Description Glimpsed
in the peripheral vision of Chester Gould's third eye, this hard-boiled
mutation skulks and skitters among the shadows of angular men, decadent
guns and deadly fedoras in a radioactive comic strip of tommy-gun nonsense. - Spencer
Parsons, Cinematexas
Crimenals is an animated collage of film noir soundtracks and detective
comics panels. The narratives of each have been stripped away as the
images and sounds are broken down, manipulated, and recombined to form
an absurdist homage to these genres.
Concept The
idea for Crimenals developed from the re-working
of ideas for my second-year production. I chose to pursue a filmmaking
process that would implement a more experimental approach than
what I had done for my meticulously planned first-year production
Rest In Peace. Rather than executing a completely resolved set
of drawings and camera instructions as I had with my last film,
I chose to work more spontaneously and let the details resolve
themselves as I progressed along. I also decided to
keep the scope of the film intentionally small. In practical terms,
this meant a simple visual style and a short (under three minute)
running time.
I
chose to create an animated collage for a few reasons:
I have used collage as an Illustrative device in the past,
and it seemed to me an obvious choice for experimentation.
The main inspiration for using comic strips as a resource
was the series of Tricky Cad paste-ups done
in the 1950’s by Jess (Burgess Collins.) I decided
to take a similar approach for my film’s visuals.
The sound for my film would be a collage as well, so I
planned
to cut together a soundtrack from fragments of Film Noir
movies from the same time period as the comics.
Jess, Tricky
Cad: Case VII (detail), paste up, 1957
Sound Since
visual action was to be driven by the soundtrack, the sound would
have to be completed first. I digitally extracted the complete soundtracks
from three Film Noir movies directed by Anthony Mann: T-Men, He Walked
By Night, and Raw Deal. From there, I cut each soundtrack into clips
containing single lines of dialogue. I was careful to use only clips
with as little ambient sound or music as possible. Due to the production
level of these films, almost every line of dialogue was useable in
this way. I saved each sound clip in a folder corresponding to each
actor so I would have a consistency among voices if needed. An added
benefit of using these specific films was many of the same actors
appeared in all three, so I ended up with a fair amount of material
to choose from. After cutting up the first
film, I
created a database of the sound clips with fields like actor
name, line spoken, and emotional tone. I thought this would
become useful
later on in creating my soundtrack, but after cutting up the
third film, I had become familiar enough with the lines that
I already
had a sense of which ones could work together. I never returned
to complete or use this database.
After
the sound library was built up, I edited together a rough
cut of the
soundtrack. Dialogue was created by editing words spoken
by the same actor but from different scenes, or from other
films entirely. On some occasions, new words were fabricated
by the careful splicing together of phonemes. The film’s
title word Crimenals is an obvious example of this. All
of the dialogue was created in this way. Short scenes were
then
built up from the juxtaposition of spoken lines that created
a mood or had a common theme. The scenes were then assembled
into a complete sequence. The addition of a music loop
and some sound effects created a working soundtrack for
picture.
Picture Creating
the visual component was a process analogous to compiling the
sounds. I considered sourcing from several artists such
as Will Eisner, Chester Gould, Bernard Krigstein, and Jack Cole
before deciding to use only Gould’s Dick Tracy comics.
I scanned several complete serials from volumes checked out of
area
libraries. Each page was scanned in at high resolution and processed
for consistent white and black levels.
Text
comprises a large part of the Tricky Cad paste-ups,
and although I would attempt a similar manipulation of
words in Crimenals,
I knew the majority of my film’s text would be
aural. The small amount of written text, however, needed
to be
explicitly editable as well as visually consistent
with the Chester
Gould aesthetic. To this end I created a digital typeface
of Mr. Gould’s hand lettering. Scanned images
of letters
from
various comic panels were used as templates that
were traced over in Adobe Illustrator and subsequently
imported into Macromedia Fontographer, from which
a
TrueType format font was generated.
In
order to facilitate the moving collage effect, I initially
decided to use the 3d animation environment of AliasWavefront’s
Maya. Within Maya, I wanted to be extremely conscious
of preserving the flatness of the two-dimensional art,
as
well as to explore
more uncommon representations of 3d computer graphics.
My solution was to make characters using a simple inverse-kinematic
skeleton. Each joint on the skeleton had a nurbs plane
parented to it with a texture map of a specific body
part and corresponding
transparencies mapped onto it. This created something
that behaved like a jointed paper cutout.
Shading
networks were created in Maya to mimic the look of black
line art with colored regions of offset-printed halftone
screens.
A procedural shader was created for the color halftones,
while the line art from the bitmap images was composited
overtop.
