The KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival has its roots in
its sister festival, the KLIT Multimedia Festival in Gent,
Belgium. It was organized in 2004 and 2005 by students of the
animation course at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts.
The return of one of the organizers to his Amsterdam
roots planted the seed for a successful new branch. House of
Secrets attended the festival in 2008 and thought it would be
fun to design and direct the next festival leader.
We
talked to Arjan, Bobby, and Sven about the work House of
Secrets did for KLIK!
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| Q: What was your role on
KLIK!? | |
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Within House of Secrets we each have our duties and
specialties but all three of us directed KLIK!.
The
individual tasks per job for KLIK! were:
Arjan was
basically the lead art director on this job; he also did the
rigging of the characters and some character animation and
modeling. He did the initial compositing of all the CG plates
and he also did the entire stereoscopic version of the KLIK!
movie, from start to finish.
Bobby was art director.
He did some character animation, modeling, the animatics, and
the editing. He also produced the whole project.
Sven
modeled at first but then mostly did tool writing. He wrote a
pose library system for our new rigging system and did some
extra tools to tie 3rd party tools into our pipeline. He also
did the grading and compositing for the live action
sequences, which mostly consisted of adding new or
removing distracting elements in the live action plates.
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| Q: Could you supply a bit of
background on how and when the project was started? What
was the outline? | |
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When we attended the KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival in
2008, we thought it would be a fun idea to suggest to the
folks of KLIK! that House of Secrets design and direct the
next festival leader. They loved the idea and so it goes.
KLIK! is an up and coming animation festival which we
really like and this would be our way to help them for the
2009 edition.
We also wanted to do more design and
direction, and this gave us a good opportunity to show our
stuff and just as important...a DEADLINE! Because without
someone waiting or screaming for a result at a specific date,
we tend to get way too picky and slow.
The folks from
KLIK! told us that they had two themes for 2009, political and
erotic animation...so we thought long and hard about it and
choose to focus on the latter. We did some internal pitches
and Arjan came up with the best one.
We worked on it
for about 5 weeks in June and august.
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| Q. How many artists worked
on KLIK!? | |
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In total, including the set crew, about 21 people worked
on the KLIK! leader, not all at the same time, especially the
animators. Each one worked for either a few days or, at most,
about a week. They helped us out in their spare time. We love
them all!
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| Q: Can you approximate the
number of shots that you completed? Why did you choose
Fusion? | |
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We did about six live action and 20 animated shots.
Fusion is our main compositing software and one of the
backbones in our workflow. And whenever you guys visit
Holland, you feed us beer...we like that.
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| Q: What was the biggest
challenge? | |
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Time was a big challenge. Since there was no budget, we
had to ask a lot of people for their precious time (and some
equipment, we shot the live action on the Red camera). This
production took up most of the studio, we had to finish it
fast to get back to our 'regular' work.
Visually, we
were looking for a stylized and simple 3D look. We are big
fans of Japanese director Koji Morimoto; he is a very gutsy
director, with lots of extremes in his films in general, but
also from shot to shot. We tried to be as extreme as possible
within our own constraints and often would ask one
another...what would Morimoto do? Not to emulate him but to
remain flexible at all times.
Of course the end result
is not as radical as we thought it would be when we started
out, especially with the colors. This is because we did a lot
of experimenting in changing them from shot to shot but found
out that it all became a bit too intense, so we made it more
harmonious in overall look.
Technically, we wanted it
all to render fast on HD, that went reasonably well. We also
tried to create a workflow where our characters could be
deformed after initial animation (like AniSculpt in blender).
We got that running but, after the initial animation, we
realized our brand new rig setup gave us enough control over
the characters. Taking into account that the time it would
take to fully integrate the sculpting system and the time it
would take to do the secondary animation, we realized the
payoff didn't warrant the time spent on such a short
turnaround, so we decided to stick to the 'normal' animation
workflow.
Another thing were the 'boobies', featured
prominently at the end of the leader. We wanted them to
'behave' normally but also to be ahmmm...more majestic...epic?
We tried key frame animation and dynamics but neither one
worked well enough alone. We ended up with a dynamic
simulation and key framed on top of that.
Funny thing
is that while making the film, we did not realize that the
breasts would dominate the film that much (really!), but it is
the one thing people remember, while we worked so hard on
everything...it just shows how one can be wrapped up in a
production.
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| Q: Was there a particular
shot that was more complex than usual or turned out
better than you could have
hoped? | |
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Not really, but as an afterthought and wanting to tryout
stereoscopic filmmaking, we did a 3D version of the leader.
Which by itself went pretty well but we realized that because
we did not think of this while making it (so didn't do any
depth grading), some cuts were difficult to do while at the
same time trying to make the most of the 3D effect. We will
post this version online in the near future.
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| Q: What are some of your
favorite tools in Fusion and how do they help in
production? | |
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Probably the Custom Tool, basically because it allows for
programming really complex tools really fast without having to
resort to a fuse or compiled plugin.
The most used
tool, besides the Merge tool of course, would be the Vector
Motionblur followed by the RSMB plugin from ReVision, as it
allows our team to do reasonable looking motion blur in
'post'. This shaves off hours or even days of render time in
our 3D pipeline.
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| Q: What's next for the team
at House of Secrets? | |
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We are always working hard on the next show (and a very
weird short somewhere in between). We are very pleased that
KLIK! was selected for the applied animation competition at
Annecy, which is one of the most fun animation festivals
anywhere and a beautiful village in ze French mountains. We'll
be there all week, so anyone who wishes to have a chat and/or
buy us a drink - feel free!
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| Q: Finally, what's your
favorite beer? | |
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I would say pink, with a hint of tequila.
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