Friday Flashback #631

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FRED THE CAVEMAN: Tube Studios Uses Paper Cuts for Tale of Violence, Greed and Prehistoric Pencil Sharpeners
by Michael Abraham

Remember the breathtaking opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s legendary 1968 film about what life might be like…well…now? For those of you who don’t, it goes something like this: A humming black monolith descends from the heavens and turns a bunch of dumb, grass-eating monkeys into a bunch of dumb, club-wielding, pig-killing, and altogether all-too-human apes.

Wackiness ensues.

Flash forward to the actual 2001 (like…now!) and an eerily similar scenario is being developed into a television series by Montreal’s Tube Studios. Of course, in Fred the Caveman, the futuristic sets have been replaced by animated paper cutouts and the spacecraft appears to be a flying pencil box, but the similarities remain. Trust me.

The inaugural episode of Fred the Caveman opens with a distracted alien spacecraft narrowly avoiding an asteroid field. In the twists and turns of the escape, however, the craft accidentally jettisons an apparently invaluable item. The fact that it looks less like a monolith than one of those little manual pencil sharpeners that we used in grade school is besides the point. Everything is about to change.

Cut to the Earth and a lively population of leaping dinosaurs and a single caveman named Fred. Unlike Kubrick’s monkeys, Fred already possesses the curiosity, avarice, violence and stupidity that will one day allow his ancestors to rule the globe but, for now, he’s happy just clubbing the occasional dinosaur. Just when Fred appears to have met his match, however, the jettisoned pencil sharpener fortuitously brains the T-Rex that is about to swallow him, and Fred finds he has a new toy.

It is immediately apparent that this is no ordinary pencil sharpener. Climbing aboard, Fred manages to fire up the engines and literally rocket through the wilderness where the dinosaurs roam. Fred’s fun with his sharpener/rocket may be short-lived, however, as the alien owner wants it back.

The brainchild of German artist Wolf-Rudiger Bloss (better known to the world as Rudi), Fred the Caveman is composed entirely of paper cut scenery and characters, a technique once most popular in the world of stop-motion animation. Put simply, the characters appear to be paper cutouts, their limbs joined at each joint by a thumb tack allowing their shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles and jaws to articulate freely.

Further episodes of Fred the Caveman are currently being created by Bloss and digital artist Andy Harvey using SOFTIMAGE®|3D at Tube’s spacious studio on the cusp of Old Montreal, but Fred’s road to TV stardom has not been a short or easy one. Since his original conception, Fred’s creator has undergone a partial transformation from traditional to digital animator, and traveled halfway around the world. Indeed, before last December, Bloss was living in sunny San Francisco and working for ILM on such projects as The Mummy, Rocky and Bullwinkle, a special edition of E.T. and The Mummy Returns.

“When I first came up with Fred the Caveman, I really didn’t know anything about computer animation,” says Bloss matter-of-factly. “I considered going to university to study computer animation, but then decided I’d rather learn on the job. ILM saw some of my animated films and gave me six weeks of training in 3D and SOFTIMAGE|3D. The software was relatively easy to use and, even for someone who isn’t very technical, it was easy to pick up. It certainly works for me.”

The details of Fred’s conception are bit sketchy, but Rudi remembers this much: “I wanted to have some fun and create a film using paper cut figures,” says Bloss. “Initially, it was going to be a Hercules story and I was going to create it using the traditional method. Then Disney came out with their Hercules movie, and I had to come up with something else. Somehow, what I came up with was Fred.”

Around the same time, Bloss also discovered the enhanced capabilities and possibilities that computer animation held over the traditional technique.

“Once I discovered how much more control I could have using computer techniques, I became very intrigued,” says Bloss. “I am not a technical person at all, but I could see the possibility of better textures, depth of field, shadows, etc. There were just far more and better options than with the traditional approach.”

Striking up collaboration with French production company Antefilms, Bloss created a series of projects that combined traditional and computer animation techniques then used a lull in the company’s production schedule to create the original Fred the Caveman pilot. After his fruitful 2-½ year interlude at ILM, Bloss moved from sunny California to snowy Montreal to begin production on his new series at Tube. Since then, his days and nights have been pretty full.

“Lately, I’ve been spending most of my time drawing, painting and scanning all the new characters,” says Bloss matter-of-factly. “Andy has been modeling them, cutting them out, and making sure that they’ll work properly. There are a great many characters and they all have lots of pieces, so we’ve been working very hard. SOFTIMAGE|3D is particularly good with expressions, the stuff that Andrew is doing. It handles the relative simplicity of Fred the Caveman very well. Andy has truly been my right-hand man.”

“There are hundreds of different expressions in Fred the Caveman,” Harvey agrees. “There are, for instance, 50 different hands shapes and probably 50 different expressions for each. There are over 100 eye shapes. Right now, I’m making sure that the characters work flawlessly, and SOFTIMAGE|3D has been really helpful. As we get more people working on this project, that process is going to be very important.”

