Project Forlorn

So I've been doing my fair share of travelling these last few weeks, and while on said travels I've been thinking a lot about the project.  A quick recap of what's happened first.  This time last year Forlorn was a considerably bigger endeavor, with a half dozen characters and multiple sets.  Seeing the task laid out ahead of me, I realized it would be too much and shelved it for a few months.  But after getting some things in order I decided to take what I had made, put together a couple more things, and make a quick showcase of the idea that, while not the full version, represented the tone I wanted to go for, and it would just be something nice for my reel.  By the end of that minute long short, I decided I didn't want to stop there anymore, and ramped the short back up.  The scale, however, would still be truncated.  But as I began to work on what was Episode I, a concern washed over me.  My original story was solid, full of set ups and pay offs and had a larger san

To quote that magician from Frosty the Snowman, "Busy busy busy".  That's right, it's the winter season, and being as such I've grown increasingly busy with many things, including this project.  But fret not, for over the holiday weekend I made great strides.  Episode I is now completely prepped and ready to go.  All props are modeled and textured and rigged, and animation has officially begun.  Feast your eyes on this plain and innocuous still frame of an in progress shot! I imagine I'll be able to finish this shot before Christmas.  I'm hoping to make a lot of forward momentum during the holiday break, I might be able to put a serious dent in this episode by the beginning of 2020.

This week I did some more revisions to the hair.  The look of Kaelis was another one of those things that kinda came to me suddenly.  I wanted the character to have short hair, for several reasons.  One was that the personality of the character I had in mind wouldn't want to deal with long hair, and the other is that a character with a helmet shouldn't have long hair for practicality purposes.  If a character were to take off their helmet only to have long, silky smooth hair underneath, it would be difficult to make it seem sensible without it being overly comical. This was another concept piece drawn by my soon to be wife.  It was one of several quick sketches, but this one captured what I envisioned perfectly.  With the costume and face locked in, we worked on a few more colored sketches together to lock in the specifics.  The design of her face was a combination of features from various Mexican athletes. I also decided to go with red as her primary color scheme.  T

After working on the face rig for the past few weeks, I've gotten less and less pleased with the way I did the main characters hair.  One of my art directions for this series is that there is no fur or hair, and all of it is modeled.  The fur on the angel's cape, for instance, is all textured in.  For Kaelis's hair, my original idea was to model it all as one solid piece, in sort of a clay model kinda style.  I wanted to avoid anime hair or anything like that.  So I made the character's hair when I modeled her, but since she's wearing a helmet in the first 2 episodes I shelved it until now.  Technically I still have another episode to make where she's still got her helmet, but I felt compelled to figure it out now. Looking at the hair in unreal, I found it to be just sorta okay.  It was acceptable for the style when lit and rendered, but it lacked a certain something.  And if I was thinking that, then normal people will probably look upon it with disgust and i

I'm quite thankful I had some time this week to sit down and hammer out the layout for Episode I.  I have daylight savings time to thank for that.  These last few weeks have been a whirlwind of personal events, and in a good way.  Wrap parties, meeting old friends, helping out on old projects, exciting new work, the list goes on. Oh, and I got engaged!  That's very exciting, if I do say so myself. The layout for the first episode wasn't too much trouble.  What will be interesting is how it will come together with animation.  A lot of the angles and the timing of the scene overall will come down a lot to how the animation turns out.  Normally I'd rough in the animation, if it were a normal professional project, but since it's just me I can block in the camera to have something to animate to and call it a day.  So the good news is I'm now at the animation stage once again.  I plan on making 2 small props and some stuff first, but I don't anticipate that ta

Did some animation tests on the face this week.  So far I'm happy with the results.  There are a few minor updates I need to make to some of her skin materials in unreal, but that's the biggest thing I saw at the time.  I won't really know for sure how it's working until I get into the thick of it, and maybe coming back to it in a few months I'll see more problems, but it's in a place right now where I can set it aside and work on the layout for Part I. I still anticipate Part I to be an easier task than the current released episode or any of the following.  The set is built and ready to go, all I need to do aside from animation is build a couple of simple props and rig a couple of set pieces.  I'm hoping it's just a simple and straight forward process. I made some aggressively terrible boards just to block in the major ideas and to make sure all of the angles and shots I had in my head would flow together well.  I made these boards during a lunch

