In the first of our chats with fellow compositors, we talk to the team at Rhonda Graphics Studios who have just brought musical instruments to life for a new animated 30 min project. The team discuss their views on After Effects and Flame, as well as a few Final Cut Pro tricks they developed.
Continuing to expand its full line animation and special effects capabilities, Rhonda Graphics Animation Studios has entered into children’s home entertainment by creating computer generated animation for a direct-to-video project entitled “We Stick Together Like Glue”. The eye-popping animated film is the first half-hour of a series featuring The MusicLand Band™, created and produced by Touch Studios, LLC.
“We Stick Together Like Glue”, features stunning 3-D animation, wonderfully produced original songs and unforgettable characters with witty and captivating personalities. The comical and inspiring story centers around two best friends – Gil the Guitar™ who waits anxiously for the day when his newly famous electric guitar friend will return home from a concert tour. It is the unexpected arrival of Eddy Electric™ that sparks a big misunderstanding causing Gil to think that Eddy is now too famous to be his friend. However, Gil eventually realizes his mistake and he and his best friend are reunited in a delightful musical finale.
The visually appealing aspect of the project was created by an exceptional team of animators, artists and technicians at Rhonda Graphics.
We spoke to them about the process to Loren Olson at Rhonda’s Graphics
FXG: How long did the project take?
Loren: If you include preproduction, we worked on it almost a year. Actual animation production took about 6 months. When production got rolling, we ended up with a team of 7. Six people animating with Maya. Two of those people also did compositing. Plus editing on Final Cut Pro.
FXG: Can you walk us throught the compositing process?
Loren:There were only a handful of shots that didn’t have some compositing. Basicly, we always broke things into layers for compositing in After Effects. Compositing allows us to be more efficient AND produce better looking shots at the same time. However, there was no hard rule about how a shot would be split up, it just went by what each shot needed.
In a typical shot, there would often be 2 or 3 layers of characters, plus shadow layers for each character layer, plus reflection layers, plus background/environment layers, plus any effects layers. Any outside shots that had Maya Paint Effects would have more layers, since PE would always get split into multiple seperate layers. As much as possible, we would add Depth of Field in compositing.
A small number of shots and some fixes were done in our Flame.
FXG: Sounds like AE was the primary tool, why – given your long history with flame?
Loren: Flame is so good when you just need a little paint/roto retouch work. So there was some of that. Also, at the beginning of the project one of our artists (Jon Segress) was very familiar with Flame, and very new to AE. As a result, even though going in and out of Flame added an extra step into our pipeline, sometimes he would do that because he knew how to solve certain problems with that tool. (Say for example, moving stuff in 3d using Action.) I’ll admit that I was kind of an AE evangelist to Jon during the early going. By the end of the show, I think I had converted him, and just about everything was AE. Its not that I think AE can replace Flame for all work. But for what we were doing on this project, AE was an outstanding tool.
FXG: Does AE have a render farm option?
Loren: Yes, but I’m not wild about the way it works. I’d much rather be able to integrate it with Smedge, so that it would fit in with the 3d renders. The result is, we don’t really use the AE render farm feature.
So, probably your next question
is, why use AE instead of Combustion. Well, we’ve been using AE for quite awhile, we know it, and we like it. Some of the things that Combustion has over AE don’t seem as big a deal for us, since we have a Flame, and can do those things there. So, there hasn’t been a good reason to spend more money on the Combustion. AE is a good tool, and a very good value.
FXG: You mentioned Final Cut Pro before ?
Loren: We edited the show in Final Cut Pro at DV resolution. This made the editing system incredibly economical, and kept disk space usage way, way down. However, we knew that a bottleneck in our workflow would be getting the animation into the FCP system. For FCP, we needed a Quicktime movie in the DV format – but that’s not what would be coming out of Maya. At each stage of the process, Layout, animation, lighting, comp, a scene might need to be brought in to the edit multiple times. During layout and animation, animators often quickly do many “playblasts” to output tests, then want to drop that into the edit. When you have a 30 minute show, that adds up very fast.
Our solution was to develop a command line application that converted an image file sequence into a Quicktime movie. This app could also overlay text, for example the sequence and scene numbers, frame numbers, and the current date automaticly. When work started on a sequence, very simple batch scripts were created for every scene so that an animator who did a playblast could simply double click, and get a Quicktime movie that was ready for FCP, complete with text annotation. Or, when a render finished, a new job could automaticly be started on the render farm to create a Quicktime movie for that image sequence.
Its not a very glorious task, and it seems really simple. But having this app saved an incredible amount of user time.
FXG: Is this the first step towards an animated Feature Film?
Loren: Of course, we would love to do a feature. For some reason, it turns out to be a little harder to get together the money required for one of those. Go figure.
Seriously, we are actually working on some very cool tests for a possible feature. However, its way too early to start counting our chickens… we’re working hard, and we’ll have to wait and see what develops !