#errantcode

As anyone familiar with this particular project may know, the characters in the story encounter (and one violently dispatches) creatures described as "rats" or "giant rats". This is the description used in the short story, which is written in first-person from the perspective of the human character. As may or may not be evident in the short story, this character is...well, he starts off as kind of an asshole. In actuality, there is a whole other side to this guy that I won't even begin to get into now; suffice to say, he's not a very good person and by the end of this, he's....at least a little bit better. Probably because he can't ever remember being the jerk from before the story starts.

Now this character sees a large, semi-aquatic mammal with a hairless tail, calls it "a rat", and that's as far as his analysis goes. The short film adaptation would be able to show the critters as they were intended: much more "mutant dog" than rodent.

It was brought to my attention that using "rats" as a monstrous, alien presence could be taken as ---

-- yes, I know, I'm getting to it! It could be taken as contributing to a negative perception of a real-life animal that is anything but monstrous or alien.

Here is a rat, for example:

and another one, being monstrous:

Although the word "rat" has always been used (in the short story and in the notes for the film) to indicate the creatures scurrying outside the boat, the actual, original idea of them was much more dog-like and was, in all honestly, partially informed by the silly-yet-somehow-still-terrifying creatures from the film Attack of The Killer Shrews:

When they weren't toothy hand-puppets, they were simply dogs in poorly-made costumes. And they moved as such. Now just like describing the critters in this story as "rats", “Attack of The Killer Shrews” made monsters out of what actually looks like this:

So my initial reaction when asked "why demonize rats?" was "Well, they're not really rats! They're like mutant dogs!" So sure, fair enough, mutant dogs and not rats -- but that brought up another, deeper problem. The creatures outside the light of the boat, which are dangerous and hunted, are like mutant dogs.....which is an entirely original idea.

Nothing like "mutant dog" has been used in recent horror/fantasy.

It's an inspired and visionary creation that no audience has seen the likes of.

People will be shocked by the revolutionary concept of the "mutant dog-like creature".

Only that's NOT TRUE AT ALL!

This concept is not only unoriginal, but has been run well past "trope" territory and into "Already Half-Expected Cliche Land". I had inadvertently committed one of the most grievous crimes I can think of in storytelling: Using a cliche and expecting it to seem original. Ugh....Pfffthth.....

So....although I can honestly say that term “rat” in the story (which is actually never spoken once in the short film) is a misnomer and does a poor job of describing the mammalian critters in the dark, even the actual visual concept of the creatures is a tired trope that would likely inspire nothing but boredom, or, at best, a feeling of familiarity.

NO. GOOD.

So....Let it be known, that friends of real-world, non-monstrous rats (like, say, @spoonriverrat, and I’m just pulling letters at random here) can rest assured that not only are no rats being portrayed as horrid beasts, but that even pausing to question it brought the realization that the “semi-aquatic threatening mammals” in the story needed a rework. So that’s in the pipeline.

They still won’t be rodents, but will hopefully be a bit more original and surprising than what I was blindly willing to put on the screen. And to preserve said surprise, I will not be sharing their design or build once completed. Where would the fun in that be?

Drawing is not my greatest strength, but when quickly storyboarding to just get down a series of shots, glorified stick-figures will do. Not well, but they'll at least DO. Eventually the storyboards will become low-poly, 3D animatics which will allow us to really see what frames up correctly and what doesn't. At the moment? Just some sketches that are a couple inches wide, roughly hashed out in tiny increments while at my day-job.

Why the hell would I post this, one might ask? Primarily because it tricks me into being productive. Even if I throw this into the digital ether and no one ever sees it (arguably the best possible outcome?), it gives me that "Well now you've gone and done it. You've publicly posted X,Y,Z, so you'd damn well better get it finished!" feeling. It's terror, really. Maybe that's the lesson I should take away from this: creative endeavors are born from inspiration, but only realized through constant pressure and primal terror. I'm headed to an early grave, aren't I?

So here's a short sequence showing the struggles of a man tasked with lighting lanterns on a weird, drunk, frog-ish creature's boat:

Just a short sequence out of over 180 total panels so far. The character designs here aren’t representative of their final look, of course. These guys haven’t even been modeled yet. Many of the props have, though! I’ll probably share some of those next, as my brother has been our primary prop-modeler, and he’s damned good at it. 

Music has always served as psychological fuel for people. Been that way since we started hitting hollow things to get everyone elevated before a hunt or the subsequent feast. 

So, as our project moves through its various phases, tunes of all sorts have been catalysts. I can only speak for myself, as what is motivating and inspiring to one person may just be an irritant to someone else. I’d like to collect some tracks that are serving me well at the moment. Of course, I can only link to what’s already openly available, but after a while I might end up with a collection of music that played throughout this production. Might be nice to have as a time-capsule once we’re a couple projects in.

“Choros” - Ludovico Einaudi 

I say “I can only speak for myself”, but if you listen to this track in its entirety at a decent volume and at the end aren’t creatively inspired, you may need to look inward -- for capacitors or wiring, because you may be a robot. Kidding aside, this is just one of my favorite pieces of contemporary non-soundtrack orchestration.

“Revolution” - Uppermost

Not so much creativity-inspiring, but productivity-inspiring. If there’s already an idea or something and the work for it just needs to get done.....or I need to do some dishes, this track is a nice background head-bob that seems to keep work going.

So, the guy who’s tasked with doing our prop and set modeling, and who has been burdened with meshes I’ve made and been told “This is a mess. Here, please fix it!” and who not only comes back with them fixed, but with alternate (often much better) versions of them? That guy? My brother? It’s this guy right here: @chaosequilibrium

He’s goddamned talented. So much so, that aside from slashing through the mire of CG asset production is taking a brief break today to participate in a “performance day” at his office where he’ll be playing a lead guitar segment from a Dream Theater track. Because that’s a thing he can do too. 

