First off, we’ve both finished school, got our diploma’s, and are actively looking for work. If you know anyone who may be interested, spread the word!

We’re also heading off mid-October to Amsterdam to give a presentation about Haunted. We will be explaining our production process, but will also talk about the place Blender has in education, how its place could be stronger and how developments could be more interesting, things like that. More information can be found on the blender conference website, with the schedule here: http://www.blender.org/community/blender-conference/schedule/

Later on in late November we’ve got another presentation planned at the school we went to (ESIAJ Belgium) to talk about the same sort of thing, but also give a super accelerated crash course in how to get started in Blender. The point won’t be to « convert » students to the software but to make them realize it’s a serious package that can do just as much as most others. This is a relatively closed session but will allow for us to get a bit of teaching experience!

I hope to meet in person some of our followers at the Blender Conference!

See ya,

Chris.

Cliquer ici pour voir la vidéo.

Please watch it in HD on Vimeo, it’s way better !

We also have some VERY EXCITING news for you: Chris and I are going to speak at the Blender Conference 2012 about the movie ! We’ll give you more details in a few days

Due to Vimeo’s upload limitations, the Making-of is coming next week (we can only upload one HD video per week with our free account).

Cliquer ici pour voir la vidéo.

Please watch it in HD on Vimeo, it’s way better !

(click on the image to enlarge)

It’s been a long time with no news at all.
I’d like to apologise for that. We planned to release the movie in july, but with our holidays and personal obligation, we did what we could. Now, the problem is our exams: Chris finished his, and I still have two exams left. It’s taken up all our time.

We also encountered a lot of unexplained problems during the HD720p re-render: some scenes were missing and some colour grading went really wrong. The sound also needed some additionnal work… We’re almost done, I promise that your wait is almost over, and the movie should reach the internet before the end of the month, I’ll do my best!

Quentin.

When we set out to make the potato movie project, we had lots of amazing, huge ideas and a very strict, christmas-and-birthday-presents-from-our-family for both equipment and software as well as a very, very short deadline. The script and storyboard was as complete as it was complex, but some scenes and details still got docked from the finished cut to help the narration of the story, to get things in on time and keep to the budget. Going in with all these amazing ideas makes the release of such a student film very difficult. We gave too much and wanted things to be too perfect for it to be a painless experience. However, scenes which we thought would be absolutely necessary ended up not really being so, and the response from the jury (which happened last Friday) and the first screening seemed incredibly positive. We now understand some of the great directors who never want to see their movies again. It’s very uncomfortable, and you see all the problems with the movie that the audience completely ignores.

The potato movie project will be released very, very soon and will be made available on Vimeo first, once we’ve got the results (as potato is actually an exam!) and a nice, 720p encode for Vimeo.

While you wait, here are a couple of images from the finished movie:

We’ve been so busy with the project that we forgot to update de blog ^^

First, I’d like you to meet our second CG character, « Bear ».

At first we planned to make it really look like an animal, but we changed it for a more abstract, more « rock-golem-like » shape. Note that we kept the ears to make it coherant with the « forest creature » theme . The texturing is not finished here, I still have to apply some moss on it and finish the shading. I won’t say more about it because I don’t want to spoil the end… it may not look wonderful, but the scene will be in a very low light setup, so we won’t see modeling imperfections and I chose not to abuse on the displace modifiers to shorten render times

Chris changed the edit of the film because with the studio shots, if we were to follow what we planned at first, the movie would be way over 9 minutes long, and some parts quite boring. We trashed some shots and shortened others. The movie now lasts aproximatively 6.30 minutes with the credits, and it’s WAY MORE interesting to watch. While doing that, he made a « neutral grading » for the whole movie, because it’s been shot on 2 DSLRs, with different lenses (well, we shot with a 50mm 1.8 most of the time, but still). Chris is now working on the Rabbit integration and it looks very good!

On my side, I made a lot of physical simulations using Bullet from the game engine to animate Bear. I had to do some R&D to be able to create realistic-looking moss and I am now working on dirt particles.We’ll render with Cycles, and as particle hair is not yet supported, so we’ll use both Cycles and Blender Internal to render shots where particles are needed: moss and dirt. I also had to do a cleanplate for one of the exterior shots where there was a sign on the background.

Here is a video where you can see what I’m talking about for the use of both renderers (by the way, I found this trick a while ago on the Tube Open Movie production blog, thanks Bassam Kurdali!) and I packed a few particles tests in it. These tests may look pointless and weird, but they are useful: testing particles with objects in motion, objects with a subsurf modifiers, interraction between several particle systems and emiters, objects as particles, different setups… Note that this video contains a spoiler on « how Bear will come to life ».

