Archive for the ‘TDDUP-Production Log’ Category

I’m happy to announce that just recently, the paperwork was signed to have my short film, Till Death Do Us Part, distributed by Ouat Media.  Their sales team will be making efforts to get the film shown on television, cable, airlines, the internet, and more.

This is pretty exciting.  The more people that see it, the better!  The bad news is that I won’t know ahead of time when it will be on!  If for some reason I do get fair warning, I’ll be sure to let it be known here.

If you see it, be sure to let me know!

I decided to take a couple of shots from my short film, Till Death Do Us Part, and put it on Vimeo.  I wanted to see how good or bad their HD looked.

The short was rendered at 1920×820.  However, for the upload to Vimeo, it was scaled down to 1280×546.  There is some loss right there.  It still looks pretty good.  Especially when you compare it to all the crappy low res internet streaming videos out there.

Check it out for yourself here.  There is no audio.  And the shots are not together in the actual film, but are placed together here.

Till Death Do Us Part- Shot 97/99 from Rick May on Vimeo.

Download a high res video here

Something that I like about the animation itself on these shots are the eye movements.  I knocked these two out in a day.  But, I was still able to get some pretty decent movements that suggest thought.  The eyes are pretty much doing everything in these two shots.

Even though all of this took place a few weeks ago, I just haven’t had an opportunity to write anything until now.  If you recall, there were potential problems with the audio at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.  I was concerned that the Digibeta dub may of had the audio recorded at too high of a level and therefore caused distortion.

A local animation studio was nice enough to allow me to come in and check the tape on their Digibeta deck.  I’m not sure they want to be mentioned, so I’ll refer to them as XYZ.   After going to XYZ and watching/listening to the dub, the audio levels were fine.  The loudest portion of the short was just bordering at 0db, which is the upper limit for digital audio.  Technically, that shouldn’t cause problems.  The editor at XYZ told me that generally it is good to have the levels at -10 or so, just to give some extra headroom, but he seemed to think that the 0db level shouldn’t be cause for distortion.   Which suggests that the problem was the equipment at the festival.  Or possibly a combination of the equipment and the audio having a very dynamic mix.  The suggestion was to make note for future projectionists that they need to be aware and check it prior to playing.  There is nothing technically wrong with the audio recording.

Kevin Geiger, the founder of Animation Co-op recently interviewed me for his website. This community is great for those trying to make their own films or projects. It was a helpful resource for me as I was trying to find people to help out. Take a moment and visit, and perhaps read the interview.

…all of the technical issues were over… For those keeping score, I sent out my short to get the DigiBeta and HDCAM versions made, however, I figured I could easily do the miniDV tapes myself. In theory, it is a straight forward process. And it actually ended up being easy to get it on tape, but to get it to actually look right. That was another issue.

The short was rendered at 24fps, and of course miniDV is a 29.97fps format. The solution is to run the short through a 3:2 pulldown to change the frame rate. Much easier said then done. Initially I was downrezing each frame to 720×480 (with an anamorphic squeeze) and loading it up into Quicktime Pro and then outputting to an AVI DV format. It worked. Or at least it seemed to until I looked closer. Quicktime wasn’t really doing a 3:2, but just doubling up the fourth frame. This looked bad on any shots that had slow camera pans. You could see the stuttering.

I couldn’t successfully get QT to do a 3:2 the right way. So, after many hours of tests of potential solutions, I settled on using Shake to create a 3:2 pulldown and save to an AVI DV straight from Shake, bypassing QT altogether. Since this software does a proper pulldown, it eliminated the stuttering.