Attribute sliders were created to interactively control settings
such as halftone color, dot size and density, and screen
angle. Other high-level controls created for the characters
included
sliders
for scrubbing frame sequences on a particular nurbs “card” – useful
for animating replacement head turns or lip sync mouth
shapes. Another feature to be implemented was global control
over visibility
of color or line information. This would be used for multiple
render passes. The idea was to have the animation of the
colors on a separate layer from the line animation. Their
relative
timing could be skewed when composited together so that
the color action would bleed outside of the lines, a reference
to
the abundant
mis-registration found in comic book printing. Mitch Cockerham
was instrumental in introducing me to building complex
shader networks, as well as getting me started with mel
(Maya’s scripting language), which was used to implement
many of the
controls described above.
procedural
"halftone screen" shading network(left) and render
view (upper right)
Production Up
to this point I had done a minimal amount of storyboarding.
The goal was to achieve a whimsical, nonsensical visual look, to
be created spontaneously in response to the soundtrack. Since
the visuals would be largely improvisational, I was hesitant
to begin making imagery until it was absolutely necessary.
After successful test characters were built in Maya, it was time
to
create a storyboard with rough blocking to determine what characters
would be created, and what range of motion they required. The
storyboard was done in one pass on a big sketchpad page
with a series of extremely crude thumbnail drawings representing
each
shot.
Listening
to the soundtrack, I quickly sketched out the blocking
for each scene with specific characters or locations in
mind.
From there, I put together an animatic based on the storyboard.
It was at this point that I determined exactly how each
character would be constructed, and how each shot would
look. The “improvisational
performance” or resolution of visual ambiguity was
executed at this stage.
storyboard detail
Adobe
AfterEffects was used to create the animatic. Using the storyboard
panels as a guide, I created layered Photoshop files for
each scene containing characters broken apart into limbs
or other components as well as background elements. These
files were imported into AfterEffects as compositions. Each
composition was a separate shot and contained the full soundtrack.
Animation was done to match the audio for each specific scene.
The scene compositions were placed in a master composition,
each starting at frame zero to ensure synchronization among
all scenes. Then each scene comp was trimmed to the correct
in and out points.
scene
sequencing and synchronization in the AfterEffects timeline
The
character animation relied heavily on layer parenting in
AfterEffects. Simple transformational hierarchies could
be created using
layer parenting so, for example, a shoulder – elbow – wrist
hierarchy could be made and animated using forward kinematics.
Another use for layer parenting was for camera movement:
several elements could be parented to a master solid layer
whose visibility
was turned off. By transforming this layer in x and y space,
all objects would move in correct relation to one another,
simulating a camera move. Depth of field effects were used
to literally focus attention on speaking characters, who
lacked lip-sync at this point. This was achieved through synchronizing
the
Fast
Blur effect on multiple layers. Although AfterEffects allows
manipulation
of cameras and objects in three dimensions, I did not
see any benefit to working in its 3d space. I was
getting
the results I wanted quickly and easily by sticking with
two dimensions.
The
animatic was to serve as a reference for how to efficiently
set up each shot in Maya, however the response I received from
preliminary screenings made me reconsider how to continue my
production process. Rather than move onto the Maya production
stage, I decided to use my remaining schedule to refine and
complete
the film in its more primitive incarnation.
There
were a few factors contributing to
this decision: The animatic accomplished the audio and visual
styles I set out to explore, succeeding as a collage film,
and preserving a crudeness and immediacy I wanted to capture.
Although I considered it a work in progress, it hit very close
to how the film looked in my imagination. The process of recreating
it in Maya would require a substantial further effort, introducing
an entirely new production process, and resulting in a film
only marginally different from what I had already completed.
The
completion of the film now involved a refinement process
that ranged from minor adjustments to scene blocking and
animation to reworking entire shots. Lighting effects
were added throughout to suggest a sense of depth
and space. Lip sync animation was created in Maya by applying
some newly learned melscipting: Five mouth positions were
mapped as textures onto a single nurbs plane. The frame
extension for each mouth texture was an animatable attribute,
so only
one texture would be visible at a time in correspondence
to the value of the attribute. A short script was created
for each
mouth shape to map it to the plane and set a key for the
current frame. Each of these scripts was mapped onto buttons.
The resulting workflow was to scrub through the timeline
listening to the dialogue, and hitting the button that
set the correct mouth shape at each frame. The speed and
simplicity of this technique allowed me to complete the
lip sync for the film in one night. Frame sequences were
exported for each
line of dialogue requiring lip sync, then brought into AfterEffects
and parented to the appropriate body parts.
My
approach to the completion process was to change as little
as possible from the first pass of the film. The intent
was to augment some the details rather than to bring the
entire
piece
up to
a high
and even level
of refinery. A few particularly unresolved scenes were
reworked, but overall the final film preserves the energy
and spontaneity of the first animatic.
Thanks
again to Faculty Advisors Kathy Smith and Midge Costin,
to Juri Hwang for the final sound mix, and to Mitch Cockerham
for his indispensable assistance with Maya scripting and
shader networks.
Screenings
Marin
County Short Film and Video Festival, Marin
County Fair
San Rafael CA, USA. July 2-6, 2003.
(Grand Prize)
