"Hey, we can do that!" Those were the words or
something close to it. It was early 2000 and we had just
completed animating episodes of "Starship Troopers:
Roughneck Chronicles" for Sony Television when the
idea of doing our own feature danced in our heads. We believed
we had set up a nifty little pipeline for production and
thought, why don't we just bang out a CG feature with the
crew we have?
Lesson
1: You can't "bang out" a CG feature.
To
begin with, we had to figure out a level of detail that
we could implement for the whole movie with our limited
resources, and get through our modest render farm. The core
of the production had to hold up so that any upgrades through
the long process could be added without having to start
from scratch. After all, as an independent, we knew that
we couldn't win a technology war with a major studio. So
we wanted to put our emphasis on entertainment. We weren't
making this movie for our peers, we were making it for an
audience.
That
being said, we still knew it was vital to set priorities
on what could and could not be accomplished. From examining
other films and television shows, we found that the greatest
technical problem with independently produced animation
was the level of consistency. There is really no point to
having a beautifully rendered shot if it is going to be
followed by a technically inferior one since the audience
will intuitively know something is off. Like a bad special
effect in an otherwise good movie, it breaks the illusion
for the viewer and pulls them out of the story. We wanted
to make sure that each shot was up to the level of quality
with the one before and the one following.
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After
settling on a look, we concentrated on the story, and the
characters and the worlds they inhabit for the rest of the
production. We boarded and re-boarded, animated and re-animated
as well as added entire sections to the film in order to
make the experience as exciting as possible. We used the
lessons we'd learned in producing and post-producing hundreds
of hours of other peoples' ideas. No one ultimately cares
what your troubles were in making the project, what software
you used, how big your crew was, or how much money you spent
compared to another film. If the film is entertaining, nothing
else really matters.
In
terms of genre, we thought this film would appeal to the
demographic we belong to: video game geeks. The idea was
to create an exhilarating feature length video game cut-scene
about a group of racers in space. I especially wanted to
make a film that was what I like to call a "Saturday
Morning Star Wars," with all the excitement and energy
of the original Star Wars movies combined with the
appeal of the cartoons we enjoyed as kids. Or rather, the
memory of those shows more than the actual cartoons;
as an adult, most of them are painful to watch.
We felt we could pull this off since Hyper Image was working
in the industry already. Our producer Rhonda Smiley was
an accomplished writer with plenty of credits and the studio
was a primary supplier of post-production and animation
services to the few companies that were still making Saturday-morning
style cartoons.
"No
one ultimately cares what your troubles were in making
the project, what software you used, how big your crew
was, or how much money you spent compared to another
film. If the film is entertaining, nothing else really
matters."
-- Rob
Brousseau |
Though
we began physical production with both script and storyboard
in hand, the length of time the process took allowed us
to live and breathe our story and make the changes we felt
were necessary for clarity and entertainment. Finding just
the right flow involved quite a bit of experimentation but
for us that was more an investment in time than money. We
couldn't pass up that opportunity since we wanted to make
the most out of our one shot to impress an audience.
Each
viewer will discover what in particular they find special
about the film but for those who've been working doggedly
on this production for five years, the fact that "Race"
is (nearly) complete is the most special. The opportunity
to share our vision with others inspires the very excitement
that drew us into this business in the first place. The
movie is both a culmination and a beginning.
We
look forward to applying all the positive (and some of the
negative) experiences of making our first feature into our
next one, which we have recently commenced with a 24 month
start-to-finish schedule as our goal....Deep breath.
