Magic Mandcandy – Can You Finish It?
Nathan of Project Peach is running a little experiment on the Peach Blog to investigate an idea for community involvement in the project. It’s based on this tutorial on Pose to Pose animation by Keith Lango which you really should read if you haven’t already.
So what’s this community participation thing I mentioned?
Well, I’ve been toying with the idea of having people outside the core Peach team do some of the finishing for Peach’s animation. The Peach team would do the block (like my mancandy animation), but then for some shots other people would take over for finishing. This would allow us to turn out more animation of a higher quality.
Please keep in mind that this is just an idea. Currently there are no plans to actually do this. I’m just toying with the idea.
This sounds like a seriously cool idea to mee. I only wonder how hard it would be to maintain a consistent ‘feel’ over the entire animation when so many different people are working on the details. What do you think?
That’s an interesting idea – and would better utilize the community – but I agree with the concern of consistency.
Perhaps it would be better to have the team review the animation afterwards, and tweak it yet again – or review multiple versions of animations (that is various people do their own tweaking, and it’s all examined by the team) and choose the best one.
Or maybe that’d be a logistical nightmare.
Sounds like a cool idea to me. I’m working on my version of the mancandy animation at the moment, and I’ll upload in a few days time.
Then again, it might not work either. We shall see…
Cuby
That sounds a lot like “Night Watch”. When Timur Bekmambetov didn’t have enough money to recruit a crew, in order to supervise every stage of the visual effects on the same space, building –namely “studio”–, he did exactly the same thing, but with a win… net platform, assigning different scenes to specialists on every field: shaders, rigging, lighting…
In fact, sounds way too cool!!!
I can think of something else for an idea:
Why not set up a renderfarm like BURP via BOINC.
It could get you to render with the latest Blender and add support for rendering the project at the same time!
I love this idea, and I would like to participate just to leave my mark on the movie :)
I don’t think that these consistency problems will arise. I see in my own work a team of 30 animators working on different movie shots without these consistency problems. But we have an animator supervisor that checks this consistency and asks for changes to the original animators when something doesn’t match the movie style.
About the rpgsimmaster comment, I know that this wont work. If you ask an animator to fix a shot made by another animator, he will start again from scratch. Each animator has his own work method, and although they may come with the same artistic result, they don’t do it in the same way. Just to mention one case, some animators like to solve one action with forward kinematics while others prefer to use inverse kinematics.
The only thing that I have seen working was to give the block animation task to one person and refined animation to another, and even then, sometimes the refine animator starts from scratch, but it is not a problem, as the block animation is only a list of main poses, that can copied very fast.
I think that someone from the peach team should review the external animations, but let the original animator fix it.
Waking Life used different animators and the result was wacky, but worked with the concept.
I think a goal of consistent animation would put wiki tutorials and wiki project management to the test. Probably for a different project, though. With Peach, I think people are interested again in seeing what is possible when the best of the best work very closely together.
That is a great idea and it should work even better in other fields like shading where the general theme could be defined with examples, swatches and stuff.
It is a great idea because it would give the opportunity to a great(er) number of Blenderheads with aspirations to get some actual work experience.
I wish that this can be tuned up to work in Peach. If not possible it would beautifully fit to the ‘Contest’ format, one to organize through the Peach Blog maybe, just to give a chance to many to feel closer and to the Team to feel accompanied even more?
Hey a whole post without cynicism, critic, grumbling? Some is wrong… Oh ya: where is Verse when we need it?!
;)
Jean
it’s normal that help animators “smooth out” the animation. would be cool.
animators should have to pass a “mancandy test”. Once in, an animator should focus on 1 character, really get to know it. Only the best should be allowed on the main characters, but average animators (read very good animators) could do the “extras”. get 5 or 6 really good guys working on the main characters. maybe not just like this, but there needs to be STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION. it WILL work. and the end result would be WAY higher quality.
Actually this is no different than what has been done for the last 100 years. The head animator would draw out the key/main poses and hundreds of other animators would work on the inbetweens.
There has been no inconsistentcy then and don’t think there will be now. As Long as the key poses are done by the ProjectPeach.
Certainly worthwhile ‘toying’, there may well interesting ways to make something like this work.
~Toni
Great idea!
I would be much happier to support projects if the wider community can have opportunities to participate in some way.
It also helps those who are certainly talented and would like to be involved but cant travel or only have a little time say in the weekends and evenings…
Of course people participating this way need to meet a standard too.
As has been said it is a way to get some experience too so the pool of eligible artists can grow ahead of the studio
Also I think properly well it would raise the standard or at least extend the movie duration on what could be achieved by a small team in a small time regardless of their dedication.
So yeah lots of potential
Go for it :o)
Great, this will help the movie and get more work done in less time, or more done, in the same time it wouldnt otherwise and what Morris sugested, makes a lot of sense! Nice sugestion! I would take that in consideration!
Have a nice day!
sounds neat – it would be even more of an open movie!
I agree – This is exactly what an open movie should be about – but not at the sake of quality of course!