new shot.

So I spent the last few days writing Python code to give me a faster way to do things. It’s not set up for multiple users, since it’s just me. But it wouldn’t be too hard to fix that if the need arises.

Currently I’ve got my files split between 2 drives. The work files, like the AE projects, live in my home directory under a Projects folder. Images, movies, and other media live on an external 2TB drive.

My pipeline scripts help manage naming conventions and provide short cuts for things I do a lot.

So now I can do stuff like do stuff like this from the command-line:

#switch working environment to a particular project
setshow jss

# make a new shot
mkshot <seq> <shot>
mkshot ovrt 1


# navigate to a shot's working directory giving a sequence name and shot number
nav --shot <seq> <shot>

# navigate to a shot's movie directory
nav --media <seq> <shot>

# of course aliases are helpful for these
ns
nm

# render an after effects project in batch
render_ae  <filename>


I’m starting to use git to manage revisions of my After Effects project files. It’s actually using less space than maintaining copies via naming convention. Plus this way I can experiment with alternate ideas and use git branches to manage them. For now I’m going to use raw git, since I know how to use it. But I can see writing some wrappers that would be helpful.

It’s all a bit hard coded for now so that I can get back to making pictures. I feel like it wouldn’t take too much more work to clean it up so that I can use this code as a base for future projects.

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.

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

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

Click here.

Glago’s Guest, the project I worked on last year, is finally out. It premiered at Annecy a few weeks ago.

There’s a blurb on Animated News about it. Click here for the link.

The shot with the huge black egg towering over the house is a shot that I lit. If I remember correctly, it was the first shot to make it to color on the show.

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.