Gods of War: An exploration of fight choreography through animation

2012-01-08T21:45:00.000-08:00

Thought I would post some things, see if I will actually keep up with the blogs this yearFigure drawing of a pregnant model for a Powerhouse Animation, Luck of the Draw.

Rough sketch of a design of Iron Fist. I am going get some 3d models on and then do some fight choreography...I think.

sketchbook posts on 3 blogs

2011-05-11T21:31:00.000-07:00

I got a new sketchbook. It has brown paper. I use white out to make white things. Got that idea from the Drink and Draw guy books. It is fun.

Jamie Teer photo shoot

2011-05-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

So we did a photo shoot with Jamie Teer, who is one of our Naked Lunch models. Jamie kind of has a look like the character design I had done for the Ishtar character and she agreed to come into the studio on Easter Sunday to take a bunch of inspiration photos.

Here is a sampling:

Here is some dude trying to show her some poses.

Gods in San Fran

2011-02-24T11:04:00.000-08:00

I am in San Francisco on the Powerhouse World tour

Got some Bruce Lee pixies in the G.O.D. outfits:

And saw some great Guan Yu's in chinatown:

and even picked one up for my shelf at home:

Tezcatlipoca

2011-02-20T19:01:00.000-08:00

Worked on the Tezcatilpoca design this weekend. This one is a tough one for me. I have done a few different versions and not really liked any of it so far. His fight is a truning point in the script and he is one of the only evil characters in the piece.

I started off trying to do a lucha libre thing, tying the design in this famous Tezcatilpoca artifact. But it was difficult making any take on a lucha libre thing look serious or evil.

I started to play around with the Anderson Silva body type, which helped me move forward.

In the piece Texcatilpoca has two obsidian hook swords and a buckler

This is what I ended up with on Sunday.

Kodo

2011-02-17T09:06:00.000-08:00

Saw Kodo last night. It was very inspiring:

The music for the trailer is going to be a slightly revised Taiko-like orchestra, similar to Kodo. I am using BFD, a percussion composition software. BFD has its own Taiko sound series that recorded Taiko drums in a symphony hall. I record by playing a midi-based drum-pad set. It is a lot of fun to play.

I also got BFD's percussion set which will allow me to create the music for the other scenes of the pieces once I get the trailer done.

This is the most fun I have had working on a project in a couple years.

Ishtar outfits

2011-02-14T20:44:00.000-08:00

I have been working on Ishtar the past couple days. I think I am zeroing in on it.

Been really inspired by Pierre Alary and Rodolphe Guenoden.

Throughout the short she is going up levels in the temple and in each level there is a fight sequence. As such, the outfits are going to get damaged and change as she goes, so I spent some time figuring that out.

Found a model that favors the character I am hoping might give us a chance to do some in costume drawings and photos.

Also worked on the music a bit this week. Its been fun working on this lately.

Powerhouse Animation World Tour & G.O.D.s

2011-02-10T19:57:00.000-08:00

At Powerhouse we made a little promotional piece. I wrote the concept, lyrics, did initial character designs, boards ( both of which were vastly improved upon by Megan Kluck and Sam Deats). Then the guys at Phouse made it come to life. Carl Thiel, of Sin City and Kill Bill fame did the music.

One of the greatest blessings in life is to watch extremely talented folks help your idea come to life and add their own personal touches that make your idea so much more than it could have been. It stops being your idea, and becomes something of its own. This project personifies that amazing thing. I get to see this happen often. I am damn lucky. I can't express how much I love that feeling.

So what does this have to do with the G.O.D.s project...each of the designs is a cartoony play on the characters from G.O.D.s.

The lead singer is a play on Tyr:

The bassist is a take on Ogun

The drummer is Ishtar, wearing the Game of Death jacket and everything.

...the guitarist is a combination of Kurt Cobain and some guy from Pearl Jam. And yes that does not have anything to do with the short. I also gave them all names for some reason. Guitarist is Pierre LaFoote, drummer is Wei Lynn, bassist Chaka Boom, singer was something like Lemmy I cant remember. Meh. Whatcha gonna do.

Early Ishtar. Beat obsession.

2011-02-06T19:13:00.000-08:00

I did the first sketch of the lead character of this piece that I even close to like earlier this week.

Since the first thing I am doing for this piece is a trailer to put on some sites to hopefully raise some funding, the question comes up: "How do you make a trailer for something that nothing has been done for?"

One thing I want to do is make sure that I do it smart enough so that everything I animate in the 2.5 minute piece is usable in the 7 minute piece so that I end up only having to create 4.5 minutes of animation to finish the piece out.

I plan on directing and developing this project in a different way than anything I have worked on before. I think it might be a unique method for planning animation, so I want to document the process.

As both a drummer and an animator I tend to get pretty obsessive about beats in film making. I posted about this once before. I want things to land exactly on beats. I want the beats to influence the animation, and the animation and story to influence the beats. In other words, I want the pacing of a story and emotions and ideas the director wants to convey to be built by the rhythms and pacing of the animation and music in harmony. This is not unique of course, but in animation you have the ability to control this down to the fraction of a second.

