As reported previously, the Ugly Baby Studios team has been working diligently on creating artwork for use in the A3F 2006 film festival in Phoenix, Arizona. Well, this past weekend, February 17th-19th, we went
to Phoenix, learned the requirements for the competition, came up with our story to meet said requirements and we animated, rendered and built a 3 minute, 25 second movie over the course of the weekend. Read on for more on how it went and how we managed to get this thing done in just under 48 hours.
We arrived in Buckeye, just outside of Phoenix, on Friday night around 5:45PM. We had originally intended to go to the launch party for the festival, but a slightly late start on the drive from Southern California and a ton of unexpected traffic on the I-10 west made that a fairly unreasonable expectation. So we setup our equipment and went to the website for the competition, which was supposed to give the final requirements of the competition at 6:30PM Arizona time. Sure enough, they were there on time, and we got started. The requirements were pretty interesting:
Theme of story: Mistaken Identity
Line of Dialog: I don’t think this is going to work!
Prop: A Plant (Someone had to intentionally water a plant)
Our initial reaction was to try and use the requirements to drive some ideas we’d discussed en route, because they really did fit pretty well. We learned quickly that fitting the plant and the line of dialog into our version of the Mistaken Identity concept was a bit harder than we initially thought, so we struggled on the story for awhile. The more we tried to make those two elements fit, the more complicated the story became until it was either too unwieldy or resulted in contradictions that we couldn’t resolve. Finally our Animation God, Josh Jertberg, said something brilliant: “What would Ed do?”, referring, of course, to our own Ed Knight, who’s currently in Florida attending the Digital Animation and Visual Effects school at Universal Studios. For the past 3 years Ed’s really been our “Idea man” any time we’ve worked on projects, and without him we were kind of lost. However, the invocation of Ed’s name and method of thinking kicked our brains a bit, and before long we had a working plan that was sweet, simple, used all the requirements of the festival in a creative way and would let us get away with roughly 3 minutes worth of animation and relatively little dialog.
So we went to work; Josh began to animate, I started working on prepping the workspace (our environment, designed by Adam Hetrick, the newest addition to our team and one hell of a level designer) for our animation, and Juliet started working on the texture for the two Plant props that we now had to model, texture and animate. Josh finished a brief sequence with one of our characters and we imported it into Unreal Editor, where it appeared to work great in the Animation Browser. So far, so good. Recalling the lessons of my recent 3DBuzz training videos in the Matinee system, I setup the list of scripted actions and pressed the “Play” button in the editor, expecting the animation to render in all it’s beauty before my very eyes. The Unreal logo played as expected, the gray box telling me that assets were being loaded…and then CRASH! it all came down in flames. Unreal Engine collapsed and with it all our hopes.
Back to the Editor and the UnrealScript AI. What did I do wrong? I couldn’t find a specific error, so I consulted our programmer over MSN messenger, Andrew Halford. He wasn’t sure, but the error sounded to him like some kind of loop in the programming, so I went back to the Buzz tutorials. Had I missed something? Step by step for over an hour I plodded, then went back into the editor, cleared my list of scripted actions and started again. WAITFOREVENT–>Check. PLAYANIM–>Check. And then, of course, my *new* friend, WAITFORANIMEND. Check. I crossed my fingers, and I think Josh and Juliet held their breath. I hit the Play button in the editor again and waited. Unreal logo, so far so good…gray box describing the assets being loaded, getting nervous. Black screen and then…Success! Our world materialized, the character sprang to life and all our hearts started beating again. Josh dove back into his animation software, Juliet went back to building textures for our new props and I dove into setting up the next scenes.
This continued for the next day and change, punctuated only by 2 roughly 4 hour sessions of collapse where we all had to sleep awhile. On the final day we raced to render our final scenes (part of which was made difficult by some pathing issues in the engine, thanks to the tight confines of our cave environment) and convert them to AVI’s for editing. We had recorded our dialog the day before, with help from our now two-time Sound Engineer Rafael Flores, which went very well. The process of rendering the video, however, was a little time consuming as we stumbled over a few technical hurdles, one of which included the UT2004 “Dumpframes” methodology, which worked excellently once we figured out that UT2004, for whatever reason, removes modifications to the INI files after each render. I finally resigned myself to keeping copies of the modified UT2004.ini and user.ini in a separate folder so I could overwrite UT2004′s “corrected” versions in a hurry.
The process wasn’t overly lengthy once we worked out the bugs, but it did entail a lot of rendering. First we had to render from UT2004, which drops all frames to BMP format on the hard disk. Then we had to load those BMP’s in VirtualDub, a freeware video application, and render them to AVI’s. Then we had to load them in our editing package and, after doing the arrangement, render those frames as well. For a short film it’s actually an OK process, but I have to say that without the dual-core AMD processor I’d ordered a few days before, we might not have rendered quickly enough to make the deadline. Next time we’ll do dual-core AND we’ll do RAID0 across 4 SATA drives to really improve the rendering performance, because waiting for a movie to render while a deadline approaches is not as much fun as it sounds (and it doesn’t sound fun to begin with, does it?).
As the deadline approached we all became more nervous, more tense. We hadn’t eaten all day because our stomachs were too much in knots, and it was only getting worse as the the clock ticked away the minutes. Finally the last renders were done, and with a trembling hand Josh raced through the editing. A quick preview showed that the movie was mostly in order except that one clip and one special effect hadn’t rendered properly, meaning that while one of our characters was clearly watering the plant prop, the water itself hadn’t rendered. Time was too short to correct the problem, so we had to rely on the audience to see that he was, in fact, watering the plant. We burned the DVD and with barely 30 minutes to go we raced out the door, into the car and down the freeway, sometimes at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour. We were horrified to find that when we turned where our directions said to turn, the road was closed off for construction. With minutes to go, we raced through the maze of streets where tons of construction seemed hell-bent on stopping us from turning in our movie on time. Downtown areas are bad enough with their “one way only” streets, but toss in some major construction and a near-complete unfamiliarity with the area and you’re looking at certain confusion for out-of-staters like us.
We arrived and turned in the DVD, with the beautiful words “you guys are OK, you’re in” settling our fears of disqualification. A couple of quick snapshots from Jae Staats, the organizer of the event, and we were ready for alcohol. Into Majerle’s Sports Bar we went, where we celebrated with drinks and dinner for the next hour. All at once the unwinding hit, and we all realized just how hungry we were. Fortunately Majerle’s has excellent food, so our celebration dinner went off spectacularly. In the course of discussion we realized just how much we had done and how much we had accomplished in that 48 hours. Morever, we realized just how much we were really dependent on the whole team–those who went to the competition and those who didn’t but who contributed models, designs (John Osgood), coding and logic–to pull off the massive effort of a 3 minute animated film in just 48 hours. It’s no small wonder that out of 60 teams registered we were alone in creating an animated movie. I’ve said and felt that there must be a fine line between great courage and insanity, but whichever is the proper designation for the Ugly Baby Studios team, it’s clear that we are firmly on that one side of the line, and with talks already begun about next year’s festival and the animated film that we’ll create for it, there’s no chance of turning back.
Now if we can just place in the top 20, all will be well in the world!
