Short Animation In Carrara, Full Five Minute Video "The Iron Mask"
Steve K
Posts: 3,234
A short 5 minute animation entry in the Houston 2021 48 Hour Film Contest. The genre is Period Piece, the dialogue line "Who knows the answer", the character a collector, and the prop a melon. It was done mostly in Carrara, plus a little in Vue. The 3D elements were from Renderosity, DAZ3D and Xurge3D. The music was from Corel, Magix Music Maker, and Band-in-a-Box, The sound FX are from Digital Juice.
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Comments
nothing like a quick finish... great work
Great job on the FX. Congrtulations on another tremendous entry.
Thanks, folks, it was a fun project, thanks mostly to Carrara's animation tools.
Very impressive Steve. Beaut work! Amazing to see what Carrara can do in the right hands.
Thanks. Somebody here reported Carrara works fine in Win11, which I am in no hurry to install, but hopefully we can all be using Carrara for years to come.
that was meeeeeee
Ah, yes, and I greatly appreciate the report. I posted separately about Malwarebytes opinion on Win11 security (lukewarm). I don't recall if you were just testing, but have you decided to upgrade?
Fantastic!!! I love those final words at the end! Aaaaaaahhh!!!!
Yeah, very nicely done. Very fun.
yep.. upgraded 2 weeks before release....
when the final ISO image was released, I downloaded that and did a fresh install. The only issue is the Edge browser security doesn't allow the download of DiM ... but got around that easily enough.
Okay, I'm a little less unsure ... but will wait a while. As Malwarebytes points out, Win10 ain't broke ...
Thanks, once again I suggest you be a 48 Hour Film Contest judge ...
No way!!! I hate judging people's art!
Much like criticisms for movies that I really like - I can see their point. They have a criteria for which they watch movies.
I prefer to just take it in for what's there - not what I'm expecting.
In the case of things like Star Wars, I enjoy the art and the music, the action and fantastical scenes. I really don't care if the story meets the goals of a movie critic.
As I'm sure you guessed, I was joking. But I also don't care much for art competitions. The late, great Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead once said he did not see music as a competition, and I like that. I never watch the awards shows - movies, music, etc. But I know what I like
We did not win, but we got "Best Sound Design", so give it a ... listen:
Here is the winner of the 48 Hour Houston Contest, "Participant 47":
Wooops, correction. The winner of the Houston 48 Hour Contest was "A Dame Walked In", a Film Noir by team "the green dress", which I can't find online. "Participant 47" won the Audience Favorite award.
Great and congrats! Looking forward to watching it with a computer that has sound!
Thanks. Yes, sound is recommended ...
did you yourself foley the sounds at the end?
or was it from your collection
great stuff, really enjoyed it and good to see how you accomplished the narrative
All the sound effects are from my Digital Juice collection. The music is from various other sources.
Thanks. This is my first attempt at using text in most scenes, in the past I have tried to tell the story with images only, didn't always work too well. Still no voice acting, too much work ...
Thanks. Yup I've had that wrist crossbow for a long time, looking for a place to use it. A great product from a favorite vendor, I've got about four dozen of his products in Poser and VUE formats. This was the first one I bought years ago.
@Steve_K
Well done mate. That's a lot of story telling in 48 hours.
I watched it from a technical point of view. The thing that interests me the most is how you split your time up. Without knowing anything I would say the whole thing shows experience in allocating which scenes should be animated, and which are storyboard. I noticed you avoided lip sync which must be a killer in these situations. I also recognised some animations from my own library of purchases as well, so reusing where ever possible.
So how much time did you give to script and asset collection vs actually getting to make the production? How much time do you give to lighting? Was it a mad scramble at the end, or did you manage to keep to schedule as time progressed?
Great stuff!
Many thanks. As I've mentioned, since the live action teams have the real world to start with (they have to show up with location releases), I have no qualms about using virtual setups. In this case the castle, the barn, the monastery (all already purchased) ... and most of the props and outfits had been purchased - the iron mask, the wrist crossbow, the time machine, the medieval clothes (M4 & V4 only), etc I was familiar with the Iron Mask story, so just added the time travel angle to use the time machine. No script or storyboard really, just a story in my head.
