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kopachris Administrator Ninja Admin member is offline
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 50 Location: Behind you Karma: 2
Dinosaurs on a Plane « Thread Started on Aug 9, 2009, 10:26pm »
Well, it's pretty much official. We're making not a sequel to the original (yet), but are remaking the original Dinosaurs on a Plane. I'll post information, behind the scenes stuff, and teaser material on this thread as it's developed. You may have already seen the "WANTED: One Composer" thread in the music board. This is what that's about. Anyway, to kick off this thread, I'm going to just post the cast and crew listing (aka the credits) and a few prototype renders.
BTW, anyone wishing to join the project and lend their services can apply here. Sorry, you won't get paid (we have no money).
Credits:
Code:
[BEGINNING] NinjaSoft Entertainment presents
A Brandon Atkinson production
A Christopher Koch film
Chase Anthony as Col. Chase Rothenberg
Brandon Atkinson as Capt. Brandon Parkes
James Olmstead as Dr. James Nicholas
Kristin Hermanson as Kristin
DINOSAURS on a PLANE
[ENDING] Directed by Christopher Koch Executive producers: Christopher Koch, Brandon Atkinson Associate producers: Carl Koch, Darin Atkinson Casting by Brandon Atkinson Music composed and arranged by
Cast ------ Chase Anthony - Chase Rothenberg Brandon Atkinson - Brandon Parkes James Olmstead - James Nicholas Kristin Hermanson - Kristin Mikelle Atkinson - Jessica Calamari
Other voices:
Set designer: Christopher Koch Costume designer: Brandon Atkinson Storyboard artist: Christopher Koch
Modeling and animation: Brandon Atkinson, Christopher Koch
Recording and editing: Christopher Koch Foley artist: Christopher Koch Sound FX provided by: freesound.org Sound FX created by:
Music ------- Composer: Arranger:
Technical arrangements: ------------------------- Render wranglers: Christopher Koch, Brandon Atkinson Computer time for rendering provided by: Christopher Koch, Brandon Atkinson, Chase Anthony, Regina Grogan, Dagny Hunt
Special Thanks ----------------
Free software: Blender The Blender Foundation [url]www.blender.org[/url] Celtx Greyfirst Corporation [url]www.celtx.com[/url]
kopachris Administrator Ninja Admin member is offline
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 50 Location: Behind you Karma: 2
Re: Dinosaurs on a Plane « Reply #1 on Aug 15, 2009, 11:09pm »
I've got some technical details and "how it's made" stuff in this post.
Let's start off with a list of things that sucked in the original DOAP: 1. Lo-resolution The original was lo-res because of the settings I used in iMovie to export it. The original renders were much higher resolution (about 640x480 compared to 240x160). It looks even lower resolution when you add the high compression (for internet streaming). This time, we'll render the entire thing in widescreen HD 720p24 (1280x720 at 24 frames per second). 2. Scene backgrounds These just sucked in general. Nothing really to do about it except to do them the best we can. 3. Audio timing That's because it was animated before we recorded the audio. Big mistake. It was a nightmare to edit. Won't happen again. 4. Texturing, shading, and lighting The textures (images on a model) just sucked in general. The main reason for this is Anim8or's lack of support for UV mapping. UV mapping allows you to unwrap the 3D model into a 2D image, so you can accurately wrap a texture around the model. The shading (color, reflectivity, etc.) also sucked. This is partly due to Anim8or's simplistic shading system, and partly because Brandon's not very good with photorealism (he admitted it). I, on the other hand, am not that bad with photorealistic shaders, which is why I'm doing most of the material work this time. As for lighting, well, there's not really much to explain. Blender has more lighting options than Anim8or, so that should help. 5. Nonrealistic hair, fire Blender supports particle systems (which can make realistic hair and particles). Anim8or doesn't. 'Nuf said.
Well, those are the top five. In addition to fixing those individual mistakes, we'll also be following a totally different development process: 1. Write screenplay 2. Modeling 3. Storyboard 4. Vocal recording 5. Animatic production (combination of storyboard with vocals and timing) 6. Animation 7. Rendering 8. Video editing, vocal timing editing 9. Music production 10. Audio editing 11. Finalization (DVD, artwork, etc.)
