Twenty One Inc's blog

Spotlight On: Animism: The Gods' Lake - Broadcast

Animism: The Gods' Lake (APTN/Z2H Studios), which we worked on last year (director: Jericca Cleland) is now broadcasting on APTN.  The show premiered this week and broadcasts on Wednesdays at 8 (PST) and repeats Saturdays at 5:30 (PST).

Drawing on ancient First Nations mythology, the show is a contemporary mix of tech meets magic in highly stylized animation and evocative artwork. The series tells the story of Mel Ravensfall, who, unbeknownst to her, has been chosen by the Trickster to be his emissary. As her powers begin to manifest and she steps deeper through the veil between worlds, Mel and her friends are swept up in the climax of an endless cycle: once again, it is the Time of Change, but this time, the fate of humanity and its future lies in the hands of one disenfranchised teen.

Exec Producers: Matt Toner, Paul Gertz
Series Producer: Carolyn Allain
Series Director: Jericca Cleland

For those of you in Canada, here is the APTN scheduling index where you can set your area and time zone to see the schedule.  

 

Spotlight On: Team Generous 2012

 

Our friends at Danish studio Noerlum do this awesome thing every year called Team Generous... They gather a group together for a couple of weeks with a creative or technical challenge in mind and make a pro bono short film for a worthy organization.  How cool is that?

Two years ago, I consulted on their piece for Save the Children and just loved it!  Last year, they supported Medics Without Borders.  This year, the lucky beneficiary is the World Wildlife Fund.  Check out beautiful result of the Team Generous collaboration this year! 

 

See it on the Noerlum page or on the Denmark WWF page!

We are discussing collaborating with Noerlum on a future Team Generous project, as Twenty One Inc shares their interest and commitment to creative collaboration and using our amazing medium to spread great messages in support of strong causes.  If you're interested in getting involved, please let us know!

Spotlight On: The Story of Change

As most of you know, I'm a huge fan of short films and a big believer in the power of story to communicate, illuminate, and shift our understanding and world view.  It is with great pleasure that we are participating in the outreach and distribution of Anne Leonard's The Story of Stuff Project shorts.  The newest one, The Story of Change, is released today!

Can shopping save the world? The Story of Change urges viewers to put down their credit cards and start exercising their citizen muscles to build a more sustainable, just and fulfilling world.

 

 

Spotlight On: Cinematography in Animation

On the heels of the recognition in cinematography that Arthur Christmas (Aardman Animations/Sony Pictures Entertainment) garnered, the Canadian Society of Cinematographers (CSC) kindly asked me for an interview.  What surprised me was writer Fanen Chiahemen asked very little about my past projects as Cinematographer at Pixar, Sony, and elsewhere or about the impact and growth of cinematography in CG-animated feature films. The questions instead focused on my most recent work as Director/DP of a new motion comic series: Animism: The Gods Lake  (Zeros2Heroes Media).

This article (published in June's Canadian Cinematographer magazine) provided a refreshing opportunity to restate what I've long believed-- that the visual storytelling tools of space, lenses, motion, staging, composition, lighting, and focus are essential to bringing strong stories to life on any screen and that the role of the cinematographer is a vital one in any medium.  It's a bit of a cinematography-geek article, but for those of you who are interested, read on!

Many thanks to Fanen and to the CSC for publishing this and allowing me to repost it here.

Download CSC_June_2012_lores

Spotlight On: 5D | FLUX Worldbuilding Conference

I had the great pleasure of attending two of the three evenings in the recent 5D Flux series on Worldbuilding held at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts this week (March 13-15, 2012).

To quote the 5D philosophy, worldbuilding is a “metaphor for the design and iteration process, creating and actualizing the story space in digital narrative media. It addresses the design thinking, the process, and the experience of creating new worlds for storytelling.”

The conference opened with a fantastic talk by Tom Wujec (Fellow, Autodesk), who posed an interesting question regarding the effects of exponential technological growth on creativity.  If I’d been worried about work keeping me too busy to be in touch with major advancements, his mind-blowing examples confirmed it.  A LOT has been changing incredibly rapidly and we all need to ponder his astute question.

Tom also quoted that creativity is the set of skills and processes that carry us from a moment of epiphany (ah-ha!) to the end result of innovative expression.  So how does technology effect and enhance our creative process?  Does its exponential growth allow us to be more creative, more efficient in our creativity, or simply result in us being more overwhelmed?  Probably all three.  But being an optimist, I prefer to see the whole as a positive, growing trend.

