Journal

Knowing that the story will play in a traditional Japanese setting, I’ve started pondering the possibility of getting a decent soundtrack together. Unlike last time when time constraints forced me to go with a royalty free (albeit canned) Jazz track, this time I’d much rather have a nice and original score to go with the plot.

Fortunately my brother Christopher is a good musician and I hope that we’ll be able to produce something worthwhile. Unlike with western Classical Music, we’re both not too familiar with Japanese traditional music and will have to delve into the matter soon. Christopher now has a user account with this site and I’ve encouraged him to post his progress here periodically.

After what seems like a thousand sleepless nights of telling insipid stories to myself, I think I’ve finally come up with one that I like. It’s the short and fairly humorous tale of a lonesome but annoying dragon on the lookout for someone to call a friend. In hindsight, I find that Bagel 2′s storyline was perhaps a bit too convoluted, which is why this one will be very straight forward, more along the lines of Pixar’s For the Birds or perhaps Geri’s Game.

Now after some thinking I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably unwise to publish details about the plot here on my Plog, because after all, I don’t want to spoil the fun for anyone when the film is finally released. You’ll be left in the dark as to what exactly I’ll be producing, but I don’t see that as a drawback at all. The gist will reveal itself though my postings here anyhow.

While still toying around with different story ideas, I’ve spent some time on improving my toon/cel shading techniques. At first they may look awfully clumsy and complicated because it’s a rather simple thing to get a toon shaded image from just about any 3D renderer, nowadays. Even pretty “ink” outlines are no longer the problem they used to be.

Yet the technique I’m developing gives the artist (in this case me!) a lot more control over the look and, best of all, even major changes can easily be applied long after the 3D render-farm has gone to sleep. Being able to setup things like color, contrast, line thickness and even lighting in post can be a huge advantage when you think of the alternative: Time consuming re-rendering!
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This morning I read on slashdot about an open source project called the “Inkulator 9000″, which seems to do a pretty good job at outline rendering of 3D polygon objects.
Although I’ve developed my own little method of rendering toon outlines in RenderMan, I’m always open towards new techniques and will surely give this software a try when I have the time.

Since I currenly don’t have any concrete ideas concerning the storyline, my next steps will be as follows:

• *Come up with a story idea!*
  This one shouldn’t take all too long, after all I’ve written down lots and lots of little story ideas lately and I usually come up with basic plots rather quickly. Goethe, Shakespeare and the Grimm Brothers might need to help me out as well.
• *Find an entertaining plot and design that will…*
  a) …suit the story idea
  b) …be workable in a reasonable time frame
  The greatest story isn’t going to be of any use to me if I can’t make a short film from the material, be it because the plot is too complex or merely due to my incapacity to tackle a huge project by myself. This time I’ll try to get it just right and take a good amount of time for this step, making sure that the story really works before I start producing. _Simplicity is the key!_
• *Create a schedule and time-line*
  Meeting deadlines can be tedious, but in the end it’ll surely push me to get things done.
• *Write a script and sketch out the complete storyboard*
  As a more visual person, the storyboard will be my primary focus.

Obviously my schedule will depend wholly on the type of story – the number of characters being a crucial criterion – and of course the visual complexity of the project. I’m aiming for a 3-4 minute film this time, and it’ll probably have the look of traditional animation, think Disney’s “Jungle Book” or “Snow White”. Whatever may come in terms of story and design, I can already state that next summer will be the absolute deadline, because that’s when I’ll need to get started on writing my diploma for uni.