When writing the screenplay, we use a free program called "Celtx" (www.celtx.com). Celtx automatically formats the script for you as you type, allowing even a complete n00b to make a professional-looking screenplay. It's pretty nifty. The current step we're on is modeling, which may take quite a while. We've made a list of most of the individual models we'll need. There's a lot of them, and each one takes about a week or so to model and texture. After modeling, we'll use Blender to outline all the shots and render still images of each for our storyboard. We'll add descriptions and dialog to each of the images and arrange them in Celtx (oh yeah, Celtx handles the entire preproduction process, not just the script). We'll then record the vocals in several sessions. This will probably take the least amount of time. We'll keep even the bad recordings to make bloopers out of. Since the whole team will be together at once, we'll also video tape this for the "behind the scenes" on the DVD.
After all the vocals are out of the way, we'll add them to the storyboard in Blender and create and render simple animations. This'll give a feel for how the final product will turn out. With a nice outline available, we'll complete all the animation. This will also take a long time. The most labor-intensive part of this will be animating the speech, which we'll do last. We'll make use of a nice feature of Blender's called "shape keys" to animate the speech. Shape keys allow you to store the shape of the model several times, then transition between them arbitrarily. Blender also has audio facilities specifically for synchronizing audio to animation.
After the animation is decided to be done, we'll render the whole thing. This will take the longest amount of time, up to an hour or two per frame. We're thinking that we'll ask for help rendering when the time comes, as none of our computers are particularly powerful. If you want more proof of how long rendering takes, most animation studios buy time on a supercomputer to render their movies. Pixar has their own "renderfarm". Their movie "Cars" took about a year to render at about 12 hours per frame (it was all the reflections that killed them). Since our movie is simpler than Cars, it'll take less time to render, but will still take a long time.
Once we have all the sequences rendered, we can begin editing them. We don't yet know what the video editing will entail, but it probably won't take as long as the modeling or animation. After the video is matched with the vocals, we'll give a copy to whoever is going to compose the music. Every composer has their own way of composing, so there's no telling how it'll be done (especially since we don't know who's composing yet). Once the music is composed and notated in LilyPond, we'll use LilyPond's own faculties to produce a midi file which we can then put in GarageBand to make a better-sounding mp3. After the music's done, we'll do the rest of the audio editing. The audio editing will probably include setting up sound effects, editing existing audio (making vocals sound better), and probably some timing issues.
Once all of that is finished, we can build a nice custom DVD in iDVD and then burn it. Throughout all of this, we'll be working on a movie poster as well. Sometime in between "rendering" and "video editing", we'll find time to make a trailer or two. The DVD will include the movie, the original movie, bloopers, the soundtrack, and some behind the scenes stuff.
Oh, and in case you're wondering why we're doing all of this, it's because a) we just want to make a movie, b) we want to show that a good movie can be made with literally no budget, c) we want to practice movie production techniques, and d) we want to fix what we messed up in the original DOAP.
kopachris Administrator Ninja Admin member is offline
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 50 Location: Behind you Karma: 2
Re: Dinosaurs on a Plane « Reply #2 on Aug 20, 2009, 9:16pm »
The producers met together and discussed the situation of the music. We've decided that the majority of the score will be made of existing recordings of classical music (Mozart's Requiem will fit right into a dramatic action sequence). A few parts, such as the main theme, will be composed by me and put in GarageBand as a midi sequence. We're doing it this way because NONE OF YOU WANT TO BE OUR COMPOSER. :eatyoursouls:
We also found a BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project called the "Big Ugly Rendering Project", or BURP. What BURP does is take an animation and distributes the load of rendering the animation over all the computers that aren't currently doing anything and have the BOINC software installed. Think of it as a giant supercomputer over the internet. We plan on using a combination of our own distribution of .blend files and BURP to render DOAP.
Oh, as of right now, we've decided to extend the script and make DOAP feature-length. We might change our mind later on (look for deleted scenes on the DVD), because it'll probably take until mid-2011 to finish. Like I said in the first post, anyone who wants to join the team can sign up here.
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