I can play some basic rhythm guitar, but I’m not going to be of any musical use unless you need some serious shakuhachi tunes belted out. 

Our prop building process starts with sketching out a general idea of what the item should look like and figuring out how many versions we need. If it's ever close enough to the camera to need high-detail textures and a high-polygon mesh (the actual geometry of the object) then we'll need to make a high-rez version. If it won't ever be too close the camera, we can get away with a medium-resolution version of it and call it a day. This actually occurs in live-action productions as well: If your character is wielding their super-cool sword in a long shot, the props department will have a sword that is more durable but less detailed. If they're holding the sword in a close-up shot, props will have what's referred to as the "hero" version of the sword: the most detailed and meticulously designed build they can manage (which will, due to its delicate details, probably fall the hell apart if it actually strikes anything).

The same goes for what we're doing, only MUCH EASIER. Build a prop with as much geometry as you can manage, then apply the highest-resolution textures and materials you can to it. There's your "hero" prop. Need a medium-resolution version for long shots? Take the same prop, drop the number of polygons and make a low-rez version of your textures. Done! Now you've got two props that are fundamentally identical, only built for their specific purposes. And you're not wasting 1s and 0s on a 4k version of something that's only in the background of a shot.

The best booze vessels a frog-lizard creature could want!

This is our basic "creature's jug". Since it will be drinking from several of them over the course of the short, we'll be painting different versions, but using this base version as the starting canvas, so to speak.

This model's mesh was built by my super-talented brother Nick, and I handled the texture and materials:

What time is it?

Have giant rats? You'll need a good hammer to take care of those. Unfortunately, drunken amphibians aren't the best iron smiths. But you go with what you got, right?

Again, this one is Nick on the mesh build and me on materials and camera:

We use a great software suite to work on our final materials after a model has been completely built. Before it gets to the materials/texturing phase, a placeholder texture is put on to give a general idea of what the final product might look like. Luckily, my brother is damned good at making sure his placeholder textures are as close to "final" as possible (and in a few cases, I think we can just use the placeholder and be done with it!). The following props are still works-in-progress and have placeholder textures on them, but I think they still look great. These are all my brother's work:

Box for your archery equipment and hammers and such

And it’s already rigged to open and close!

Version 1 of the creature's scythian recurve bow

Nick made a second version [not pictured] just 'cause he could. So we've got bow options!

“Proof of concept” rope

There are going to be so many ropes, twine, strings and all sorts of tethering in this short. Here's the base test of a heavy nautical rope for mast-to-mast lantern hanging. It's going to have it's own dedicated physics system too, so all the swinging can be physically accurate.

So those are some props for the show so far. Many, many more to do as well as a fully animated human, a bipedal creature and a few rats ‘of unusual size’. 

Up until now, what I've been talking about has been really early pre-production stuff: writing, storyboards, etc. These are processes that are pretty common knowledge. You write something. You draw simple pictures to represent camera shots of something. Not a whole lot of figuring out "how the hell do I do this?". But now it's time to observe the making of an animated short film while the creators simultaneously learn HOW to make an animated short film!

Every studio has their own different production pipelines, but there are some basic constants in 3D animation: Concept work, modeling (building the geometry of everything), texturing (applying the materials and textures to those models), rigging (setting models up to be animated), animation, lighting, rendering (taking all of the physical data, including lighting, motion, physics simulations, etc...and churning out a picture from it. This picture becomes a single frame in the animation), then the whole compositing and post-production process.

Though we went through several project ideas, rejecting each because it would be too ambitious for our first piece, what we settled on still involves a lot of complex factors. If you haven't read the short that we're adapting, you can find it here (it's only like 2 pages, maybe less. It's quick, I promise.), but if you have, you know that there are a few elements that are fairly constant in the story. Water and multiple light sources (often MOVING light sources) are just a couple of these.

One of the first technical challenges we set out to explore was the water: its movement, transparency, viscosity and all that. Now, a lot of these factors are controlled by what kind of "shader" you use (that's the element that determines the texture and look of something) and there are a million variations of water shaders out there. Rather than jump head-first into that, I just ran some basic physics tests to see how objects moving through and under the water looked. Here's an early test using a simple icosphere and a magically levitating body of water.

We want our water ripples to look right and for an object under the surface to still be slightly visible. All of these factors can be tweaked (and will be, a thousand times, I'm sure) to get just the look needed for a particular substance or shot.

Next we want to make sure that light off the water's surface looks decent. And if not, what does it take to get it looking better? Since we're going to be dealing with lots of lights and a constantly moving liquid surface, we needed to start with the basics. We whipped together a few basic low-poly paper lanterns and ran them over a liquid surface as a boat-like shape gave us our water ripples.

Though the water physics looked way off (I’ve since learned to correct this! Victory!) the actual reflections looked like they worked. Not bad for a basic proof of concept! 

While these basic physics tests were being run, we were also working on modeling and texturing some of our props. I'm excited to share those next!

More music that fills the background of making stuff

"Starvation" - Thomas Bergersen

While technically not from any soundtrack, this instrumental piece is available on the licensing market that production companies use to select tracks for trailers and such. So it could be in something at any moment. I would love to use this in a project. Most of Thomas Bergersen's stuff is awesome, but this is a personal favorite.

"Twist The Knife" - Evil Nine & Emily Breeze

Fun, aggressive and probably capable of making you exceed the speed limit if listened to on the road.