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The Adventures of Zak and Dakota is a cancer education
animation for young children. This animation is created in
collaboration with the IdeaLaboratory at Purdue University and
The Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. This
joint effort is in support of the work of, and at the behest
of, the Children's Hospital of Boston. It will be used in
their Family Services Library for educational presentations
given at schools and libraries. The animation will also be
available to families on a loan basis.
The intention of
the animation is to teach children what cancer is and what it
is not. It is important to teach these concepts because
children may have no prior education of this subject. This
video is intended to help children who have cancer, whose
friends, classmates, or family members may also have cancer.
This animation seeks to teach children about the general form
of cancer. Having information about an illness, such as
cancer, can make living with it much easier. Some examples
where this holds true are when Zak and Dakota learn that
cancer is not contagious, what chemotherapy is, and that
children cannot cause other people to have it through poor
behavior.
This project is still underway and should be
completed by December of 2009.
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| Q: What is your role on the project? |
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My role on the project is
as director. In addition to directing, my assignments
include script writer, concept artist, and general production
artist for any leftover production and post-production
aspects. Seeing the project through, from start to finish over the past three years, has been the biggest unlabeled task.
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| Q: How many artists are working on the project? |
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It's hard to total that number. The
project is born of a curriculum concept at CDIA, known as the
Practicum. The Practicum is the last section of education of
which each student participates. The idea is for students to
gain experience by working on assignments for clients. The
clients have real deadlines for the project to be completed.
The students graduate CDIA with experience having worked for a
client.
The client selection is an important
aspect as the CDIA Practicum program and its
intention is to create strong digital media for socially
conscious organizations who could not otherwise afford
high-quality material. With that said, approximately
70 students and 7 faculty members have worked on
this animation to date.
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| Q. What was the outline of this
specific project? |
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The requirement of the animation is to
educate children upon matters regarding cancer. Chiefly, we
are interested in educating children on the facts of cancer
while preemptively dispelling any false notions they may form.
For our client's need, this animation is unique because it
seeks to educate on the general form of cancer without
applying itself to any specific form, such as brain, skin, or
blood cancer. The animation has an approximate running time of
10 minutes and is subsequently subdivided into chapters. Each
chapter relates to a specific educational requirement as
requested by the client.
Educational topics include meeting the various
caretakers involved during treatment, how cancer affects
the body, and certain treatments including chemotherapy. The
intended audience is young children who either have cancer
or know someone with cancer. This may include family members,
classmates, friends, or neighbors.
Our client
for the project is the Children's Hospital of Boston, specifically
the Family Services Library on the oncology floor. CDIA was
approached in 2006 by Summer Menefee, of the Children's
Hospital, asking about the possibility of creating this
animation. It is the intention of the Family Services Library
to loan the animation out to families on request. In
addition, the Children's Hospital visits local schools
to give cancer education presentations. Our client will use
this animation for that purpose as well.
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| Q: Could you supply a bit of
background on how and when the project was started?
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To be more specific, the animation
was brought to the attention of the 3D Animation faculty at
CDIA and proposed as a possible practicum assignment for the
students. At the time, and since this project, the school was
focused on creating compact and manageable projects no longer
than 30 seconds in runtime. Keeping in mind that the practicum
project begins, from scratch, and ends, in a client
deliverable, in four weeks time – creating hi-quality
animations with an all-student staff that run around 30
seconds is a sizable endeavor for a well-trained production
manager or faculty instructor. What the Children's Hospital
project required was approximately 7 – 10 minutes of
hi-quality production.
At first we all balked. Clearly
and rightfully so, to complete this project in four weeks was
an impossible task. Discussions continued. The campus director
saw great promise in this animation and encouraged us to find
ways to rethink our assumptions of production practices and
methods.
Not one to turn down impossible
challenges, I accepted. In order to complete the
animation, certain assumptions had to be altered, our assumptions on the
practicum timeline and our assumptions about workflow
pipelines. Two main changes were agreed upon immediately:
1. The animation would be split into chapters wherein
each class would work on a small number of chapters to
complete as their practicum project. This then would
necessitate the production cycle spanning multiple practicum
cycles.
2. Creating three chapters with the
first class (consisting of 20 students) inside of four
weeks, totaling roughly three minutes of animation with no previous asset
library, character rigs, models, or animations, would require
a parallel production pipeline with rigging being the
beginning lynchpin unlocking the rest of the production. Once
character rigs were created, we could then animate and model
the characters in parallel.
With these two new checks
in place, we presented our abilities to the Children's
Hospital and informed them that the work delivered will be of
hi-quality but that the timeline will be a slower one.
Preproduction was generated in a month or two and also as
needed during production. I wrote a script and worked with
Summer on finalizing the learning points, facts, and general
tone of the story. The second round of character concepts was
quickly approved. The character names switched from 'Socks and
Beauchamp' to 'Zak and Dakota.'
All parties agreed on design, concept. and delivery schedule.
So it began. Production started in April of 2006.
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| Q: Why did you choose Fusion to accomplish the shots? |
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The
choice of compositers was made
by, my then, boss and Fusion mentor, Mark Thompson. Mark was
the Director of the 3D Animation Department at CDIA. Due
to the enormity of the project, Mark and I met to discuss
the feasibility of executing and completing this production.
