I am very happy to report that I have just finished the first draft of my script, especially as it only took 3 writing sessions over 3 days! In fairness, I have wanted to make this short film for several years and had already done some research on the project. Even shot a sample of the visual style back in 2007. Still, I conducted a bit more research and was richly rewarded, now utterly convinced of the value of research to the story development and script writing processes.

This new script is one of three films I want to make this year and it was originally going to be the last however the Reallusion War & Peace film contest is a great fit and so the schedule is shifted. My original plan was to make one short film to get back into the flow of things before starting a long production cycle on the 28 episode series (shot all at once). I am going to make two short films before the long one now I think.

I have also done a lot of thinking around my brand new idea. I read a suggestion that you should be able to tell your whole story (as often as possible) before you commit to writing it down and the importance of the hook or tagline as not only a commercial advantage but also a lens to look back at the story from. And so I have been spending time simply thinking through the story and characters in detail and this has been very fruitful (although I don’t have a hook yet).

It is little known that I hold a green belt in the Togakure-ryū, a ninjitsu tradition dating back through a direct linage of 34 grandmasters. Back in the 80’s, I had my ass kicked by Hatsumi sensei, grandmaster of 9 fighting schools and so didn’t need to research the ninja for my latest script but watched an Unsolved History episode about the ninja as it featured my old teacher Stephen Hayes.

There is a good lesson in what makes a good story from the 22 minute mark to 36 minutes of this show.
(click Chinese link to go to movie):

There are 2 stories played out for you in this well-controlled experiment: a team of navy SEALS and then Hayes sensei, a modern ninja master, will attempt to infiltrate a protected safe house, defended by professionals expecting an attack and assassinate the target without getting eliminated. For me, this was extra tense as here is my teacher facing very challenging odds on TV, putting his reputation (and my green belt!) on the line.

The navy SEALS attack in predictable Hollywood fashion, an encounter of massively superior firepower lasting less then 20 seconds. Hayes sensei goes in alone and unarmed using a much different approach. Who is more successful in the mission? Well watch the show and find out! Who creates the real tension, characters, climax and stuff of story? Hayes sensei kicks butt. (I also see Ricky Grove being able to pull this off )

The two different scenarios, each with the same objective, demonstrate how pacing and character interaction are so necessary to bring tension into the story. There is nothing in the first attack to bind the audience to those involved. Conversely, there is excellent character development in Hayes sensei’s approach as well as an increasing sense of tension as the scenario unfolds. There is also a great character defining moment with one of the defenders during Hayes sensei’s mission around trust. Hayes sensei demonstrates that the real art of the ninja is the art of storytelling.

Made in 5 minutes with this free browser-based, 3D-animation studio from xtranormal.com - easy and fun to use. The tagline: “If you can type, you can make movies”

Xtranormal has a rudimentary timeline with animations, expressions, camera moves, etc - even ambient noises and soundtracks. Wish you could add your own voices but hey, it’s free with premium content subscrition model in the works after beta. In my 5 minute start-to-finish movie, xtranormal even did auto camera moves and the avatars follow along.

Love to see something like this integrated with Celtx.

I want it. I want it bad.

Capture Session:

Character Import:

One of the biggest challenges in 3D animation is making your characters move as you want them to. From a machimima perspective, one is typically limited to the character movements that come within the engine or in the case of machinima toolsets, importing pre-defined motions for your characters (through .bvh files for example). However, rarely do you get exactly what you are looking for and so you work around the limitations of the movement through camera framing, editing, etc.

For example, in my recent Lively machinima, a character is sitting on the bed, moves his body to respond to an audio cue, then stands up and yawns. However, this movement does not exist and the sequence was pieced together from various movements and video edits. This quite a common technique, especially in game engines: make the most of what you got.

I remember looking at Animazoo as a system to capture my own motions but it is way out of reach in price for me ($50K at the time). However, OpiTrack makes my mouth water and, even though it is $5K, I am struck by how fast the price point of this technology is dropping.

If this trend continues and/or someone like Johnny Chung uses IR and creates a mocap system from a WII or something, the possibilities for machinima will be enormous.

Google’s 3D virtual world Lively came and went in only 6 months. This is an extremely short lifespan for any technology, especially from a software maker who has a tradition of letting things develop organically. Google Labs is full of experiments that have outlasted 6 months, even Gmail is still officially in beta. Perhaps we will see Google’s 3D avatar technology pop up in Google Earth - after all, what is a 3D world with 3D buildings (Google Warehouse) without 3D people?

Watch Captain Aqua in Animation  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

I was inspired by the Lively virtual environment which, to me, was that old fashioned machinima opportunity. By ‘old fashioned’ I mean pre-Anymation, or maybe even pre-pre-Anymation, when making films was guerrilla by necessity, full of happy accident and not the newer generation of tools which we complain about today. I was attracted to Lively’s really smooth camera pans and pulls, awesome frame rate and the improv comedy element of it all: here is a limited set of things to use, go.

I wrote a script in short order but my schedule prevented me from finishing shooting before Google shut-down Lively on Dec 31/08. The film is called The Adventures of Captain Aqua and is about a lazy, bored superhero: no one ever invades the sea.