Cliquer ici pour voir la vidéo.

I still have to animate Bear and for that I’ll have to do a basic rig for it. Then, We’ll put togeter Chris’ cave, my bear and the greenscreen shots.

We have less than a month to finish the whole project + render it and add sound effects and music… (delivery date is june 14th and the Jury will see it the day after!)
It’s gonna be a busy month!

Friday we filmed the last part of the movie, in a greenscreen studio. If you follow us on Twitter (if not, you definitely should ), you probably know that the initial studio video shoot was planned a week ago, the 04/20, but our actor forgot something essential, and we had to cancel everything. Bad things happen. Fortunately, we were able to book the studio again for the 04/27 and everything went well
There was already a greenscreen in the studio, but Chris and I were not happy as it wasn’t real chromakey and it was very small. A couple of months ago, we purchased our own greenscreens and supports: we had two 3x6m screens. we created a sort of « corner » with them, put some dirt and leaves on the floor and we were ready to shoot !

Alex filmed us for our « making of » video, so I grabbed some frames of his videos (sorry for the date/hour watermarks on the pics, and due to the latest WordPress update our shadowbox plugin appears to be broken, I’ll fix that as soon as I can^^):

Thanks to Bryce (actor), Damien (perchman), Michel (studio lighting advisor), Sandra (script and clap) and Alex (making-of) for their precious help !

Chris is in the process of animating Bunny and testing the integration with the tracked footage. I have a few problems with 2 of the shots which are REALLY hard to track, but I saw today on the Blender SVN that there is a new camera solver (an option in the Blender Tracker) that could help me A LOT. I’ll try as soon as I can find a build using it I’m also busy finishing our « secret monster » and I should be able to show some screenshots very soon. We also have to integrate a sort of rock-totem in a few shots, the 3D model is almost done, I’m already working on shading.

Chris did (and is still doing) a cool job on the cave modeling in which my « Monster » will come to life.

See you soon,
Quentin.

• « Potato Movie Project » was the code word for our short film. We were waiting until we had a story and were in production before we decided on a final title. The choice of Potato as a codeword is explained in the « About » section up top.
• « Warning Haunted » is going to be the first title that’s seen in the film. We like the setup because it’s two strong words, and the domain was available.
• The « Warning » part of the title will then disappear, leaving « Haunted » all alone. This is the final, sort of official original title. It’s there because we also wanted ONE word to describe the film… but « Warning »‘ just felt strange to us.
• … then there’s a fourth title that you’ll see when you watch the finished film.

Basically, the film has three sort of official titles. But feel free to call it « Warning Haunted » as that’s pretty much the one we’re using.

I don’t like leaving a blog post without a picture or something new. If you’re over here, it’s to see images of how we’re getting on, not to see endless blabber. I will therefore leave you with a few BRAND NEW screenshots of our WIP Bunny rig! It’s EXTREMELY simple, this sort of character not really needing 300 controllers (you could, but seeing as we’re modelling, rigging and animating, we don’t have an animator who’s going to complain that he needs to go into the bone structure to make new controllers when necessary).  We also don’t want to limit our creativity too much so we’re opting for a barebones spartan formula which can be tweaked at any time if we feel there’s something new that needs to be added.

Thanks for reading!

Chris.

www.warning-haunted.com

If you wish to share our project, talk about it, etc, please use this adress instead of http://www.quenting.com/potato/ or http://www.christaylor.be/potato/. Those URLs still work of course, but as we have a « classier » one, use it! You’ll probably notice that the URL will also change to the « old » one when you visit the « official » one in order to avoid small problems, because the official URL is « just » a redirection (yup, it’s cheaper). Please note that these details are just mindfrack.

The « Warning Hanted » sign you can see in the header and the sidebar (and below, because you’ll see it everywhere!) will apear in the movie, it’s another part of our teasing campaign . The destroyed effect may still change a bit, we’ll see about that when we integrate it in the final movie!

I was busy with that and side projects (yeah, we don’t have just to make our movie to finish our studies…). On his side, Chris is working on Rabbit, the character we previously introduced. The modelling is almost done, a lot of small details were added, he looks gorgeous! He also started to rig him so we can bring him to life as soon as we can!

I also did a lot of R&D on how to make nice, realistic rocks in Blender and I will soon continue with the production of our second CG character and some props! Stay tuned

Quentin