The Duelists Production Diary

010 . Motion Capture for The Duelists

2006-11-09T17:08:00.000-08:00

Last posting I promised you an exciting and interesting development in the production of my short film. That development is motion capture! Earlier this week I flew from Los Angeles to Orlando to work with some old friends at the Digital Animation and Visual Effects (D.A.V.E.) school in Florida.

There I worked with Motion Capture Supervisor Dave West (wearing the checkered shirt below) and lead Motion Capture artist Sam Mendoza (pictured standing) to capture all eight minutes of the film on their state of the art optical capture stage using the actual motion capture cameras used by Sony Pictures Imageworks on their CG film Monster House. (The D.A.V.E. acquired the gear after the wrapping of Monster House).

I'm wearing the reflective suit because I knew the character and the story the best. Plus this film will still be a mixture of hand-keyed animation and motion capture so I wanted to try and see what it would be like to capture a movie in a pose to pose style. Hopefully if I do my job right you won't be able to tell which parts are captured and which are keyed.

It was also great to see my old friends Jeff Scheetz, Lee Stringer, and the Godfather of television visual effects himself, Ron Thornton. I was very impressed with the facility as well as the work the students were producing. All in all it was a very cool visit.

009 . Long time... no post?!

2006-10-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

Christopher here. I know it has been an entire month without a posting but I had an extremely busy September (including taking one of my rare vacations). So there wasn't much to post. However there has also been a very exciting and interesting development in the production of this film that I don't want to talk about yet. I'm waiting until it actually happens, then I will post about it here. So stay tuned... In the mean time here's a little eye candy for those of you still following the ongoing production of this kickass little movie. (Trust me... it will be worth the wait to see it) In the meantime check out one of our character production sheets for the film.

008 . Color Keys... Part One.

2006-08-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

Greg has started working on the color keys for the film.

These will give us the rendering palate and help establish the stylized look and feel of North Africa. The look is of course based on the area of the desert from Lawrence of Arabia after Lawrence has finished crossing the Nafu. Turns out this region is actually on the Sinai Peninsula.

It's a beautifully rugged landscape that Greg has adapted to make it ours. Personally, I think these images rock! And they help motivate me to keep this film on schedule, because I can't wait to see it done and on the big screen. This will mark the first time I make a full 2K rendered, 35mm, all CG film for theatrical release, and I'm pretty excited about it!

Until next time troops!

-Christopher

007 . Face off...

2006-07-28T15:18:00.000-07:00

Just a quick posting to mention I haven't fallen off the face of the Earth. It's been an extremely busy summer so far and we're still working feverishly on the film. Currently we're up to the face off between Biggs and the Stuka. This is a little past the halfway point in the film and next comes most of the real meat/action of the picture.

This animation is nothing compared to the amount of work the effects animation will take to realize the dusty desert enviro and the some and other squib effects needed for gun play in the desert.

On a sad note I wasn't able to make it down to Comic Con this year. But hopefully I will be there next summer showing some prints of the finished film.

To the left is more screen captures from the initial face off. I'm hiding some of the cooler shots to save for the actual screening.

This is Christopher... signing off troops.

006 . Shading Reference

2006-07-06T17:36:00.000-07:00

The stuka is now built and being added to the shots, replacing the stub previs one we've been working with. At the same time we are also looking at the surfacing and details of both the plane and Biggs.

Here's a quick look at some surfacing reference illustrations created by Greg. Greg is not only a killer art director and designer but he is also the king of finding cool reference and then amping it up in the art form and making it his own. I see this when I look at the design of our villain. The stuka is going to look amazing at it thunders across the desert, strafing our hero within an inch of his life.

... Christopher

005 . Desert Reference

2006-06-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

So PIXAR's Cars came out last weekend and the rendering was amazing! Very impressive stuff, especially the southwest desert. My eye focused on that a lot since we are currently working on our north African desert environment for The Duelists.

When we started this short one of my mantras was that this film is sort of like, Aardman meets Corpse Bride. We're looking for a photoreal type of look, but everything should feel like a hybrid of table top models and stop motion characters. So our desert should also feel designed but also be rooted and referenced in reality. So I started location hunting on where I wanted to shoot this movie. In the end I went back to one of (if not) the greatest desert films ever made... Lawrence of Arabia.

Here, shortly after Lawrence returns from crossing the Nafu I found our location. Here are a few screen gabs of that area where Ali waits for Lawrence to return. We are using these for general inspiration of the enviro, however Greg is/will be doing a lot to enhance it and give it a super designed feel.

Until next time troops... Christopher

P.S. Notice the awesome mix of long and short lens work to accentuate the vastness of the desert, while bringing the audience in to almost become part of the tribe. Go David Lean!

004 . Previs...

2006-06-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

Christopher here... I haven't posted an update in a little while so I thought I would take a sec and talk about where we are at the moment.

