Happiness! FINALLY posted

[Shawn]

http://www.tamaandco.com/pics/sc1Sh3.jpg

Whew, I'm back!

I ran a pre-production thread here years ago about a short I was doing called "Happiness!"...well, I FINALLY posted it!

The last two years I have been directing a few short films for some companies which will never see the light of day (one was an animation test for Disney that turned out really well but nobody will see, damnit!) and have been literally too busy for anything. I finally got time this month to sit down and do up a website proper and post some of my old shorts plus a few odds and ends that I hope you all will enjoy.

I've a few other shorts now in production that I'm going to be working on so check in from time to time as well!

Ah, it's good to be working on my own stuff again!

Thanks,

Shawn

watch the short here:

http://www.tamaandco.com/webPages/subHappiness.html

[AnimWatch]

The render looks great. Good to have you back. Love to see more...

[Mathias]

I second to that. Checking it out now. One question, is the sky a painting or a photo, looks like a really great painting, or a very nice painterly photo. Great job on that.

Edit. Loved the animation of the robot!

[TeviH]

looks like a photo to me - downloading film now... I'll post here later with comments.

Congrats! :)

[edit]
interesting.... what prompted that idea?

[Shawn]

The sky is a digital matte. It started life as a group of photos I took on a hill side by my home. I wanted to do a rich sky that had some nice realisic motion so I took the photos and did a lot of hand painting and digital minipulation. I then split them up for parellax and ran them though a X axis dipsplacement (The displacement is based off another set of cloud images I created) to get the proper interior movement I was looking for. If you scrub slowly through the short you should be able to see the nice animation this produces.

There was one HUGE issue whith the sky, though....Since this short was rendered at 1920x1080ish and the Maya Software renderer at the time could only render 8k textures, the shot where I follow the raining balls overhead was a nightmare. I needed to pump at least an 18k texture to achieve that element and it took a couple of weeks just to find a solution (I split it into three and used a simple ramp transperency as the blend....not the best solution but it worked).

Other things that took FOREVER that you may not notice, every ball creates a splatter on impact and every ball leaves a trail as it rolls. I actually hand animated every one. And the balls all deform properly when rolling. I ran a dynamic silulation that I then hand animated to fix then ran a softbody sim on top of that to give it a nice wobble. Every ball had this treatment done.

Hope that answers your questions!

Shawn

[AnimWatch]

It's a neat piece, Shawn. That one shot with all the moving objects is a really fun shot. Great effects work, also. You using ParticleFlow?

Love the logo animation, too...

I was feeling the first third or half of the film was a tad slow, but I imagine you were doing that for contrast. *shrug* Diffrent strokes for diffrent blokes.

Nice work, and you got it done!

-Steve

[jstaub]

Nice work Shawn! Really, it's a wonderful short - simple, elegant, and fun. The animation work is beautiful too.

Yeah! :D

[Zensho!]

Short and simple indeed! To be honest, that greatly exceeded my expectations from what I can recall feeling when I first saw your prepro work. I hope you don't feel offended! It was a very pleasant surprise.

Rendering, animation, and story were all solid, but best of all, it put a smile on my face.

Job well done, sir.
Zensho

[Shawn]

First I'd like to thank everyone for thier positive response, it's actually very motivating! You guys don't know this, but this spring I broke my hip and was laid up in hospital for a while. While I healed up pretty well I still have a lot of metal in my leg that necessitated a change to a much more active lifestyle then I usually have. Since then I have been struggling to stay focused on my work in 3d. On top of that, I was directing a short for a un-named company that, frankly, left me hating 3d. Since then I've taken some time off to try to re-centre myself. Since releasing this little short I feel very re-energized. Thanks guys!

And to reply:

Zensho - No, I'm not offended in the least! My work goes through so many iterations from concept to completion.....I look at what I have and I always try to better it in as many ways as I can. The very first shots where pretty early in the process and apparently, I thought they sucked as well! And I'm happy I put a smile on your face, that was what I was really trying for... I smiled through most of the animation component. The best animation advice I ever recieved was from Neal Scanlan (Jim Henson's Creature Shop) - we where working on the digital puppets for "Don't Eat the Neighbours" and the questioned was asked about animation submissions. Neal said "Animate until it makes you laugh, then show me. I'll problaby laugh too. If you yourself aren't laughing then I'll just be bummed out." (or something to that effect).

Josh - Again, thank you. And I also want to congratulate you on your masterpiece. Your words mean a lot.

Steve - Nope, nope, no particleFlow. That second last shot....nightmare! Sky issues aside, Maya 6 simply could not handle that many particles. I worked for a full month trying and was just about to quit when Maya 6.5 was released and Vila! everything rendered fine. Arg. The logo animation was one of the many "I only have an hour, 3d doodle, GO!' tests I sometimes force myself to do.

and TeviH - Ah, the question, "what prompted that idea"....Most of the work just comes to me and I just tend to go with it without thinking to hard on it. Many people I know slave over story forever. I'm of the opinion that for short format work, it's not so much what you have to say as much as how you chose to say it. Excuse me if I go into this in a little depth, but I'm in the conceptual stage of my next short as I write so all this is going through my mind. "Happiness!" started life as a short with two robots ,who where pretty useless, fighting. It evolved into a comic piece where they were just having fun. Then I had a dream about one of the useless robots just having fun killing beachballs. I smiled when I started thinking about it, and it just seemed right. Technically, him dropping out of nowhere, the beachballs, well, everything doesn't make any sense, but that wasn't important. I just wanted to convey what I felt and tried to do it well.

*spoiler* My next short film is called "Calicad", it it is going to be very challenging on a number of fronts. The initial idea was doing a fight sequence. I have never done a fight sequence but watching anime like "Ergo Proxy" and "Noein", wow, the use of camera and the choreography of the characters...simply beautiful! And looking at the framing for Ghibli's new "Tales of Earthsea"....it's just kinetic. I really want to explore that area of visual storytelling. But I don't just want a nonsense action sequence. I need a protagonist and a antagonist of some kind, but the setup must have a meaning in order for the conflict to have weight. So I asked myself, "What is heroism to me?". Calicad will be an exploration for an answer to that question....and a cool fight sequence to boot!

Hope that makes sense!

Shawn

[Nichod]

I very much liked that. Great work. That lucky robot! I do agree the beginning could have been a little faster, or at least involve more action.