Mac & Roe - Elmer Kaan

Found it again, had lost this one for a while, clever playing with the camera frames I thought. By Elmer Kaan

Mac and Roe from Elmer on Vimeo.

Fumiko's Confession

Yeah, this has been everywhere, but now I know where to find it in 8 months when I go looking for it again. I first saw it on the brew. By Hiroyasu Ishida, production blog Rough translation is she's asking both boys out, and getting shot down.



Director/Animation/Background/3D CG/Editing/Sound: Hiroyasu Ishida (a.k.a. Tete)
Background/3D CG Textures: Yūko Iwase
3D CG Textures/Background: Kazuhiro Murakami
Animation: Tatsurō Kawano
3D CG Modeling: Yūsaku Nagata

Game Trailers and Matte Painting

So my lead is making a promotional video (in a ridiculous amount of time, like 3 days, and we're going right after blizzard, crazy) and I am amazed at how well it's looking, more specifically how he's achieving the illusion of high quality with limited resources and time. He's using a matte of the sky, sliced and overlapped a few layers, that skew for the duration, that totally gives the illusion of a huge sky (if you know to look you can see in a corner odd looking mountains.) And we're using our in game models, with high res textures. Then he keeps each shot very short, with camera movement and character movement (which are tricks he's used before) and some god rays and viola, looks great. I'll post it once it's done.

But while we were talking about making it we looked at this Guildwars 2 cinematic, which is also pretty decent looking, especially when you consider they're just cutting up and wiggling their concept art.

Guild Wars 2 teaser trailer from ebonhawke on Vimeo.

So now when I watch this fun trailer by Fortiche Productions for Academy of Champions, everything looks like mattes.

Academy of Champions from fortiche production on Vimeo.

good things to keep in mind to up value, and shorten time. also a nice way to show off concept art.

Act Curtains by the numbers

Was skimming through the blog of an author I recently read, Wen Spencer. She has a few posts about the story telling process.

She had the useful definition of Act 1 being about introducing the main players and problems. The transition from Act 1 to 2 is when the main characters change from being reactive to being proactive (so not just getting bounced around, they make a plan). Act 2 you can introduce new problems or characters, but they shouldn't be major ones. Act 3 is about tying up the threads, no new stuff, this is the act where you have the big showdown, and then let the readers bask in the after glow for a while (let the readers enjoy a taste of the happily ever after they've earned with the characters).

Another interesting idea (to me at least) was knowing your acts by word count (which works minute wise in film). So her books are 100,000 words long, so each act is 33,000 words. Each scene is about 1000-2000 words. So she only has 15-30 scenes to set up her main characters, introduce the problem, and get the team together enough to make a plan and get to work. So when you break it down that way, each character really only has a handful of scenes for us to get to know them, there's not really time for not getting right to the point.


*All these "write a screenplay" books basically point back to Aristotle and 3 Act structure, taking it for granted that that's the way to write a story (and admittedly it can make very strong stories). But I am really curious about what other cultures take for granted as the basic building blocks and essential parts of making a story, if any one reading this has any insight please chime in :)

*think I need to split up the story and character label, though they are pretty integral to each other

Hmmm

*found by Lango