Proposed community project: "Colla"

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 9:14 am

Hi all,

I have this idea for a community project. To sum it up simply, it would be a collaborative animation where everybody can have a few seconds of on-screen time. It would a complete non-profit venture, something you do for fun.

The format would be:

- A very simple, rigged character is given.
- Animator A animates away for a week.
- Animator A hands over an AS file with only the last keyframe to animator B
- Animator B animates away for a week.
- etc...

More specifically, the simple character would be the thing that holds it all together. At the beginning and the end of each animators piece you would see the character and the character only, what happens in between is up to the individual artist. Every piece can be as short or as long as the artist chooses. I would try and limit the time each animator spends on his/her piece to a week or two, which is very short, but we're not trying to make the Lord of the Rings here. Once you have submitted your animation, you'd get a password to see the project up to that point and you can keep following its progress. Everybody else has to wait until the end.

The reasons why you might want to participate are many:

- You want to learn a bit more about AS and are looking for a little project to dig your teeth in.
- You have been a professional animator for years and want to remind yourself why started doing this job.
- Your friend keeps saying he/she wants to learn AS. This will give them a reason.

I guess we can flesh out the rules in more detail, but first a few questions:

- Would any of you be interested in this?
- This would a complete non-profit, "open source" project where everybody can contribute. However, to avoid any problems afterwards, is there any sort of standard copyright agreement, a bit like GNU for software that could apply to this?
- There are all the practicalities of hosting the files, anybody knows how to do this stuff? I currently don't have the server-space, but I can acquire it.

Proposed character design:

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 9:21 am

Count me in. I think if the character is simple and we can do what ever we want I could spend "a week" doing some animation.

I did a project similar to this over at the Hash forum. Took an old movie and edited it down to 4 minutes. Extracted the dialog and split it up into chunks for about 10 people. Each person created and animated there own characters to the audio chunks they received. No one knew how the others were animating the sound track.

It didn't get completely finished (about 75-80%) but it was quite funny.

Yes, count me in... as long as I don't have to organize it.

-vern

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 9:49 am

The idea is not new but nice. There were several of those "cadavre exquis" films over the last year.

Two more points to think about:
1. You not only want to share the last keyframe but also the BG (and all props if there are any). This has to be organised in some way.
2. The whole thing will need sound - or at least sound will make it much nicer.

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 10:34 am

Well, I never pretended it was an original idea

Sharing the props and BG's shouldn't be a problem as long as people send along any bitmaps. However, I would like to discourage people from getting too caught up in BG's and props.

Yes I did think about sound. It could be:
- Music
- An edited film soundtrack with lots of dialogue
- Lots of random sound FX

Personally I prefer music because it ties you down the least.

Another thing I was thinking of: how well do files travel between AS and AS Pro?

What is the sort of dead-line most people feel most comfortable with? One week? Two weeks? Remember, this is not about making a polished, perfect animation. It's important to keep the momentum going.

Rhoel · Post by **Rhoel** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 10:46 am

The variation would be to make this a loops film, "controlled/coordinated" by one or two compositors: Contributors would downloaded the background scene or ongoing scene compile and add their own animated character.

The model for this idea comes from a live action film (the name of which I have forgotten) made with HARRY some 10-15 years back - it started with an empty room and some props like a table and chair, an open window and a washing machine: Suddenly a ball bounces in trough the window, followed by a little boy who climbs in through the window, collects his football then climbs back out: This 20 second clip is then run on an endless loop.

Next a girl runs into shot and puts a towel in the washing machine, turns it one and leaves shot.

A man walks up to the chair, sits down, reads a paper, then leaves.

A guy comes in and removes the towel, leaves shot.

All of this is done on endless loops, with no-one colliding with each other, but the timing critical to each other. It end up eventually ends with a totally mad room with 50 people all doing something different.

With this animation project, each person would contribute a loop to the scene, each up to that person's technical ability. It could just be someone walking in and placing a prop then leaving. Someone can then animate another character to come in and do something really crazy with the prop, then leave.

The master file would be online as a download - both as a empty scene (this would have to be done in Moho 5.3/or up to AS5.5. THe scene wuold be in AS 5.6. This is the work around for the non-5.6 people and lack of backward compatibility.

The project would start as a one background/scene. The reason for having just one or two collators is to keep the master file from damage, loss or "vandalizm". The new 5.6 layers makes the compile easier for avoiding any collisions, improved timings

The advantages:
It means different people can work on this at the same time, and at different workrate speeds. There might be 5-6 people working on the project at the same time without risk (a little collaberation is needed - eg: a note to say "dont touch the bucket between frame 750-1500", the chair is used between 1-500, 5000,5125. etc.).

The output can go to Atom Film/YouTube. Maybe Smith Micro can sponsor it at Annecy 2008 (or 2009) if it was good enough. It would be a good advert for the product and the community.