Facial rigging continues mostly smoothly.  I've had to a lot of facial rigging for professional jobs in the past, and it's never been one of my favorite things, mostly due to the complexity of facial shapes and linking them together.  I finished the first round of blend shapes for Kaelis and created a control panel to run them.  It's not much to look at, but the best part of working on a project alone is nothing has to make sense to anyone but yourself.  I ran through hours of testing and tweaking to ensure that all of the shapes work in conjunction with one another. I plan on doing a proper facial animation test in the coming weeks.  I have an old animation I can use for the body animation, so that saves me some time there.  The facial animation aspect of the project won't come into play in earnest until Part III, so once I do the test and determine nothing is broken I'll set aside this aspect until a later date.  I imagine I'll continually add to and tweak

Now that the first episode is out, it's time to go back to the rigging stage and give the main character her facial controls.  That is so far presenting a whole slew of challenges.  Pro tip - Unreal does not care for weight painted blend shapes, so make sure each shape is self contained.  In the mean time, why not divulge some information about her origins. Forlorn's main character's name is Kaelis. She's a character I sorta had in concept for a long time, though, like many of my ideas, it existed in a wishy-washy, ethereal state.  It wasn't until I decided to make Forlorn that her design and character finally materialized.  Her look is one of those things that sorta came to me all at once.  I don't remember ever having any kind of iterations with her design.  Once I knew the story her costume just kinda popped into my head.  I love it when that sort of thing happens, it saves me a lot of trouble.  This crappy scribble is the first thing I put down on paper:

It's only been a few days since the release of the first episode of Forlorn but the response I've received is more positive than anything I could have anticipated.  It's incredibly relieving to hear that people enjoyed the short and are interested in seeing more.  Thank you everyone for your kind words!  It truly means a lot to me that you enjoyed my little experiment, and I can't wait to show you what I have coming up! The most exciting reaction to the release was also the most unexpected.  It turns out I was featured in this weeks official Unreal Engine showcase! Not only was it featured, but it was also the thumbnail!  I found out by scrolling through the new videos tab on Youtube, only to find a familiar image staring back at me.  It was one of those wave-like reactions, where I thought "Yep, there's my video... wait, I didn't post on youtube... wait, what?"  I'm so incredibly grateful to the folks over at Unreal for their support! I&#

It's finally here!  After... what day is it... one year and three months of fairly steady production I have finally finished the first segment of Forlorn!  It's been a long and arduous road, but I'm happy I came out the other side with something, at the very least.  It may not be much, but it's something I've wanted to do for a very long time and I'm going to continue with this project until I feel it's truly complete.  So I present to you, Forlorn - Part II: I truly hope you enjoy it! You may be asking me, "Why are you calling it Part II?  I don't see a Part I."  Well, originally I was going to make a whole short film, but it eventually dawned on me that the scope of the project was well outside of my means without being my full time job.  But I didn't want all of the assets I had made to go to waste, so I stripped down the story significantly and decided to make a section in the middle with more action so I could use it for my r

In the original version of the story, the prize the main character sought was a spear.  In the expanded version, the spear was an artifact used to pierce the tree of life, laying waste to the world around it and creating a horde of monsters with too much life, so to speak.  I thought it would be fun for the object to be a possession of the antagonist.  Eventually that spear would have been stabbed into a big monster and there would have been a big, exciting chase that would take me years to finish.  But in this current, stripped back version that proved to be too much to ask.  Without the time to make a horde of monsters with too much life, so to speak, I had to resort to a more traditional macguffin.  So, what better way to retain that idea then to make the monster the prize?  So I came up with the idea of an embryonic creature trapped in an otherworldly amber, which was held and guarded in a chamber.  I have lore reasons for all of this, but it's a lot to go into and that's b