And from the primeval ooze, a new star is born.

Friday Flashback #628

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From Softimage Customer Stories, Issue 6, 2002

MISSION TO MARS: David Rowntree Keeps the Beat at Nanomation
By Michael Abraham

Ask David Rowntree, founder of Nanomation, an animation house in London’s West End, about his background and you may be surprised by his answer. “I started out as a programmer and I’ve been doing computer animation for about five years now, using various packages,” Rowntree explains. “To pass the time at my other job, I started bringing my laptop with me and began playing around with animation. I originally got involved using Povray, a freeware ray tracer. That’s really where I got hooked. That tied my interest in animation and my computer expertise together when I was waiting around for the music to start.”

Rowntree’s “other” job turns out to be drumming and percussion for the popular BritPop (or “alternative,” if you happen to live on the other side of the ocean) band Blur. The four member band has been together for over a dozen years now, producing six very well-received albums in that time. Rowntree is – you guessed it – the one with the sticks and the skins. He is also the one with the computer science training and a two-year-old, two-person animation company.

What began as a way to kill time has since yielded a whole new business. Rowntree now shares the Nanomation offices in London’s West End with cartoonist and animator Tamsin Nunley, who joined the company a little over a year ago, and creates for clients such as MTV, Channel Four, I-GIG.com and, most recently, the Open University.

“I’d have to say the Open University project has been the most fun,” says Rowntree matter-of-factly. “We’ve been working on what is known as Beagle 2, which involves a distinctly British mission to the planet Mars. We’ve spent the last six months or so modeling and animating a Mars lander for them, as well as creating character animations that we hope will get kids talking about and interested in the project. It’s been good fun, and without too much pressure.”

Not too much pressure, perhaps, but still some significant challenges. Requiring both a whimsical character animation and seamless integration with much more technical, photorealistic background plates, Nanomation’s work on Beagle 2 actually began in SOFTIMAGE®|3D.

“The idea of the piece was that the character animation fits into the technical animation, which had ships flying through space and that kind of thing,” says Rowntree. “We started out using SOFTIMAGE|3D v. 3.9, but we eventually transferred everything to SOFTIMAGE®|XSI™, primarily so we could use the Animation Mixer.”

Changing systems in mid-project takes courage at the best of times, but Rowntree admits that the combination of the project’s flexible deadline and the challenge of learning a new system proved too much to deny. “We were used to modeling and animating in SOFTIMAGE|3D, but the lure of SOFTIMAGE|XSI was more than we could resist,” he says. “I was very keen to explore the Animation Mixer. That feature alone meant you could set up animation cycles and reuse them, so there would be less time spent animating. We had already effectively finished the modeling in SOFTIMAGE|3D, so we were able to go straight to the animation module in the new software. It was brave, I suppose, to go to the new software in the middle of a project, but sometimes the best things happen when you’re a little bit naïve going in.”

Still, Rowntree and Nunley say they picked up on SOFTIMAGE|XSI’s unique workflow fairly easily, even when a new wrinkle, interestingly involving Rowntree’s “other” life, was added to the project.

The original scenario went a little something like this. A rather technical, animated scene (created by another company) reveals the Mars Express, an orbiter of the red planet, arriving in the Mars orbit and jettisoning the Beagle 2 lander. The lander descends through the atmosphere, deploys parachutes and lands softly on the surface. Once it has touched down, the lander sends a signal back to earth, which turns out to be an early Blur tune entitled “Far Out.” As it turns out, however, the Open University wanted more than just the tune.

“The project team thought it would be fun to create a ‘quick’ animation of the band leaping out of Beagle 2 as soon as it lands and plays our song,” says Rowntree with a laugh. “Of course, there’s really no such thing as a ‘quick’ animation, and animations of four people is quite a task for just two artists. That was pretty challenging, but we got it done. More recently, we have taken over the technical animation work from the previous company, and are now modeling and animating the technical sequence again in SOFTIMAGE|XSI incorporating all the changes to the mission.”

Rowntree continues: “We also write our own software,” he explains. “We have integrated a number of them with SOFTIMAGE|XSI. That probably makes us the first people in this country to do so. I’ve come up through the ranks of animation software packages, from freeware through almost all the others, and I really didn’t find anything that was even satisfactory for character animation until SOFTIMAGE|3D and now, SOFTIMAGE|XSI. It seems to have character animation in mind from the start, and that saves a great deal of time.”

As that future unfolds, Rowntree will remain thankful that SOFTIMAGE|XSI functions easily on his laptop, giving him something to do during those long waits with the band. Asked if he anticipates forgoing those long waits anytime soon, Rowntree is emphatic. “Never!” he says with a smile. “We’ll keep making music from the grave.”

Somebody had better make sure that coffin has a USB port.