tso@celia.UUCP (Pauline Ts'o) (02/15/88)
I received a pretty good response, so here goes. The following is based on two and a half years of experience, first at Robert Abel & Associates/Abel Image Research and currently at Rhythm & Hues, Inc. This discussion is generalized to cover T.V. commercials, T.V. station IDs, movie trailers, and small-scale special effects for movies. I'll touch on what we require from our software, but this discourse is going to be long enough without in-depth philosophical software discussions. Maybe later. In the following, gender is determined by the majority sex that currently holds that particular position at Rhythm & Hues. First, the cast of characters: The Company - The computer animation company. That's us. The Client - the people with the product. For example, Chrysler, Scrubbing Bubbles, Benson & Hedges, local T.V. stations like KCBS, WBBM, also ABC, NBC, CBS, MGM, etc. The Agency - the people managing the advertising or promotional campaign for the Client. The Sales Representative - the person who roams the Agency halls looking for work to bring to the Company. Also called the Sales Rep. The In-house Art Director - he's a Company man. He doesn't always exist for a particular job. But if he does, he is responsible for making final decisions on all creative/ aesthetic aspects of the job. The Out-house, I mean Out-of-house Art Director - he's an Agency man. He doesn't always exist for a particular job either. But if he does, he is responsible for making final decisions on all creative/aesthetic aspects of the job. His decisions are more final than the In-house Art Director. The Producer - the person organizing the logistics of the job. She is responsible for bidding for new jobs, delivering jobs on time and on budget, scheduling post-production sessions, coaxing approvals from the clients, reminding the technical staff what's expected of them and when, chasing after late payments from the Clients, etc. etc. The Technical Director - the poor slob who actually spends all the time pounding on the keyboards to get the job finished. The mythical end-user of graphics software. Definition of terms: Storyboard - not a person. A storyboard is a series of drawings done by an Art Director illustrating the concept of the campaign as it develops through the animation. CGI - computer generated imagery. The complement of image processing. Scene I. The setting is the Agency. The Sales Rep meets with his Agency contact. He discovers that the Client has asked the Agency to develop a campaign to promote their product. The Sales Rep also discovers one of two relevant things - the Agency has an idea for the campaign that could be suitably executed with computer animation or the Agency has no ideas at all but wants to use computer animation for whatever the end-product will be. In other words, the Agency has either settled on a message or a medium. If the Agency has settled on the message, then it probably has at least rough storyboards to show the Sales Rep. The Sales Rep then shows them the Company Demo Reel and suggests that computer animation would be a really nifty way to realize the full potential of the concept. He convinces the Agency to consider the possibility and obtains copies of the storyboards. If the Agency has settled on the medium (which is rare), then usually it's because someone there has seen some other computer animated spot and the Agency really likes the "look". In this case, the Agency may seek out the Sales Rep rather than the other way around. The Sales Rep then shows them the Company Demo Reel and suggests that this Company is the best qualified to achieve that computer animated "look". Sometimes the Agency will be interested in a particular In-house Art Director, especially after seeing his work on the Demo Reel. Scene II. The setting is the Producer's office. She receives a cautiously optimistic phone call from the Sales Rep. He explains the situation at the Agency and promises to send the storyboard to her ASAP. Or he tells her that the Agency wants one of the In-house Art Directors to come up with the creative ideas and for the Art Director to send his storyboard to the Agency ASAP. In any case, somebody's storyboard winds up on the Producer's desk and she begins to work out a preliminary bid based on the technical difficulties that she and the technical staff perceives as inherent in the storyboards. She submits the bid to the Agency and they tell her that it's too high. She submits a revised bid and they tell her that it's too high. She submits a revised bid and they tell her that it's too high. She submits a revised bid and .... you get the picture. The producer (with help from the technical staff) can lower a bid in several ways - by re-exploring the technical aspects of the storyboard and thinking of easier ways of overcoming technical difficulties, by suggesting a combination of techniques like live-action with the CGI to lower the technical difficulty, by suggesting alterations in the storyboard to lower the technical difficulty, by lowering the Agency's expectations, etc. Scene III. The setting is the Company. The Agency decides to award the job to the Company. There is much rejoicing because we can now stay in business for two more weeks. Technical directors (usually one or two) are assigned to the job, along with a producer, who may or may not be the same one who bid it, and a production programmer if there are any special purpose programs that need to be written. Most animation houses nowadays use off-the-shelf production software for the bulk of work. Wavefront systems are popular, but Vertigo (now Cubicomp Canada) has a nice package also and Symbolics also has a foot, no, a toe, in the door. A few, very few, still use Abel Image Research software. (That's