The effects (time warp, hut fire) were done with the Particle Illusion plugin for Vegas (which is why I bought the Vegas upgrade), very fast using some of the hundreds of presets catalogued by type). I animated scenes where I had mocaps (in my clip library in Carrara) that fit and left the other scenes as stills (using sound effects for some unseen action), virtually no keyframing. And certainly no lip sync or sound effect recording, just title type cards like silent movies and sound FX from my keyworded Digital Juice collection. It got a little hectic at the end when I realized there were holes in the story and had to add a few short scenes. I felt lucky to draw the Period Piece genre, which live action teams dread (costumes? props? locations?), but which fit my collection of medieval stuff.
@Steve K - Thanks for the run-down. To be clear I'm all in favour of using your runtime or anything you have to hand to speed up production. It's not a 48 hour modelling challenge after all.
I would also approach it in the same way re: no script. (I'd probably look at the assets I have and imagine a rough story around it). That way you freed yourself up for more production time. So basically you got to have fun! Now you have a permenant record of your efforts.
Looking forward to seeing your next one.
Thanks again and yes, indeed, especially imagining a story based on what I already own (which is ~450GB sorted by genre for this purpose). The last couple of contests have been online because of covid, but before that there was a kickoff meeting and a resulting drive home, maybe 30-45 minutes. I had the story in my head by the time I got home. (Or at least a story ... things can change over two days) My one fear is that I don't have a model for the required prop, but its always a pretty common item. I only remember modelling one time (I am not a modeler), a nail. Not too tough, I had it hammered into the wall so it wasn't even sharp.
About quick starts, a funny story about a live action team. One year the required character was some kind of restaurant worker, maybe a waiter. We were walking out of the kickoff meeting and one guy in the team ahead of us points across the street and says "There's a restaurant, let's shoot there." The clock is ticking ...
re: missing props - two movie sayings come to mind "you gotta do what you gotta do" and "whatever works". We are the masters of improv!
Indeed. I was on one live action team for the 48 Hour contest, we used a bunch of stuff that people provided, no matter the genre or story. A couple of "Art Cars" (a huge roach and a Tiki Bar), an abandoned rice Mill, a number of female Roller Derby players ... but I bought one prop based on our script, a small grave headstone Halloween decoration from Hobby Lobby. While setting it up on the "grave", the co-director knocked it over and it broke in half. He looked very panicked ... unitl somebody just glued it back together ...
@steve K I just wanted you to know that I continue to spend effort on reducing animated film development time. I had a long weekend without interruptions this weekend and spent the whole time on lip sync. I believe we are both agreed it is the most tedious part of animating. I know you avoid it, and I'm always relieved when I can bypass it.
so to my findings. Firstly I used mimic pro in Carrara to work off a text file with audio. I then played it back live so no rendering, to my Facemotion3d app on my iPad. It's just a standard 8th generation iPad version 14.4.1 so one off the latest model. I then used facemojo in daz 3d to convert to g8. The result was a little mumbly but roughly ok.
then anilip was on offer today so I spent the whole day with anilip. It's quicker, to use, works with gen 4 to gen 8, and uses Microsoft text to speech in windows 10. It is not by default any better than the old mimic pro in my initial testing, but the editing is better.
I mixed with expression aniblocks and body movement aniblocks. It was my first time with the expression aniblocks and didn't go that well, but the body aniblocks with the speech work well.
the best results are working off video via Facemotion3d and facemojo. The importance of head movement, blinking and expression cannot be underestimated and all this all comes in automatically via Facemotion3d.
so is it any faster than the semi manual editing I used with the scififunk animated series? Yes if you are not fussy, otherwise editing is still required. However to get to an initial acceptable result that can get you by, it's a lot more fun. More to learn but a good start.
oh and by the way regarding entering competions I am working on it. I can now render at 7 secs per frame per character! Finally 12 frames per second seems fine for lip sync to me and animation in general if the action is not too quick. Another time saver.