To me, the relationship between beats and animation is especially important when you are doing a piece with something like fight choreography. Fight choreography needs to be intricately planned and is generally fast paced with subdivided "beats" of movements.

Plus G.O.D is all music and sound effects as far as what determines the pacing. There is no dialog so you don’t have to account for how long it takes for a character to say something. I think it would be fun to use a planned method to determine how sound effects and music can interact to create unique rhythm patterns.

Since I am doing the music (which will be all percussion based), sound effects, fight choreography, and the directing on G.O.D. and I want the different aspects of the short to not only work together well, but to develop together organically so I can take complete advantage of the above ideas. On side note I am excited about using sound effects as a "instrument" to play with the rhythms in the percussion.

Although animation and music have a relationship that goes back all the way to Steamboat Willie, the relationship usually goes one of three ways, in terms of development:

A.) Create the music and audio track first and then time the animation to the music

B.) Create animation and find or create music to coincide with the animation.

C.)Create one or the other first and then tweak them both to match one another at the end of the production.

None of those methods are really satisfactory for what I want to do. I want to plan how both the music and animation should be paced first, then use that to figure out how long each scene shot should be. This will give me the opportunity to know the beats and syncopation before starting to create animation or music, and then I can develop them simultaneously.

All animators know that usually if you drop certain music on finished animation sometime you create some great "happy accidents," human brains tend to create associations between the visuals and the soundtracks. I don’t want there to be any accidents on this production. I want everything to be planned.

Animation should always be planned and edited as early in the initial phases of production as possible. When you are working in a process that requires you to create multiple levels of art for every 24th of a second, it is necessary to know exactly what you want before beginning the process. Our clients at Powerhouse Animation don't always understand that concept , and it can cause problems.

For instance, if pacing is bad in live action, you can shave a few seconds off of your shots and cut sooner. In animation, those few seconds could add up to hundreds of drawings and weeks of labor. Shots should be locked in storyboards, timing in animatics, action in rough animation-- so that you are never redoing work.

This is amplified in traditional animation, where you don’t even have control of the camera after a shot has been done.

Luckily, I know I am making a 2.5 minute piece (length of standard trailers) using some math and the magical # 24 that has so many common denominators for the frames per second (it also is the standard FPS for 35mm and most cartoon) I can build kind of a formula to figure out things.

If I create the music at 120 BPMs (beats per minute) I can syncopate the action down to the 16th note (which is about as far as I want to go). The math works like this:

For a while I considered doing different frame rates to match different BPMs, but it got a little complicated and I didnt want to deal with trying to make a Blu-Ray that was 30-something frames per second.

So I built a beat-meter to help in Flash to time the action to the music, and also help me figure out what I want to do with the music while I am making all the storyboards. I know I have 6 acts that I want to have in the trailer. So if I want them even I have about 12.5 measures for each act. So I can write the music accordingly, and then use the syncopation of the music to figure out the fight choreography, then the fight choreography to figure out how to do additional percussion.

Wanna see what it looks like?:

Now to quit being OCD and actually make something.

Why G.O.D?

2011-01-09T16:54:00.000-08:00

This entire blog is going to be full of spoilers for a short that hasnt been made yet...

I am calling this project G.O.D. as a working title until I come up with a better name. This project is basically an exploration of fight choreography and mythological gods of war in animation.

The initial are stolen from Bruce Lee's "Game of Death," (G.O.D, get it?) It works because the short deals with gods and is inspired by kung-fu films like Game of Death.

Game of Death, was inspired by 36th Chamber Shaolin. It is a common kung-fu movie convention to have the hero move through a various stages of enemies, each of whom uses a different style/form and each of whom becomes more difficult. In this short, the difference is, each opponent is a god of war.

Game of Death was supposed to be Bruce Lee’s masterpiece. Unfortunately, he died before the film could be completed, and the film was horribly butchered for a release. It borrowed from 36th Chamber Shaolin the theme of moving from one level of a temple to another, battling a new adversary along the way. The pagoda was supposed to have five floors; however complete scenes were only shot for three of the floors. The goal of the film's plot was to showcase Lee's beliefs regarding the principles of martial arts. As each martial artist is defeated, the flaws in his/her fighting style are revealed. Part of the reason for doing this short is to try to capture more of the spirit of Bruce Lee’s unfinished masterwork.

The piece is an experimental film, focusing on the art of fight choreography in a medium (animation) where, every element truly begins with a blank canvas. It will focus on creating music for animation, fight choreography in animation, shot rhythm and beats, colors schemes, and good balanced and framed compositions. This approach to filmmaking has been lacking in American traditional animation, and I want this piece to be a uniquely American, action-based animated short. Animation allows a director control over every aspect of the composition to an extent not available in live-action film. This film aims to exploit and explore this in terms of a 7 minute, dialogue-free, animated short.

In 2011, I hope to make 2 minutes of the short as a kind of trailer.

Just so I can have some images in here, I wanted to share a couple of Christmas present my wife, who knows my obsession with this project well, got me.

I am currently wearing these bad boys:

And an original of this posters is hanging in my office at Powerhouse:

That's all for now folks. See you next week.