Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1464279
www.postmagazine.com 20 POST MAR/APR 2022 That was not the only reason why Quill was the perfect tool for this project. "This was my fir t time telling a story in a VR medium and Quill helped me skip all the technical difficulties because it enables an art t to draw, paint and animate intuitively," Oh explains. "That helped us achieve a hand-painted water- color and oil-painting look right away in VR space." Growing the aesthetic and images As Darnell notes, from the very start, Oh had a unique vision for the tone and feeling of the piece, and a very specific arti tic approach he wanted to employ to achieve that vision. "Supporting Erick and his vision is what mattered most to the whole team at Baobab," he says. "In general, our goal is always to support the vision of the artists who are leading our projects. We don't think of ourselves as having a 'house style.'" Oh's initial concept paintings were all watercolor, so the studio decided to capture that tactile, handmade feeling in the actual film "Because this is a very poetic and warm story, we didn't have any sec- ond-guessing whether to support it by using a traditional watercolor aesthet- ic," says Darnell. "Even when re-creating everything in VR by using Quill, we maintained the look we had discovered in 2D." As Oh emphasizes, Namoo is a very poetic piece, which focuses on life and growth. And, delivering warmth visually was very important. In the film, the t ee becomes filled with arious objects as the character progresses from birth to death. In the VR version, which can be played on the Oculus Quest or Rift platform, the "player" can directly experience the changes in climate and seasons that take place in the film "You observe what's in the tree or on the ground, what the boy is drawing in the sketchbook, and flo ting into the heavens," says Oh. The main character in the film is uni ersal, as Oh wanted everyone to feel as if they could be that person. "I wanted you to feel like you are growing up with the boy," Oh explains. "Depending on how old you are or what type of life stage you are at, you'll experience it in a very different way. But at the end of the day, life is filled wit a variety of things. It's not always beautiful, honestly; it's filled with ups an downs. You have happy, joyful, amazing moments, but at the same time, you also go through sorrow or anger, rage or the lowest point, and rock bottom. Sometimes you gotta hit your rock bottom and go through all those ups and downs. If you lived your life to the fullest, the tree of your life is beautiful." Exactly how many objects are in the tree? Hundreds, possibly even a thousand. Introducing Quill This project marks a fir t for Oh in terms of working in VR and using Quill to create a story. "Namoo is about the imperfections of a human life, so the film needed o feel human and imper- fect. Quill enabled us to achieve that," he says. "The artist literally draws, paints, designs and animates very intuitively with their hands in the virtual space. It's as simple as grabbing your own paints and moving them around to bring life to it. Every single brush- stroke is directly from the artist's touch, so it really provides the handmade, watercolor, traditional warmth that a film li e Namoo should convey." Anika Nagpal, production manager at Baobab Studios, contends that Namoo is the most ambitious project to have ever been attempted in Quill from an art and animation-quality perspective. As a result, the team was making many discoveries along the way and had to work collaboratively to find c eative solu- tions to problems that arose during production. "For example, we built an entirely-new pipeline from scratch for Namoo to bring together the best in multiple, different software to achieve that final loo we were going for," says Nagpal. "Our engineers and artists were the type of people who think both creatively and technically, and they worked very closely to make that happen." Art director Eusong Lee generated all the concept art using Adobe's Photoshop, which was then imported into Quill, while Oh created the sto- ryboards using TVPaint Animation Pro. Using the concept art as reference, Franke, Ladd and Brower used Quill to turn those concepts into 3D by drawing and placing colored 3D strokes to form each character, prop and environment. "It's a lot like creating miniatures and dioramas; there's no complex modeling, UV wrapping or texturing. It's just colored strokes, and it's much less technical than other 3D pipelines," says Ladd. Once the Quill artists completed their fir t passes of the characters, Oh would do draw-overs so the artists could fine-tune the positioning and shapes Ladd describes the animation process in Quill as a mix between stop-motion and traditional 2D hand-drawn animation. Quill has an animation timeline, but unlike other 3D software, such as Autodesk's Maya, there is no interpolation, so all the animation is done frame-by-frame. Each object and character is its own layer, and each new frame is a copy of the previous one, so an artist can change its geometry to create animation. "There's no rig, so you can manipulate the geometry however you want, and even add or remove strokes from one frame to the next," explains Ladd. Moreover, Quill has a red/blue onion skin that helps you see your previous and upcoming frames, similar to 2D animation. In fact, the process for animat- ing is similar to 2D: The animator blocks out key poses, sets breakdowns and then does in-betweens once everything is approved, Ladd adds. Throughout the process, the Quill animators worked with Oh, who provided rough 2D ani- mations as a timing guide. However, there are no lighting tools in Quill, leaving it to the artists to hand- paint the lighting and cast shadows within the tool frame-by-frame. "The software is entirely unlit vertex color with no built-in light rendering," Writer/director Erick Oh envisioned a tree of life.