A retrospective of the year:

The Feedback project was a great learning experience for everyone involved. For the professionals involved it was a great opportunity to try out some long-form animation techniques and test whether we could design a production pipeline to produce quality animation in an economical fashion. The students had the opportunity of working in a production pipeline while learning 3D animation, and walking away with a killer showreel piece and some invaluable experience.

The first five months were spent developing the screenplay and design of the scene. During this period we held a two-hour weekly meeting to assess progress and discuss the road forward. This pre-production period put us on a good footing to take on the 3D production. By the time we settled behind the computers we had a screenplay for the scene, drawings of all of the characters, a look for the environment and a complete storyboard.

The 3D production began in August. Production time was increased to three full days per week. On the 7th of August, Andrew Buckland and Lionel Newton performed Feedback for an excited audience at the Wits Theatre in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. This provided great inspiration for the students and helped to solidify their understanding of the characters and the story. We captured motion data from Andrew Buckland while he was in Jo’burg and this provided the basis for motion-capture pipeline testing. Unfortunately, at the time of Andrew’s visit we had not yet fully mastered our digital characters or the motion-capture equipment, and so could not use any of this data in the final animation.

Moving into 3D production proved to be quite challenging. The students were still coming to grips with their toolset and the conceptual side of animation. It was quite difficult to visualize how the many, involved 3D preparation tasks would finally amount to finished frames of animation.

We spent a long time working on the digital puppets. We completed four digital puppets, Myrth, Byrth, Detective Deadly Serious and the fish. The human characters were rigged for motion-capture, using basic forward kinetics (FK) skeletons adapted from original designs by Judd Simantov, and for lip sync, using a library of blend shapes created by Carlos Amato. Only the fish had a control-based skeleton, created by Nic Archer.

Getting the characters to behave well with the motion-capture data took quite a lot of trial and error. At some points we even went back and reconstructed some of the meshes to improve deformations. We encountered problems when we altered the skeletons in any way. Even re-orienting a joint confused any previous motion-capture data captured on the character. The workaround involved mapping the data between characters in MotionBuilder, and while relatively easy, it is an unnecessary step in the pipeline.

It took us just over four months to have all of our production assets ready and the systems in place to capture motion data. The University broke for Christmas and we reconvened in January 2004. With all our assets completed the pace of production increased exponentially. It was very rewarding for the students to finally see their labours coming to fruition. The students each handled a set of shots, except for Carlos Amato, who focused entirely on lip sync. They were responsible for the animation (in some cases also performing in the motion capture rig), lip sync and camera elements of their shots. Phil Boltt handled the lighting, rendering and compositing. We ran out of production time at the end of January, at which point the students switched their focus from production to report writing. We had completed just over 40 shots at this point, with another 20 or so in the pipeline. Phil Boltt completed the remaining shots during February, with the entire animation completed by the end of the month.

Remaining audio post-production was completed during March and the final “Riverbank Scene” premiered on the 27th of March 2004 to an ecstatic audience at the Wits Digital Arts seminar room.