Now that we have an edit, I'm going through and roughing out certain tricky sequences in a blocky / simple style called previs. I know most people coming here know what previs is, but for my family and other friends, previs is simply a bare bones version of each shot in 3D. There is no real animation. Just frozen characters sliding around on a simple background. Creating previs shots allows me to see how long an action might take or maybe invent a better camera angle before the real animation is completed. So far it has greatly improved the pacing and the storytelling showing me where the holes are in the composition and giving me the tools to patch it all up.

Here's a few examples of some previs frames from the Duelists...

And here are a few frames of primary animation...

(Sorry I pixelated out what Biggs is holding but I'm not ready to show that yet)

Previs has been a great tool to help me tighten up sequences and realize where the pacing was off before I dedicated too much time to animating. So far we have a minute and a half animated out of seven minutes total, and there's still so much to do! But it will all be worth it. I'm pretty excited about what I've seen so far and each week it only gets better and better.

Wish us luck as we continue on.

At ease soldiers!

-Christopher

003 . Finding our hero...

2006-05-31T11:53:00.000-07:00

So we had this idea for a story (many of the surprises I won't mention here... I'm not big on spoilers but if you've seen my other movies you'll know I like to surprise my audiences) and now we needed to begin fleshing out the look of the world.

One of the things I'm not too interested in is creating photoreal people in CG. I think real life actors are more interesting than creating high-res photoreal people so if you're going to attempt to go for photoreal people (like in the Final Fantasy movies) you're better off just using real actors. I learned this the hard way when I was an animator for the short lived SONY television show, Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles. Some hard core Sci-Fi fans liked the show, but it took a lot of flack from the CG industry and animation community as a write off.

So the first thing my brother and I decided was to make sure this film had a strong presence of art direction and an idea of where it was going. Greg and I are big fans of classic Disney and all things animated. So we started thinking about how a human would have been portrayed if Walt had access to CG back in the 1950's. So we went about the task of designing and creating the hero of our film... Corporal Biggs.

One of the first influences we thought about was of the character of Roger from Disney's 101 Dalmatians (1961). If you look at the upper left of this sketch you will see some resemblance. Then we also looked into what we knew. We liked the look our father had back when he was in college so we tried adapting the character to look like him. He's the one in the top middle. But that looked almost too real. Then Greg began working in a sort of Quentin Blake hybrid style of illustration which spawned the Biggs to the right of frame. That was when we knew we were getting somewhere. He had style and character without being too real or cartoony.

This version of Biggs soon became the production design and was refined slightly to make him look a bit more weathered and disheveled.

The final approved design of Corporal Biggs was based off the drawing to the left. This design was also used in all of the storyboards and other conceptual items.

Soon after we both agreed this was the look for Biggs, Greg sculpted him into a CG model and we put it into production.

Until next time troops!

-Christopher

002 . The Duelists history and editing...

2006-05-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

So what's the story behind the story?

Well... back in 2000 I was working on some ideas for a new live action short film. I was living in Valencia, CA at the time and there was a lot of scrubby desert area around me. So I started brainstorming simple ideas for films that had few actors and used the desert without being too cliche. That's when I hit upon the idea of a lone WWII, GI in the desert fighting... something. Being a visual effects artist I soon got the idea to have a live action person fighting a computer generated messerschmitt. I began preproduction and making tests. However 9/11 happened shortly before I could begin production and I was unable to continue on the film due to the bottom falling out of my job market.

Now about five years later my brother and I have teamed up with some old friends to take this idea to the next level as a completely computer generated animated film. I'm extremely excited about this because as an animation we will be able to have control over every aspect of the film and really make it awesome!

So where are we now in the production?

The entire short film has been storyboarded by my brother Greg and myself. It has also been edited into a primary cut that looks a little something like this...

Right now the film is clocking in at about 7-min 30-sec before credits... most likely around 8-mins when it is all done . I'm using the existing storyboards to edit the film, which is giving me a rough ballpark idea of the timings. Once the boards are all cut in previs and animation begins.

Here are a few examples of Greg's boards from the film...

001 . Welcome to the production diaries...

2006-05-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the production diaries for the new computer animated short film, THE DUELISTS, being produced by The Desantis Bros.

I'm Christopher Desantis (the writer/director) and I will be posting notes and previews here for anyone interested in the production of this short.

The team is also composed of my brother, Greg Desantis (art director/modeler), Toby Gaines (lighting/surfacing/rigging lead) and Tim Ranck (animation lead/animator). We will also be getting a bit of assistance from other friends and professionals in the industry.

The film, The Duelists, is a seven minute long computer animated short film about a World War Two G.I who is miss-dropped over the north African desert and is forced to do battle with a rogue Nazi Stuka.

We hope you will enjoy it!

Please come back every so often for fun tidbits, images and extras that we will be posting here.

-Christopher