a whole 'nother story.) The old companies - Abel, Omnibus, Digital Productions, Cranston/Csuri - used all their own software. PDI, as the sole survivor, also uses their own software. At Rhythm & Hues, we use off-the-shelf software for most of the work, however, a good half of our jobs require additional custom programming. There are basically four processes that the Technical Director goes through to complete the job. The first process is known as Modeling. Modeling consists of building the 3D database within the computer. Usually, this is accomplished by digitizing flat artwork. In richer days, some companies also had 3D digitizers. Some off-the-shelf packages don't have surface modelers yet. Most off-the-shelf packages have an ascii database format so that production programmers can procedurally generate special data and hook it in to the rest of the package. The second process is Choreography/Animation. Choreography/Animation basically consists of making the database move. At Abel's and at Rhythm & Hues, we make a distinction between moving simple rigid objects (like flying logos) and moving objects so that they squash and stretch and have that magical "illusion of life". Yeah, like ANIMATED. Real animation software is in its infancy. No off-the-shelf package that I know of even begins to deal adequately with the requirements of good animation. Any production house that is currently producing animation is doing it with in-house software. However, most off-the-shelf packages do have adequate or better than adequate choreography systems. The third process is Lighting. Lighting consists of both giving the objects their material characteristics (like gold, marble, plastic) and placing lights in the environment to provide highlights, shadows, etc. Lights may also be choreographed, that is, they may also move over time. At the places where I have worked, Lighting has been a major bottleneck in the production process. Often, the Art Director will want a particular highlight in a particular corner of a particular polygon and the particular software we use does not have the tools to make that process interactive. Usually, the Technical Director places a light where he thinks might result in the proper effect, goes away for 15 minutes while the Renderer computes the frame, returns to see that his first guess was wrong and he tries again. 'Course if we had a Cray... Since Lighting is such a time-consuming process, only a few key frames are lit under the intense scrutiny of the Art Director. The rest are filled in by the computer. The last process is Rendering. Rendering consists of letting the computer number-crunch away and compute all the final frames. This is also not an interactive process, but it sometimes gives the Technical Director a chance to catch up on some sleep. Actually, the truly last process is Recording. The rendered frames have to be placed on some sort of recording medium, either film or tape. This process utilizes equipment not typically thought of as main-stream computers. Actually, the truly truly last process is Post-production, if necessary. If the job is a combination job, then the other footage needs to be composited with the computer graphics at a post-production facility. If the job is a tag for a live action commercial, then it also needs to brought together in "post". Sometimes, last minute color balance corrections are done in post. Actually, the truly truly truly last process is Obtaining Final Approval. Ah, approvals... Throughout these processes, the In-house Art Director is looking over the Technical Director's shoulder, telling him what needs to be done to match the vision in the Art Director's mind. Of course, what the In-house Art Director has in mind is not necessarily what the Out-of-house Art Director has in mind. Therefore, periodically, the Out-of-house Art Director must show up at various stages of the processes to give approvals for what has transpired. Hopefully, it is so granted. However, sometimes these Out-of-house Art Directors are answerable to a Senior Art Director at the Agency. If so, then the Senior Art Director demands final say. However, the Senior Art Director shows up less often than the Out-of-house Art Director, so more work or more mistakes, depending on your point of view, will be done between approvals. However, sometimes the Client doesn't really trust the Agency and THEY demand final say. Unfortunately, sometimes they don't exercise their right until the product has already been rendered and recorded and gone to post-production. THEN they say they don't like it. This is usually about the same time the Producer decides she needs a vacation in the Caribbean. Or a raise. Or both. And of course, any of these people may say one week that they like it and the next week, well... Actually, the truly truly truly truly last process is Obtaining Final Payment. This sometimes occurs months after Obtaining Final Approval and even after the product has aired. Scene IV. The setting is the apartment of the Technical Director. He comes in at night after working many hours and on a whim, he turns the television on. He flips the channels looking for something good - "Hey! That was MY commercial!" Well, believe me, that was a BRIEF summary of the production process. I know some of you want more details concerning software aspects, hardware aspects, employment aspects, but I thought I'd run through the social interactions first. You know, give everyone a basis of understanding the type of environment we work in. I'll see what kind of discussions arise now before posting again.
tso@celia.UUCP (Pauline Ts'o) (02/15/88)
Forgot my .signature.
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Pauline Ts'o
Rhythm & Hues, Inc.
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