We discussed the need to have all teams (modeling, animating,
texturing, environments, and rigging) working simultaneously
to complete the animation in four weeks. He suggested the
parallel modeling and animation pipeline.
We also
discussed
the requirement to
quickly, and easily, create certain illustrative, visual
effects. This could be achieved at 3D
render time but this was decided to be too complex to research
and effectively use inside of four weeks. Mark suggested compositing
in Fusion using two plug-in packages: Krokodove and
SpeedSix Monsters. We would not be able to
complete the animation, with its distinctive visuals, without these tools.
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| Q: Can you approximate the amount
of shots that you completed for the project? |
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We have approximately 32 distinct
shots, ranging in duration from 2 seconds to almost a
minute and a half. The shorter shots deal chiefly with the
pages turning.
The caretaker chapter holds
many shots because of the seven different caretakers involved in the treatment process.
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| Q: Can you describe the visual
style of the animation? Why did you choose it? Why did you choose to create an animated storybook? |
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Because our audience will be children
and our client wants a learning mechanism, I wanted to create
something familiar, inviting, entertaining, and educational.
With this, I wanted to create an animated storybook. I wanted
more than just images dancing across book pages. I wanted to
create something dynamic.
With that in mind, the animation is styled with a strong
sense of foreground versus background. The main characters populate
the foreground and the environments fill the background.
The main goal of the backgrounds is to stay constantly
in motion so that people naturally keep watching the
animation, without making the animation so lively as to
overpower the foreground characters or detract from
the storytelling. To this end, if you look
closely at each chapter, there are multiple things happening in
the backgrounds: sun rays rotate counter-clockwise, logs float
down rivers, leaves blow through trees, the North Pole marker
spins in place.
It’s been a blast figuring out
different ways to keep the backgrounds subtly alive. Each
chapter has a new background. We want each learning section
to be visually imprinted with a different environment. This
visually segments each learning concept. It also keeps the
animation constantly updated so children won’t become bored by watching the same background for 10 minutes.
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| Q: Can you describe the rendering pipeline? |
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The rendering for
the final project has two main
passes: foreground and background. The background rendering process
has three independent passes, while the foreground
has two independent render passes. Afterward, both foreground
and background are joined to create the final
animation. Both FG and BG are rendered in Maya (1st
pass) and then in Fusion (2nd pass). The second render pass is
where both FG and BG receive their artistic style treatment. This
is the step where Krokodove and SpeedSix Monsters
are used. It’s the magic-making step. The BG then
goes back through Maya (3rd pass) a second time where the Fusion
renders are applied to book geometry. Normally, using a
compositor would be the choice to modify the 2nd pass renders
to create book-page distortions. Due to the fact
that the page must turn from one BG to a different BG,
we use 3D book geometry to create the page turns
between chapters. Once rendered in Maya, the 3rd pass is
brought back into Fusion where both FG and BG elements are
combined with any FG effects as needed. The final
movie is ready to render.
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| Q: What are some of the
biggest challenges you face on this project? How do you
overcome them and how does Fusion fit into the
solution? |
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Fusion makes
the artistic, illustrative visual style
possible. Approximately 95 percent of the visual elements are modified by
Fusion to create the artistic look of the final animation.
Those visual elements are rendered in Maya and then treated in Fusion to achieve the desired look.
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| Q: What is the most rewarding shot using Fusion? |
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This is a tough question. I have numerous choices for this
distinguished honor. The first one that comes to mind is the zoom-in on
the magnifying glass. The glass in the magnifying glass
was created entirely in Fusion including the highlights,
blue tint, and refractive distortion. The render from Maya is
of an empty magnifying glass.
The spaceship scene has a fun and colorful
atmosphere that is enhanced by the flux capacitor, the coffee
maker, various astronomical objects, random buttons that light
up, the jet wash, and the teleporting.
And the page turns. This animation would lose half of its visual appeal without the page turns between chapters.
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| Q: What are some of your favourite tools in Fusion and how do they help in production? |
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Favorite tools? Not too sure I have
any one favorite Fusion tool. I do know my favorite aspect of
Fusion is its ease of use. It’s easy to use and easy to
understand. I can create complex effects fast, ridiculously
fast.
Using Fusion, I created the teleporter, magnifying
glass, and page turn depth coloration. Fusion's
color correction, per channel operations, and particle
effects tools were heavily used. Krokodove and SpeedSix
plugins were used to create the artistic look of
the animation.
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| Q: It is a very inspiring project.
And a hard act to follow. What’s next for you Andrew? |
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What’s next? I’ve got one year left
in my master’s program at Purdue. Then, it’s back to the
workforce. I’ll be knocking on the employment doors of various
studios. Hopefully, there’s another project that
needs a director in my future.
The
Children's Hospital of Boston is not being charged for the
work that Andrew and his team are providing. The work is being done to assist
children and their families in understanding
and coping with cancer.
Thank you to Andrew
and his team for bringing The Adventures of Zak and
Dakota to life. We are sure children and their families will
benefit greatly from all your hard work!
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