Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17873
n n n n CGI Before designing the characters, Chen studied quite a few nature books and imag- ery, building up his own library of tree frog, alligator, snake, and insect images. “Te chal- lenge was to take these designs away from the realistic and toward the caricature and the car- toony, without losing the essence of the actual animals and creatures they were based on,” he explains. “Te goal was to hit the sweet spot in the middle for maximum character appeal.” While Chen considers his character designs The frogs encounter a number of characters in the film, including this seething snake. All the charac- ters were modeled and animated in Maya using a combination of polygons and NURBS. val this past July in Los Angeles, though work on “Amazonia” began in mid-2006, after he had completed the film festival circuit with “Eternal Gaze.” “At a running time of five minutes, that’s just a little over one minute of finished footage per year,” Chen says, adding with a chuckle, “I know, I’m a slacker.” Per- haps that would be true had the filmmaker focused solely on this project rather than working on it when he could between other jobs (teaching, freelancing, and so forth). Tis schedule, though, kept him from growing tired of the film. While many artists stick to a certain anima- tion style, that was certainly not the case for Chen. In fact, “Amazonia” is at the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum from “Eternal Gaze.” While “Eternal Gaze” was dark, grun- gy, and set in gloomy black and white, “Ama- zonia” is vibrant and color-rich. “While some think ‘Amazonia’ is a big departure stylistically from my previous film, in reality, it was a re- turn to my roots of making fun and wacky CG shorts in the style of Looney Tunes cartoons, which I devoured everyday after school while growing up in San Diego,” says Chen. In terms of production, Chen’s pipeline has not changed much, either. He has used the same tools more or less for the past 10 years, but be- cause of Moore’s Law and the advancements in powerful and affordable hardware, he was able to achieve much more with considerably less. For “Amazonia,” this meant doing something that most others would not dare to attempt: creating the short film using laptop computers (see “Mobile Moviemaking,” pg. 32). Jungle Jingle In the whimsical, fun-filled animated short, two buddy tree frogs named Bounce and Biggy 28 August/September 2010 team up on a culinary quest for food through the Amazon rain forest. But things quickly go awry when the proverbial hunters become the hunted. Take all these high jinks and set them to Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 8” (second movement), and you have “Amazonia.” “It’s heavily inspired by the physical humor of Looney Tunes cartoons and the musical grace of ‘Fantasia,’ ” describes Chen. As a one-man show, it’s always daunting and nerve-wracking when starting any new projects, Chen points out. “So during pre-production, I had to convince myself that the premise would work,” he says. To that end, the filmmaker relied heavily on previs to time out the story beats and gags, and to help him choose which piece of music to use. And to create the previs, he employed Autodesk’s Maya 8.0, along with Canopus’s Edius 3.0 for cutting. Once Chen settled on Beethoven’s “Sym- phony No. 8,” he used early, non-textured models of his characters and moved them around the bare sets like chess pieces, block- ing out key storytelling positions and gags. Says Chen, “Te important questions I asked myself at this early point were: How’s the story flowing? How are the actions cutting? What is the pacing and rhythm as they’re layered on top of the music?” Te previs gave Chen the answers he need- ed, convincing him that the story was sound and the project worth pursuing. What Characters Te short features a number of animal charac- ters and their habitats, whether it is land, water, or air, including a crotchety crocodile, an an- noyed anaconda, a bothered bee, and more—in addition, of course, to the main characters, the two fun-loving, albeit hungry, amphibians. unique, with a signature look, he notes that they are Pixar-inspired. “I’ve always been a big fan of [Pixar’s] character facial and eye designs in the way they’re able to convey so much emo- tion and appeal, all the while still resembling the animals or characters they’re based on,” he explains. “Because my story hinged on the physical comedy between the two hero charac- ters, Bounce and Biggy, even the size and color relation between them borrowed slightly from Mike and Sully in Monsters, Inc.” To create the cast—which included ap- proximately 10 primary and more than 30 supporting characters—Chen again used Maya. “Te [previs] footage was used mainly as a timing guide for creating the shot list and to inform the editorial process,” he explains. “So almost every animation curve was redone from scratch for the film.” Most of the characters were built using a combination of polygons and NURBS. “As someone who started in 3D using Alias’ Power- Animator, I tend to prefer using NURBS for much of my organic character modeling,” Chen says. For more complicated NURBS shapes, he found the need to stitch and attach patch surfaces cumbersome and unreliable. So Chen started exploring Maya’s subdivision surfaces, which he found to have some perfor- mance limitations, as well. As a result, Chen taught himself organic modeling using poly- gons, a solution he calls “fast and reliable.” “With Maya’s ability to polysmooth at will, anytime more smoothness was needed, there was less reason to use NURBS,” Chen relays. For some of the characters, such as the wasps and damselflies, where their thorax, abdomen, antennas, limbs, and wings were segmented and mostly cylindrical, he still found it advan- tageous to use NURBS for modeling because of their simplicity and their ability to be mold- ed easily by pushing and pulling very few CVs. “One of the features I love about Maya is its brush-based sculpt geometry modeling tool, formerly called ‘artisan.’ Tis tool provided a quick way to mold and shape organic charac- ters without having to jump out to [Pixologic] ZBrush or [Autodesk] Mudbox,” he adds.