Fibermesh
Another work-in-progress of my Hyena villain. I’m just learning to use Fibermesh in ZBrush, but I think looks pretty cool!
The Crossing
THE CROSSING
A group of wildebeests are on the side of the river. A boat is there. The leader of the group hands TAR a bag of coins, as the wildebeests all climb into the boat.
TAR wades across the river, pulling the boat with one hand. The wildebeests look nervously about. There is an “aquarium” style shot, so that we can see above the surface of the river and below it at the same time.
Crocodile warriors rise up out of the water around TAR. One of them plucks a momma wildebeest out of the boat, while TAR is fighting with two others on the other side. The wildebeest passengers are in a panic.
TAR kills the two crocs that he is fighting. All the Splashing and thrashing about ends and the water becomes murky with blood. The passengers are still looking about, agitated and afraid.
TAR hauls the boat onto the shore of the opposite bank of the river,and the wildebeests scramble out.
The wildebeest leader is angry. Waving his hands around, points at the water, the boat, and the orphaned child (who is crying for his momma). TAR looks back at the water and realizes that one of the passengers is missing.
He reaches into his pouch and takes out one coin. He shrugs his shoulders and give the refund to the wildebeest. TAR returns to the boat, collecting his gear, while the wildebeest travelers walk off, continuing on their way.
END
Working on designs and storyboards for the next episode… I’m looking for animators and potential collaborators on the Hash Forum , so let me know if you want to participate!
The Pitch…
Here is the Pitch Bible for TAR of Zandoria.
It’s got the slug-line, introduction, characters, and episode spring boards–all the required things for the pitch (based on everything I’ve read)… But WHO do I pitch it to?
That’s the thing that all the books and tutorials about pitching your ideas seem to skip… Unless you happen to know the right contact, it isn’t easy to figure out where to go next.
Have you found yourself in this same spot? Where did you go next? Let me know in the comments!
Channel accidentally deleted
My Zandoria YouTube Channel got accidentally deleted! So I will have to rebuild…All of the subscribers, statistics, etc. lost. I will have to recreate the playlists for the Siggraph Animation:Master tutorials, which may take me a few days. But I have re-uploaded the First Episode of TAR of Zandoria. Share it!
Plans for 2015
I have been working full-time on this and freelancing for the past year–Resigning my day job at the end of 2013. It has been scary, humbling, exhilarating, depressing, gratifying… all over the map emotionally.
While I was able to create the first short by myself, I also realized that it would have gone faster working with other artists, and it probably would have been even better…
I realized that I have a lot to learn when it comes to distribution, or pitching, or fund raising–or just getting people to watch it for FREE on YouTube! Yet I look at my poster of TAR on the wall, and I know that I can’t give up…I’ve wrestled with the idea of trying to do it as a graphic novel, or something easier for a solo artist to pull off, but I think that is just that familiar fear of failing….
True, I’ve proven that I can create an animation! It isn’t as polished as it could be, and I had to cut some corners, but, I did it. I have been in a kind of creative drift since uploading “Marked for Death“… I guess that I just thought that if I finished it, that people would see it and then somehow I would be successful/validated/loved? I dont know..It’s kind of crazy. The after-birthing of a huge project seems to take as long as the delivery!
Now I’m ready to continue, to take it up a notch, to bring my (our) dreams to life. I want to create an Open Studio where other aspiring artists an animators can join this project.
I believe that an open project like TAR of Zandoria is the hope and future for the Animation:Master community of artists and animators. It isn’t about just software.. an Open Studio creates the ecosystem for the artists to collaborate, for newbies to aspire to learn, for mentors to coach, for the software to gain subscriptions, There is something in it for YOU, whether you are a modeler, rigger, animator, programmer, or fan!
Since I have no funding up front, I have to figure out how to divide royalties among what are essentially co-creators of the final product. Whether YouTube royalties or DVD sales every participant has a stake in what we will create.
TAR of Zandoria, Episode 1
[youtube=http://youtu.be/d18ysusFmx0]
I’ve been working on this for so many months, it feels great to finally have something to share with you! Thanks to all of my friends and family who have encouraged me to keep going, especially to my wife Sharissa for her faith and support!
I hope you will share the video with your friends and followers, so that TAR of Zandoria finds some fans 🙂
Composer Alan Williams Creates an EPIC score for TAR!
