Creation


As it is common in this type of project, I started with a rough storyboard as a guide for the entire project. Here you can see examples of the original storyboard drawings compared to their corresponding scenes. Like always, there are conceptual changes but for the most part the storyboard served as a good starting point.
















After the storyboard was completed the next step was modeling the main character and designing the setting. Originally the storyboard depicts a very hectic room with stuff spread all over the place, indicating a disorganized state of mind. Later I changed the concept to a more minimalist design with less furniture and a more organized atmosphere. This was more in accordance with the character's philosophical tendencies and also with his temporary separation from creating art. A small Zen garden recalls his love for nature and personal search for peace even though his heart is not yet healed from being broken.

For this project I used Animation Master, a great software especially designed for character animation. It took me around a month to model and texture the entire scene to the level of detail I was looking for. I was interested in accomplishing surrealistic images rather than realistic ones, and even though I used some realistic looking textures I still wanted strong saturated colors that would resemble paintings more than photographs.

The main character was conceived as a pseudo human, a combination of 3D design with more traditional techniques, mainly pencil on paper or canvas. I tend to draw a very skinny male figure with very defined muscles when I portrait destructive emotions, like this one I made in 2001 entitled "Strings of Ego". This one in particular was exaggerated to create an almost repulsive feeling towards the worshiping of the self, and I used it as part of the project. I translated the original drawing to a 3D character with a less decrepit look. Another characteristic of this figure is the lack of ears. Moving away from the Ego means paying more attention to the person within. The result is the realization that our senses are indeed imperfect to perceive the universe as a whole. I could have eliminated the eyes, mouth and nose based on the same principle. However, the figure would have lost part of the expression I was looking for, not to mention its human nature.














All the art pieces you see hanging on the walls in the video are real paintings or drawings that I have made over the years, used as textures inside the animation software in a process called texture mapping. I also used some of them as backgrounds on several scenes, experimenting with 3D and 2D images that resulted in well balanced compositions.










Animating a simple 3D object like a bouncing ball is one thing, but animating a complex model like this requires a completely different approach. Once the model has bee built, a internal structure is created. These are called bones and they work just like the skeleton in our bodies, each bone controlling an assigned area of the body. The principle is very easy, but to achieve the desired motion is definitely a task of skills especially in complex movements involving several bones at a time.
Facial expression is accomplished in a different way. First I had to set a series of poses or facial expressions. To manipulate them, Animation Master has a very handy tool called pose sliders that make a smooth transition from one pose to the other, for example a closed mouth to an open mouth by sliding a control knob. A different slider is used for every expression and they can be used in combination.









The arrangement of the objects interacting together in a scene is often called Choreography and requires some knowledge of lighting and camera movement to achieve certain effects. Lights are very important, and so are the shadows they produce. Also important is the position and movement of the camera, depending on the artist's needs it can be very slow and smooth or very fast with vibration and motion blur. I used both types of movement in this project.
The interaction between all the elements will result in the final look of the images. There's quite some time spent in refining movement, texture and illumination before the desired point is reached. Once you are content with the result there is one more process that needs to be done before leaving the animation program.

Rendering is the last step of any animation project. This is where the computer "cooks" all the input information and transforms a series of orders and calculations into the final images that will later be printed to video. It is a time consuming process. Fortunately it can be done overnight since the computer does it by itself.
To give you an estimate of how time consuming it can be:
Masterpiece is a 4 minutes 19 seconds animation. Since it is designed for video it requires 30 images per second to be viewed properly, that means the computer has to render a total of 7770 different images. On this particular project, the average render time of a single image was about 2 minutes, making a total of 15540 minutes or 259 hours. That's just rendering time. Many scenes have to be rendered several times to achieve the proper camera motion, lighting and effects. Sometimes it just won't go as smooth as you would want it to.

Once the rendering process was finished and I had all this scenes it was time to edit. Transitioning from one scene to the next seems like an easy task, just paste one image sequence after the other. But editing is part of the final expression of any visual composition and has to be done carefully, otherwise it compromises the outcome. In this particular project, editing and music went hand by hand. I used Screenblast Acid 4.0, a music mixing software. I used a loop based composition with some additional sound effects. The original idea for Masterpiece included the voice over of a narrator that would be the main character telling the story from his canvas prison. That's still in the air, but for now, Masterpiece is like a painting in motion, and leaves to the observer the ability to interpret what is really happening.

Although it was a long process, Masterpiece was a very fulfilling project. I learned so much from it. It is my first animated short but it won't be the last one. I did it all on my own, from the first sketch to the final steps of editing and sound. In the future I will work with other people, a sound engineer, voice over artists and so on. For Masterpiece, I wanted it to be all mine, a spawn of my imagination, a reflection of who I am.

>>Synopsis
>>Concept
>>It all boils down to...
>>Creation
Bones
Story and Animation by Luis Medrano