I really did like the idea that people could easily visit the set and the look of it although there are a couple of Second Life shots in the opening sequence and of course CrazyTalk. iClone to the rescue as well for a character to fill in a green screen for this render. First time with Fraps and Sony Vegas too. For obvious reasons, I won’t go into the details of making a Lively machinima but may post some screen captures later for historical record.

The film is just rough dialogue/audio/video mix but a look at the look of what could have been. Jamie Levack is the voice of Captain Aqua, he did an awesome job on the part. I would still like to make this film and so look out in the future.

[EDIT]: maybe I can finish it in Lively - here is NewLively!

Sorry to delay the rolling out of new content in Second Life - just finishing up an unexpected project. It has put me behind about 2 weeks but onward we roll. I was hoping to have a little sample ready at least but I am still in the process of over-engineering it. Will release this sample content properly in the next couple of days.

Also, as part of this change, I am going to rename the HatHead business side of the, well, business to more accurately reflect the company’s service and market offerings. (If that language doesn’t scare you, it may be too late for you.) That will mean a new website and other related stuff.

Lastly, got an email from the Google Lively team today and am now a Lively content developer - very exciting! Models are imported from 3D Studio Max or Maya currently (no Sketch-Up yet) and interactive objects are made using Google’s desktop gadget development kit.

A confluence of both creative philosophy and emerging technologies have really inspired me over the past few months, marking a real shift in how I design and produce. Enough of a shift that stopping for a moment to frame this approach will help me to hopefully crystallize the new HatHead version 3.0 (version 1.0 being the first music web presence; v2.0 being the founding of HatHead Incubators).

In essence, the philosophy is that the experience of your audience - whether film, virtual worlds, music, web - has the most primacy. As an example, in Second Life there is something known as “lag“: essentially the bandwidth, graphics and CPU resources decrease the frame rate of display (FPS) of the virtual world, sometimes lower than 1 FPS. In contrast, video is around 30 FPS. While the digital pioneers in Second Life suffer through it, this quality of experience is very low, making it difficult to often perform even basic user operations.

While issues such as performance can always be improved, HatHead 3.0 is not about craftsmanship for any skilled craftsman best understands the strengths and limits of their craft, hopefully with some style. Rather, more and more I see that many of the projects I have wanted to do but did not because the were too expensive or impractical are now possible. This includes virtual installations, machinima and multimedia performances. While there will be more on individual projects in later posts, the underlying theme is the primacy of the user experience.

To leave you with a sense of scale of this shift, the content on both the 2 HatHead Second Life islands will totally change on Sept. 1/08.

Also, a HUGE shout-out to John Martin and Jason Lin at Reallusion for their mind-blowing release of iClone 3.0. I have been kicking the tires of the early release for a week or so and this product deserves its own post so stay tuned!

Lessons Learned
A couple of months ago I produced around 20 minutes or so of animation for a client. A little on the project experience later as the most striking aspect of this project was, to me, in this seemingly ubiquitous age of the internet, the near impossibility of getting high quality images of First Nations peoples - Canada’s indigenous population - for use in creating 3D facial models.

Of course I could find some images but they were mostly antique frontier photographs from the turn of the previous century. My search went on for several weeks until, at one point, a First Nations production team member volunteered to provide some portraits but these too ended up being sepia prints from the turn of the previous century.

The Government of Canada recently apologized to the First Nations for its blatant policies of cultural genocide (”assimilation”) that created our country’s forgotten generations. However, my internet image searches were not constrained by geography and the global results always tragically empty - a seeming Social Darwinist style trend.

(With hindsight - and budget - we could hired some real life models/actors but we did not suspect for moment how little image documentation of First Nations peoples there is…or isn’t.)

Video Production Notes
Firstly, there is no such thing as “final approval” and revisions to creative previously approved were requested right up to the last possible moment. Par for the course when dealing with clients and a fixed budget. As a result though production and post-production time got super squeezed and I was basically left with a month to film and edit it all (script written by client).

Here is a video of some early concept footage to show some of the traditional designs I created for the project as well as my animation style. I shot this in Second Life as this was the quickest way to gather content and express my ideas. Except for one shot, the production animations were then done in iClone as iClone uses a timeline and I knew there would be client revisions so the ability to exactly recreate a shot and only change one thing about it (face, prop, hair, etc) was essential.

Burning the final files to DVD for the client with literally 5 minutes to spare, I managed to deliver my final animations as part of a larger online educational and training manual. The concept behind using machinima here is to provide engaging case studies for people to consider in the larger context of the training manual.

Here is a direct link to the 3 ‘web plays’.
1. Introduction
2. John’s Story
3. Mary’s Story

Discovered on YouTube: rare live footage of HatHead Rickenbacker performing live on Hammond organ with his most favorite band ever!

Talk To Me (Like You Talk To Your Brother)

Reefer Smoking Blues

*Breezin’

* it is true, the entire place was full of almost entirely women that night, which is of course awesome! So come on down every Wednesday night from 9pm-1am!!

This is a video of a real-time blues performance taking place in Second Life featuring Komuso Tokugawa on vocals, guitar, harmonica and intelligent back tracks (which follow him) from Tokyo, Japan and myself on piano, excited yelps and groaning from Toronto, Canada. This is a regular weekly show so keep your eye on the event listings. The video was filmed and edited by Osprey Therian.

In a world where a mobile phone ring costs more than a real song, I am convinced that virtual music performances are the future for musicians.