Alan Williams is an award-winning composer and conductor with more than 100 motion picture and television credits. Alan’s scores include the Academy Award nominated IMAX film, Amazon, Sony Pictures Classics’ Mark Twain’s America in 3D and some of the highest rated movies made for television. Alan composed the award-winning score to the animated film, “The Princess and the Pea” and also co-wrote the original songs with Grammy Award winning Lyricist David Pomeranz as well as the Student Academy Award winning short “Pajama Gladiator”. His score to “Estefan” received an Annie nomination for best original score. He has been awarded the Insight Award for Excellence for his score to “Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa”, 13 Accolade Awards for Best Original Score, 8 Park City Film Music Festival Gold Medal for Excellence awards as well as his score to “Crab Orchard” being named as one of the Top 20 Film Scores of 2005. Alan has received 3 Global Music Awards for his albums “The Cinema Collection”, “The Documentary Collection” and “Patriots of Freedom” and a Prestige Film Gold Award for his score to “Cowgirls n’ Angels.”
When Alan contacted me during last years Kickstarter campaign about creating music for TAR, I didn’t really understand just how amazing and generous his offer was. I had an idea that the score needed drums, but otherwise I was pretty clueless about music…
Today he blew my mind with the the most awesome, visceral, pounding, epic musical score for the first episode! My heart was racing as I listened to it! It was just intensely powerful–it totally takes the animation to a higher level. It is EPIC!
You will hear it soon, and I know you will love it too. Until then, check out his work at http://alanwilliams.com
Stylizing the look…
Have you noticed that the “look” of big budget animated movies has become homogenized? However beautiful those globally illuminated, sub-surface scattered, realistically simulated CG worlds have become, there is a common look to them…. I think it is because the artists and the tools are the same from studio to studio…
From what I understand about the industry, artists move from film to film, studio to studio, as each project ends (self described “pixel gypsies”)… The tools are similar between studios, the feature orgy in 3D software pushing in a Darwinian way towards a synthetic hyper realism.
The last animation that I posted suffered from this same look, and I had to stop and think about why…. I think there is an unconscious bias towards that style, because our tools favor it, and there is an expectation that for it to be accepted it has to have that look.
I am just one guy. Even if I thought that this homogenous CG look was great–there are hundreds of people involved in creating it–and if my work attempts to emulated it, then it will rightly be compared to it. The animation, the particles and effects, the lighting–everything has to be at Hollywood level…If it is not, then rather than being immersed in the story with the characters, the viewer is going to be distracted….
Realizing I needed to stylize the look–Dig a little deeper than what the tools want to give me–make them give me what I want, I started looking at my influences for TAR of Zandoria to see what it was that I liked (and figure out how to make the computer render it).
Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and Simon Bisley are my favorite fantasy artists. So I started looking at their paintings for stylistic cues that I could try to emulate–since that genre is the inspiration for TAR, if I could make it come to life that would be more satisfying….
The first thing that jumped out at me is the strong contrast between light and dark–It is called chiaroscuro in painting. The defined contours in Frazetta’s and Bisley’s work also stood out–I think this comes from their background in comics before they started painting…
The backgrounds are painted of course, and since I was already using a matte painting approach to creating my backgrounds for TAR, this is an easy shift–Even running a Photoshop filter was an improvement over the realistic matte painting…
I added toon shading to the edges of my objects, and I relighted the scene with a key light and a couple of fill lights. I think I am also going to tweak something with the diffuse falloff at the edges, to get a look for like my airbrushed version of TAR.
Shot 1(5)
I was watching some behind the scenes shots from the Blue Sky film “Epic”, and saw a lot of reference footage that was acted-out by the animators and used as a reference. I thought that the motion and timing was very naturalistic, and if a big studio can do it, then why not me?
So I opened up the iPad and filmed a couple of takes of me taking off my shield/hat and flipping my staff around to use as a club, as storyboarded.
Dropping the footage into Animation:Master as a rotoscope, I was able to step forward in the timeline and see myself acting out the shot. The timing and spacing was already worked out–I just stepped to where I needed to set keyframes and posed TAR to match….
One thing that had struck me as odd on the Blue Sky example is that the reference shot matched the finished shot exactly for the camera angle…. To me, I had thought of myself as TAR, standing looking into the shadows at Ninja Pass–preparing to charge into a fight! The best camera angle came after I had dropped TAR into the Choreography.
3D Print your own TAR of Zandoria Collectible!
Download and 3D print your own TAR of Zandoria collectible statue! Print it and put it on your desk. Print it and give it as a gift. Take a picture and share it! Every time someone sees this statue, they are going to ask “What IS that!?”
That is going to help spread awareness of this project, and the cost of the .stl will help me keep the lights on 😉
Pierre at Cults3D invited me to upload my sculptures to their new 3D model marketplace where people can buy print-ready models to build on their 3D printers. It seems like a great idea–I imagine that there are only so many Stanford bunnies and Yoda heads that a person needs… As 3D printers become ubiquitous there is a need for high quality sculpts to fill the build platforms.
I foresee that there is going to be a market for commission work too, so if you need a little help bringing your idea to life, please give me a shout. Here it is on Thingiverse
Zandoria Studios 