To quote another panelist, Rick Carter (Production Designer: Avatar), being overwhelmed is not necessarily a bad thing.  He brought to mind the image from Pinocchio, of the fairy emerging out of whiteness, out of a nothing which is everything, to create the manifestation of a wish, of a dream in tangible, conscience-driven form.  As filmmakers, imagemakers, storytellers, don’t we do that every day?  And doesn’t the state of being overwhelmed sometimes lead us to a blankness that contains everything, inspiring new thought, innovation, and spectacular opportunity for creativity?

The first evening in the series dealt with inception, or how ideas are born and how we spark our creativity, with a lively and philosophical conversation between panelists Rick Carter, Michael Wilkinson (Costume Designer: Man of Steel, 300), Tom Wujec, and Rick Jaffa (Screenwriter, Rise of the Planet of the Apes). 

What resonated most for me was that starting from character and story, we have the opportunity to develop an elemental metaphor that expresses the story’s main theme or the main character’s journey.  This metaphor or core image then becomes something that can guide the cinematic design, exploring its expression through every creative voice in the film—colour, movement, composition, space, texture, light, editorial pacing, sound, silence, dialogue, music, gesture, expression, etc.  This cinematic design provides a framework for collaboration, creative play, and unified vision between the director, production designer, cinematographer, editor, writer, and other creative keys as the film evolves.

I joined fellow panelists Alex McDowell (Production Designer: Man of Steel, 300), Jim Bissell (Production Designer: E.T., Mission Impossible: Ghost-Protocol), and Tom Meyer (Production Designer: Real Steel, Fantastic Voyage) lead by skilled and well-informed moderator Henry Jenkins (Author, Professor at USC) to discuss the prototyping of ideas, generally through the use of digital, rapid-revision technologies. 

Ultimately, we all agreed on several key points—that world building provides a rich and evolving source of inspiration for story and narrative, often spanning much more than the film or creative vision that initially motivated its creation, that cinematic design allows the director to guide the overall vision in service of story and final expression through collaboration with all of the creative keys within that world, and that the future of narrative story-telling based in any given well-developed world has the potential to be expressed through a wide variety of media and products, from films, to television shows, to games, to books, social media installations, and beyond.

Practically speaking, I find this all incredibly exciting, and I feel that previsualization (or visualization or prototyping) is a perfect space in which to exercise this creativity and enable it to flourish.  It gives us a common ground to play in, concrete imagery to respond to, and context to work within while supporting change, organic evolution of ideas, and progressive refinement of the vision. The future of compelling and strongly unified storytelling is bright!

To read more about 5D, please visit: http://5dconference.com/

To learn more about World Building, please visit: http://5dconference.com/about

For another perspective on the 5D | Flux Worldbuilding conference on, please read Bill Desowitz’s articles:

1. http://www.billdesowitz.com/?p=4797
2. http://www.billdesowitz.com/?p=4830
3. http://www.billdesowitz.com/?p=4819

 

Showcase: Interview About Previsualization

Here is an interview done by HFF Academy at this year's Insight Out conference (March 2010).  I gave a talk on previs at the conference, but this interview was conducted separately, and gave me more of an opportunity to express my personal point of view and philosphy regarding previsualization and its role in filmmaking.

 

Showcase: Previs for Live-Action Commercial

Here is a recent previsualization we did for a live-action commercial.  Of course, everything you see would be replaced by real elements on location during production.  Everything we've created is to real-world scale so you can analyze the previs for how to achieve the shots in live-action. 

We always shoot our footage a little long, allowing for coverage so that an editor can cut the scene creatively.  Since the edit is where things ultimately come together, it's wonderful to be able to shape the shots and staging in synergy with the cut.  This helps the filmmaker get to the core of what a piece is trying to say and to strengthen the elements that tell the story.  During production, a director can rely on this experience to make strong decisions in context, efficiently and clearly.

In addition to bringing the opportunity to cost-effectively experiment and revise choices to live-action filmmaking, previs also becomes an indispensable communication tool for everyone in production-- for camera, lighting, and set design crews, management, actors, vfx artists, and everyone else!  During preproduction, the director and producer have the chance to work through the vision between themselves and other key stakeholders in an intimate, creative setting designed to support rapid-revision, experimentation, and problem-solving. Then production can be about performance, about doing the best possible job of making a high-quality piece, with everyone on the same page.

