Después de haber estado detrás de las promos de la Eurocopa pasada y de la actual temporada de F1, KOTOC Produccions son los responsables de las nuevas promos de TVE para la Champions League…
Promo Champions – tve | Kotoc from kotoc on Vimeo.
Cami de Cala Pregonda
2009
“La Habitación Inclinada” began as a simple project, something that we could embrace with hopes of actually finishing it, after the effort to complete the ten seconds of “The Show Is Going On“.
We quickly became fond of the simple character design that we created inside the good-old SI|3D, during the small breaks at work, so we felt we could add more background to the basic story that we already had. And it slowly became a longer film, and it took much more time to finish than we had expected. But it also became one of my best animation experiences, in which we not only learned a lot about animation, but also about storytelling, camera work, editing and, most importantly, teamwork.
La Habitación Inclinada from pako Bagur on Vimeo.
PAL Quicktime Version HERE (720×576 113.2MB)
The shortfilm was premiered at the “Festival de Sitges“, and even though it didn’t go through all the shortfilm festival circuit, it was nominated for a “Goya” Award by the Spanish Academy of Cinema, but unfortunately we didn’t won. I found this clip in YouTube, from the night of the gala:
Costa Nord – Menorca
Summer 2009
Los Spline Doctors han colgado una entrevista con Ricky Nierva, diseñador de producción de UP. Dentro de todos los grandes comentarios que hace, especialmente interesante son los que hacen referencia a la estilización que hay detrás de esta película, o “Los Increíbles”, en contraposición a la tendencia que hay de buscar realismo al hacer una película 3D. Y también resulta muy instructivo escuchar como explica qué hay detrás de los diseños de los dos protagonistas de UP.
I found this interesting article in a thread at the CGTalk forums. There’s a very controversial statement in it by Avatar producer Jon Landau:
“Our goal on this movie was not to replace the actor, it was to replace the animator.”
Ouch…. And then, to make things worse he also says:
“A great actor withholds information. Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men” can sit there and do nothing. No animator would ever allow that, they would put in a twitch.”
Well, let’s start with this last statement, in which he is utterly wrong and shows a total lack of knowledge about the world of animation. As he says, “a great actor” could do nothing in a scene, if that particular scene required it, but he forgets to say that a “bad actor” might ruin that same scene with some overacted performance. The same thing happens with animators, there’s also good animators and bad animators. And of course, a good and talented animator will be able to have a character doing nothing and also keeping him alive, and he should know when to do it. As animators, it is our job to know what’s expected from the character in each scene. Just as any good actor would know.
I have to say that it is probably more difficult to have a character “doing nothing”, or to keep a solid performance in a scene, in animation than in real life, because of the fact that it takes so long to animate a shot. There’s many revisions of one single shot, and many people can have an opinion about it (I might write about feedback someday), so that the whole point of the shot might get diluted over time. But trying to avoid that is part our job, and the job of the “Animation Supervisor”, and the job of the Director during dailies.
And this takes us to his first statement, about replacing the animators with mocap. I think that behind that sentence, and behind all the marketing and PR stuff that’s having the mocap technology nowadays, there’s the mind of a producer, the person in charge of handling the budget and schedule of a movie production. Animation is an art-form, not a mathematical process, and this means that it’s hard to control, and a total nightmare from the production department point of view. So, getting an actor in a suit at a mocap facility for a few weeks, and getting all the data that’s been captured straight into the character rig, and then getting this “animation” into the movie shots, this process is like a dream come true for a producer. You can put all the info required in a project-planning software, and you won’t get many surprises down the road. And that’s why many producers will keep selling and promoting to the audiences a technology that they can control, more than the actual artform that their own movie is actually based on.
I’m not against mocap. I once was, but a few years ago I had the chance to work in a couple of projects that were all mocap-based, and realised that used properly it can be an interesting tool for the animator. This projects demanded a very realistic animation, which is precisely the case where mocap can help. Of course, it would be foolish to think that you would use mocap in a cartoony film or game. What we discovered while working in this projects was that although the characters were very realistic, they were still animated characters and hence subjected to a world based on the laws of animation, so it was a mistake to simply use the data from the mocap session, without any alteration. We had to push the poses and the timing in order to make it work. In short, we stylized the movement, which is exactly what animation is. What we got from the mocap were the mechanics and the physics of the movement, and they were perfect, but we had to add animation on top of that in order to make it work, to make it appealing, to make the character alive and believable. So an animator is still needed. And will remain so. Although ignorants keep saying otherwise
One last note, here’s another quote by Jon Landau from that same article:
“Movies aren’t about worlds, they’re about characters,”
And I have to admit that he is absolutly right in that one.
The Internet is really amazing, and YouTube it’s even more amazing… Yesterday, while searching if there was any good quality version of “La Habitación Inclinada” already online, I found this little piece that somebody uploaded to YouTube:
PAL Quicktime Version HERE (720×576 10.5MB)
This is the first animation that was created by KOTOC3d. It was just a teaser of a longer short-film, some sort of video-clip with Freddie Mercury. We had an 4-minute animatic of pretty much all of it, Montserrat Caballe was supposed to be in it also, and it was set in one of the most famous markets in Barcelona: “El Mercat de la Boqueria“. It was a huge project. But after a few moths of a lot of hard work during our free time, we only had those 10 seconds, and we realised that it would be impossible to finish the whole film. So we edited this little teaser and then abandoned the project in order to tackle something simpler and that could be finished in a reasonable amount of time; three years later we had “La Habitación Inclinada”.
S’Albufera d’Es Grau – Menorca
Summer 2009
