Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/4522
Animation n n n n W hen the short animated film "Live Music" pre- mieres in movie theaters on November 20 with Tri-Star Pictures' fea- ture animation Planet 51, few people in the audiences will know they're seeing a revolu- tion in production: crowd-sourced anima- tion managed via a Facebook application. e five-minute short film about a rock guitar in a musical instrument store that falls in love with a classical violin features the work of 51 animators from 17 countries who created the 98 shots. Guitarist Steve Vai played the lead character Riff; violinist Ann Marie Calhoun played Vanessa. It's the first work from the virtual studio appropri- ately named Mass Animation, founded by Yair Landau, the former vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and president of Sony Pictures Digital. Landau produced and directed the film; Alan Cohen and Alan Freedland wrote the script. "At Sony, I saw where the game world was going online and saw the complexity of what users were creating in the game space," Landau says. "I realized there was a lot of raw t alent out there. Meanwhile, Imageworks was expanding by opening satellite facilities in New Mexico (Albuquerque) and India. I thought, 'If we're connecting with people online, why not put the whole thing online and allow people to connect in?' [Mass Ani- mation] is a way to get people who want to be involved in making a movie involved, regardless of where they live." Landau decided to open his idea to the world via Facebook, with support from In- tel and help from Autodesk, Dell, Reel FX, and Aniboom. He started with a script and characters that would need little translation. "I tied the story design, characters, and conceit to the development of the project," Landau says. "I wanted to tell a music- based story. And, by going with inanimate objects, I had characters that would be 'what you see is what you get in anima- tion.' Like the early Pixar films." Group Performance To design and model the characters, Lan- dau worked with Reel FX and Gentle Giant; Reel FX rigged the characters and provided animation tests. Mass Animation designed and created the Facebook appli- cation with help from Noise and other user interface designers, and from Aniboom, which provided the technology infrastruc- ture and technical support. With all that in place, Landau could solicit and collect animated performances for the characters from Facebook friends. Anyone could pick any shot or shots to animate from the 107 posted online. When someone downloaded a story reel, they re- ceived fully modeled and rigged 3D assets, the environment, an animation test—walk cycles that showed the style of animation Landau wanted—and the PLE version of Autodesk's Maya. e animators in return submitted playblasts. "It was like, 'Here's a shot, here are the boards, here are the assets, now you in- terpret,'" Landau says. "ey would block out the animation and the camera, per- form the characters, and shoot the scene." All told, 124 people submitted shots. Ap- proximately 40 percent of those anima- tors have work in the film, which Landau pared down to 98 shots. "Initially, we limited people to 20 shots, and then we expanded it to 25," Landau says. "One person, an animator from Sao Paulo [Brazil], had 10 shots in the final." Each week, people commented and voted on their favorites, and the weekly winners received a Dell computer. A jury of anima- tors, animation directors, and Landau chose the performances that appear in "Live Mu- sic." All told, 58,000 people from 101 coun- tries participated in the process. e animators who made it into "Live Music" range in age from a 14-year-old boy in San Antonio, Texas, to a 48-year-old wom- an in Bogota, Colombia. Some had worked with the software before, others hadn't. "I'd say of the 51 [animators whose work appears in the project], a dozen were experienced and a dozen had never done any animation," Landau says. "ere were a lot of students and recent graduates. We had Ash Brannon [Surf 's Up director], Jay Redd [Monster House VFX supervisor], and November 2009 31