timothyweber.org

I guess it didn't turn out too well for him. But who could predict giant Muppets?

Hash Animation:Master, Springboard, Cakewalk Pro Audio, Cool Edit, Premiere, Ray Dream Studio
January-February 2001
Requires QuickTime:

As a promotion for their Animation:Master product, Hash Inc. sponsors a monthly image contest, and this month they introduced an animation contest as well. This month's theme required that you pick from a few character models that they provided, and from a bunch of walking or running styles, for which they provided reference sketches. Other than that and a ten-second time limit, you had complete creative freedom.

I had a whole lot of fun with it. And I won first place, among some terrific entries.

Here are some notes on the project, for interested animation geeks. More complete details and the Animation:Master project file are on the Hash site.

• I had the idea at the outset of tying together the rhythm of the action (the monster's footsteps), the music, and the cuts, and this helped a lot -- I didn't have to figure out after the fact how to edit to the music.
• The large rocks with the darker textures are by Alain Desrochers, from his wonderful Al's Archives collection. The mesas in the background in the third shot are a photograph from a Corel clip-art CD, placed on a layer.
• I had originally intended to render the "shag" fur on the ShaggyPuppet model, and I had the render time. I ran some tests early on to make sure it was going to look good. Then I put the model into my choreography, scaled it up, animated... and when I went to do the final render, realized that shag doesn't scale. I fooled around a little with it, but couldn't get it to look right, and anyway I thought the model looked nice without it in the bright desert light, so I dropped it.
• The camera jiggles when the monster stomps in the first shot were done with a little rig that the camera was constrained to. I basically moved the "handle" of the rig to position the camera, so that the rig's base moved smoothly through the shot, then applied a jiggle action to the rig's upper pieces at the right places. Kind of the reverse of a Steadicam.
• I did the "shatter" effect on the opening title in Ray Dream Studio, then composited it in Premiere. Now that the new version of After Effects has a Shatter effect built-in, I'd probably use that instead (and I expect it would look less tacky).
• The sound effects were mostly fabricated or recorded at home in Cool Edit: the monster's footsteps and the faint sound of the knight's feet kicking up sand were made from scratch out of generated noise; the knight's armor was my keys jingling, pitch-shifted down; the monster's roar (which doesn't come out well in the mix) was my cat's purr pitch-shifted down; the faint crunching of the knight when he's grabbed was aluminum foil pitch-shifted down; the monster's gulp was me gulping (all together now) pitch-shifted down, and the knight's breathing and yell were me with my head inside a cooking pot. The smashing sound at the beginning was one I had grabbed from a videotape a long time ago (you have to guess what the movie was).
• I wrote and recorded the music to fit, after first deciding on a tempo to time the shots against. I used a classical guitar, an E-mu Proteus 1 synthesizer, and Cakewalk Pro Audio. I also composed the sound FX track in Cakewalk, because it provides a lot more control over volume curves than Premiere.
• Some things I wanted to fix but didn't have time: the audio mix (needs more amplitude compression, foosteps probably too loud, can't hear roar), adding footprints and dust, and plants and rocks in the third shot to match the first.