MacOSX commercial in source!

As the schedule will show, I'm currently hashing out character concepts for the short. Those will appear here soon! But in the meantime, I had to share this:





Those of you who are older (or those of you who are trivia buffs) will recognize this as a spoof on the classic Macintosh 1984 Commercial. Like other videos made by Valve Software, this is a commercial for one of their products and is done entirely within the source engine. Notice the light fog, dept of field (most visible in the audience) motion blur, and all that other jazz that I've pointed out before.

Why didn't you list that among our assets?

In order to make the project schedule, I needed to figure out how many things had to be created, and how long each would take. And of course, the script was needed before either of those! Below is our script and my current best-guest list for the things that need making:

• Short's Script- 'The Robin Danger Action School of Culinary Excellence"
• Asset List 

As is standard practice, we'll be making all this stuff in pre-production (myself as a modeler, and Sonja as the audio wizard), before the full-on film-making gets underway. In a full studio environment, that would mean that we get to avoid the expensive animators and rendering folk until later. But since this is not a professional project, it just means that I'm avoiding bothering otherwise-expensive animators until I'm sure that they have all their tools ready to rock and roll.

Below is a diagram I have up on my wall. As we complete each major step, I'm ticking them off and recording info about each.

Back on Track

I believe my previous posts have fairly solidified my claim. Hardware-based rendering is (at least in some scenarios) a viable tool. Now I will shift from talking about general examples to the specific details of my project.

Firstly, I ought to explain that this blog has been delayed over the past two months. I was forced to lay aside my own project while assisting a friend finish his 2010 thesis project. It can be found here. I did the animation for the main character, which was good practice for me and helpful for him, since he was focusing on the effects side of the piece. Anyway, now that this is done, I can return to my own goals with full effort.

As mentioned before, I'm going to produce the same short twice, once for each engine, and then measure the results. With the help of my friend and collegue Alex, an extremely talented wordsmith, the script for the faux-commercial "Robin Danger Action School of Culinary Excellence" has been hammered into place. It makes me chuckle to read it, but in order to pull it off, I must create:

• 4 rigged characters (1 with multiple pallette swaps)
• 2 Scenes (each created in two separate engines)
• 6 Voices
• 29 Props
• 27 Sound Effects

So far, several kind souls have volunteered their time to help out. We have in total: a storyboard artist, a handful of 3D animators, several voice talents, a writer, an audio technician, and myself. Quite a team! But even with this tiny army of creative minds, this is an ambitious attempt.

So let's get started!
(a schedule of production can be found here)