The basic rules would be

a static camera,
16:9,
25 or 30 fps (I'd favour 30 as this is good for web and mobile).
Style and colours should be agreed in advance - just so it gelled in "the final version".
No limit to the number of loops one person can add to the project

It would probably be advisable to have some form vetting or voting of what goes in as not everything might be suitable.

Just a though of making this idea available to a wider number of people.Does this make the project better, unmanageable, possible???

Rhoel.

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 11:01 am

Ah yes, what's that film called again? We saw it [pun] over and over [/pun] again when I was at animation school.

I can see the appeal of people working on it simultaneously. But how do you avoid characters walking through each other? And you talk about sending it to Annecy and asking SM for sponsoring, maybe it all gets a bit too serious. My idea was the animation equivalent of sitting around a camp fire and singing some songs, you're dragging us in the recording studio now. But again, it all depends how others feel about it.

But maybe allowing people to contribute simultaneously is better.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 11:20 am

The film you talk about is "Tango" by Zbigniew Rybczyński (1980). It wasn't made with HARRY (a digital compositing system from Quantel) but filmed on 16mm, then frames of that film got printed on paper, have been cut-out, then animated on a rostrum stand. (Getting a Harry system to Poland in 1980 would have been quite an enterprise ...)

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 11:25 am

Yes, Tango, that's the one. And you're right, it wasn't done digitally, you can still see the flash-frames where it went wrong.

Rhoel · Post by **Rhoel** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 11:41 am

Manu wrote:But how do you avoid characters walking through each other?

By working with the master file, or at least, some specific character layer, it is not difficult to engineer the timing. In fact it can be fun to make that inter-action, make it work to your advantage.

The layering tool also makes this much easier - done it before with Animo 1.7 - it's easy to fool the eye.

And you talk about sending it to Annecy and asking SM for sponsoring, maybe it all gets a bit too serious.

I dis say "if its good enough" - it is is, and there is no reason why it shouldn't be, then an Annecy-type screening is a good incentive to do your best: It would look good on a resume - my work made it to Annecy.

Certainly, it would appeal to me, where as just playing around wouldn't - I mean, why waste several weeks/months working on something that is never going to be seen.

BTW, I have web server space I can probably donate for this, providing the file sizes aren't too big - big bitmaps and heaps of texture downloads start to get very expensive on bandwidth - and the geeks controlling the rack yell at me if I steal all the bandwidth on video streaming. (Which is why YouTube is such a good option).

Rhoel

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 11:56 am

Rhoel wrote:Certainly, it would appeal to me, where as just playing around wouldn't - I mean, why waste several weeks/months working on something that is never going to be seen.

I know that the "keep it fun"/"be ambitious" balance is a tricky one to get right. It's one of the reasons I didn't want people to spend too much time on their contribution. The one problem I have with your idea is that "Tango" was such a strong presence for such a long time, it's impossible to do something like that without everybody comparing it to the original.

Rhoel wrote:BTW, I have web server space I can probably donate for this, providing the file sizes aren't too big - big bitmaps and heaps of texture downloads start to get very expensive on bandwidth - and the geeks controlling the rack yell at me if I steal all the bandwidth on video streaming. (Which is why YouTube is such a good option).

Thanks for the offer. Bandwidth is another reason to keep it simple.

Here's another idea. "Pink Komkommer" used a looped soundtrack of almost random sounds and every contributing animator animated one loop. the resulting loops were then edited together.

Rhoel · Post by **Rhoel** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 11:59 am

slowtiger wrote:The film you talk about is "Tango" by Zbigniew Rybczyński (1980). It wasn't made with HARRY (a digital compositing system from Quantel) but filmed on 16mm, then frames of that film got printed on paper, have been cut-out, then animated on a rostrum stand. (Getting a Harry system to Poland in 1980 would have been quite an enterprise ...)

Thanks for this - here is a link to Zbigniew Rybczyński's Tango. What has confused me was there was a film based on Tango which was done on Harry/flash Harry, which I saw at IBC.

But the principle might work of a collab project.

Rhoel

rylleman · Post by **rylleman** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 3:34 pm

One advantage of the tango-way over the animation-jam way is that the different animation pieces will vary a lot in quality.
The linear composition will be very uneven to watch, probably dragging the quality of the whole film down whereas in the tango-piece the compositor can edit the whole thing and have the great pieces in focus and put the more mediocre stuff at a toned down position getting a more even movie and in the end a watchable one.

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 3:43 pm

Good point. If the most people are happy with a Tango style project lets go with that then.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 3:52 pm

What ever you guys decide is fine by me. I would prefer the linear version since it lends a mysterious "what is going to happen next" aspect to each person working on it.

If we keep each segment short it shouldn't drag too much. Plus it won't confine the action to one place. The character could start in one setting and end up anywhere in the world.

We have an international membership here. It would be cool to see some cultural exchange in this project.

Just my suggestion.

-vern

Manu · Post by **Manu** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 4:04 pm

Two people in favour of the linear approach, two people in favour of the Tango approach. A poll is called for...