When I originally envisioned this blog it would kinda be a diary that would coincide with the making of this film.  However, due to many factors this ended up not being the case.  So, here's what this blog will turn into: basically I'll post anything I think of whenever I want and hopefully it'll be interesting. The path of this project didn't really go the way I thought it was going to.  Around the beginning of 2019 I came to the realization that I had no chance in finishing this film in under a decade.  I had been too ambitious, bitten off way more than I could chew, and so I dejectedly shelved the entire thing.  However, my professional career had a tumultuous first half of the year, which involved me leaving one studio for another, only for that studio to get iced due to a certain large studio acquisition, leaving me unemployed for what would be about a month.  In that time I figured why not dust off this project and just turn it into a tech demo for my reel.  I

September 18th, 2018 I have completed my third and final draft of the script.  After having the environment built, I had some new ideas that changed the way the end of the film played out, and for the better.  I decided to scrap the idea of a vehicular chase as it was too hard to set up and felt out of place, and that's also not considering its artistic complexity.  It is now a more intimate but hopefully equally thrilling set piece.  As for scene 3, that came together nicely.  I shifted some things around to create a more cause and effect scene that has greater ramifications for the entire story as opposed to a stand alone scene.  And I decided to cut way back on the dialogue.  Some of it was meant to provide some exposition and context for the state of the world in the story, but the new scene 3 is now able to convey that without any words.  Scene 7 is the only scene with any spoken words, and even then it is lessened to have a greater impact.  All told, I'm quite pleased w

September 15th, 2018 Now that the exterior environment is all roughed in, it's time to work on the interior.  The cathedral has three main rooms - an entrance, a great hall, and a throne room.  The entrance and throne room haven't changed much in my head since their inception, but the main hall has a bit.  After completing a draft of the script, I decided to give it a bit more verticality.  I also did some work to the exterior of the cathedral to make sure everything fits together in a sensible way.  I'm not keen on making some magical space where room sizes don't make sense.  The rooms right now are just some gray cubes in maya, with pillars and doors and stuff to block in how it feels structurally.  I also did a small amount of detailing to the exterior, with buttresses and the like, just to see how they'd fit.  So far everything connects.  My plan now is to shift to characters, but the first room I'll actually create is the entrance room.  It's fair

September 1st, 2018 Having always been interested in writing but never really done much actual work since school, I thought now would be a splendid time to bust out the metaphorical type writer and clickity clack up a real no-foolin' script for this bad boy.  After a month of design and brainstorming, I started officially writing.  To do this I ended up getting a trial to Celtx, which is what I used in college.  I'm quite saddened to see that it's not a program anymore, but more of a service.  Oh well.  While the main pieces of the story are there, I'm still missing a few elements.  The plot consists of seven major scenes, but scene 3 and scene 6 are a little vague in my mind.  There is a lot of "The Hero enters this place and then something exciting happens to get her from point a to point b."  That is the biggest hurdle I need to overcome.  For scene six specifically I hope to have a vehicular chase sequence of some sort.  I also have a bit of dialogue I

August 25th, 2018 Today I'm working on the environmental layout for the film.  The environment is one large connected piece, consisting of a bridge/ stairway, a cathedral type building, and the surrounding city streets.  There's also a big tree in the background.  Attached is my terrible drawing just to get something to  paper.  I can't recall how my ideas for the city came about, it seems like I've always had them.  The city is shaped like a ring, with a lot of high walls and honeycombed streets, and a bit sunken areas in the middle.  In Maya I made a big circle and lined it with big cubes in city grids.  In the center I put in a roughly shaped castle/ cathedral.  I have on my a large number of royalty free buildings which I plan on kit bashing and retexturing to fit my aesthetic, but I place some of those in there as well to fit the scene.  I'm also building the scene to scale, which makes it a little tricky to work with because it's so huge.  Having eve

Early August 2018 So, here's where we get to the normal format.  This blog will function basically as a diary of the making of the movie, complete with dates!  Yay dates!  Unfortunately, in the beginning I didn't do a good job at writing things down so some of the more specific dates from the very beginning are lost at the moment. Speaking of writing things down. Now that the story was figured out the first thing to do was to put ink to paper and design everything.  And I mean everything, from characters to environments to props.  Thankfully for me, as I am doing this project mostly alone at the moment, I can get away with not having to get too specific with my designs.  This project consists of three human characters, one humanoid creature, and two other creatures.  These characters have names, but saying them sounds super dorky, like I'm a sixth grader trying to get you to read their fantasy book, so for the time being I'll just use code names.  The creature fro