Perspective: Visual Structure

When I lecture on cinematic design and visual storytelling (which I've been doing a lot recently),  people often ask me "There are so many possibilities, so many visual devices-- how do I figure out a design for MY story?"  A huge key to this is presented in a great book by Bruce Block (of USC): The Visual Story.  I clearly remember when Block came to lecture to us at Pixar many years ago-- it made a very deep impact on me and my understanding of cinematic craft. 

In his book, Block states a very simple, but exceedingly useful principle: the more contrast (within a frame, between frames, or across a film), the greater the visual (and therefore emotional) intensity; the less contrast, the less the visual intensity.  So in other words, you can plot out the story emotionally in terms of intensity and then select a few key visual devices, such as colour, shape, line, and/or value and determine where you want more contrast and where you want less.  This can become a very powerful tool for architecting your visual structure in a way that supports the story. 

Another thing I hear lots of people say is that they don't like "rules".  There's a big difference between "rules" and design.  A painting with no design and every colour known to man thrown in is hardly communicative, evocative, or good on virtually any scale.  Cinematic design is similar-- it emphasizes consciously selecting an overall style and palette for the film, if you will, but not one restricted just to colour-- rather, considering all the myriad of applicable visual devices: line, colour, shape, space, lens, staging, quantity of light, quality of light, movement, eye fix, editorial pacing, etc.  and determining which will dominate and which will be used specifically to underscore the emotion and story.

Cinematic design is a subtle, powerful, and often-overlooked aspect of filmmaking.  And it's free for the taking-- every shot has to be designed and considered anyway; it costs nothing to do so in a meaningful and story-enhancing way...

Spotlight On: HFF's InsightOut 2010

Traveling to Germany at any time is a great treat—going there to participate in the HFF “Konrad Wolf” Film & Television Academy’s InsightOut conference is terrific!  This intimate, hands-on conference is held in the beautiful film school building in Babelsberg, Potsdam, not far from Berlin. 

 

I was invited there as a trainer to speak on the subject of (guess what) previsualization.  The talk was very well received, and hopefully, we have some new converts out there.  ;0)  And I love Europe, so the whole affair was wonderful.

 

The conference format is very interesting—two days of lectures and case studies followed by two days of hands-on workshops and then a final day of lectures and discussions.  The evenings typically are also planned with a variety of events.  At about 70 participants, you have the time and opportunity to get to know a variety of people well over the course of the week.  I found the conversations and various points of view very stimulating—keep an eye on this one: http://www.insightout-training.net/home.html  You can also see some photos from the event on their Facebook Page.

Since I decided to hang out for a couple of days after my lecture, I had the great fortune of taking a stereoscopic stop motion animation workshop from Brian Van’t Hul (LAIKA) and Joe Lewis (General Lift).  Super fun!!  Stop motion animation is a secret love of mine.  Doing it in stereo was cool, but really, just playing around with the stickfa figures was the best.  Here’s a peek at what the setup looked like (quite simple and doable at home, actually):

I was so inspired, I found a stop motion animation app for my iPhone (iMotion) and made little animations on my tray table on the flight back to Vancouver.  Made for a great conversation-starter with my seat-partner!

Previsualization “Sparks” Interest at Vancouver Animation Festival

 

At the SPARK Animation Festival in September 2009, held in Vancouver, BC, previsualization made a bit of a splash.  In the four-day conference covering varied subjects such as character design, the cinematography of Up, and animation studio pipelines, two sessions were dedicated to previs.  Chris Edwards, CEO of The Third Floor, and Jericca Cleland, CEO/CCO of Twenty One Inc, laid a foundation for conference attendees with their joint presentation on the definition, history, and trajectory of previs. 

 
The following day, Justin Denton of Halon and Jason Hopkins of Propaganda Games joined them for a previs panel moderated by EA Chief Visual Officer Henry LaBounta.  Edwards, Denton, and Cleland all spoke about the uses and advantages of previs in film, commercials, and game cinematics.  Hopkins described Propaganda’s use of it to mock up game play and work through game feature and interface design. 

The presentations made a clear and compelling case for adopting the previs process in some form and the audience was interested and highly engaged.  Led by LaBounta in a casual but probing question-and-answer format, attendees peppered the speakers with a broad range of questions from the usual ones about time frames and budgets to the increasingly more dominant one—why isn’t everybody using previs?  And that, say Cleland, Denton, Edwards, and Hopkins, is exactly why they believe that previsualization truly is the shape of things to come.

(Photos courtesy of ACM Vancouver Siggraph.  From left to right: Henry LaBounta, Chris Edwards, Jericca Cleland, Justin Denton, and Jason Hopkins)