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In light of some
recent, not-so-low-budget digital productions, the phrase "shooting
digital" has begun to lose some of its status as the weapon of choice for
the indie revolution. Shooting a $5 million feature on HD 24P is still
considered "shooting digital."
For most people, the allure of
low-end digital formats for narrative filmmaking is simple: it's the cheap
alternative. More often than not, film would be the medium of choice if
better funding were available. But on occasion, digital lives up to its
billing as a truly innovative medium that, in the right hands, can have a
profound effect on filmmaking. Such is the case with "Waking Life," the new
feature-length animated movie from Austin, Texas -based filmmakers Richard
Linklater (writer-director), Tommy Pallotta (producer), Bob Sabiston
(animation director) and their team of animators.
The key element in
"Waking Life" is Sabiston's "interpolated rotoscoping" software, a QuickTime-based
application that runs on the Mac platform. Rotoscoping, which involves the
frame-by-frame tracing over live-action material, has been around for the
better part of a century, but never quite like this. Imagine each frame of
a feature-length movie filtered through Photoshop
by 31 different animators and then strung back together, and you'll start
to get the scope of the project.
Since rotoscoping cannot exist
without source material, Pallotta and Linklater's first order of business
was to shoot and edit a live-action action movie, which they completed in
the summer of 1999. The story, a loose narrative in the vein of "Slacker,"
Linklater's debut feature, follows an unnamed character played by Wiley
Wiggins ("Dazed and Confused") as he encounters a variety of off-beat
personalities. The crew was small (usually fewer than five people), with
Linklater and Pallotta each doing double duty behind the camera. The team
shot over 40 hours of footage on mini-DV with two Sony TRV900s and a Sony
PC-1.
On set, all of the
source material was captured with its eventual metamorphosis in mind. "The
shooting style definitely had everything to do with the animation," says
Pallotta. "It was conceived in order to be used in conjunction with Bob's
software. We also wanted each scene to have a distinctly different style
so that we could give the animators a variety of material to work with.
The animation was actually very integrated into the entire process and
thoroughly planned out."
The live action
footage was cut that fall on Final Cut Pro 1.0 by
long-time Linklater editor Sandra Adair, who had never used the software
before. "It was actually my first completely digital project. I really
didn't know much about the medium or the software, so it was quite a
learning curve for me," recalls Adair. "At the very beginning I was trying
to find a way to convince everybody to cut on Avid, but Tommy was
determined to have me cut it on Final Cut Pro." The system Adair used,
which Pallotta set up himself after consulting with Apple, was a 300 MHz blue
and white G3. For storage, Pallotta hooked up a 400 GB external SCSI Raid
drive in addition to a 300 GB internal IDE unit.
Once the picture
was locked, the project was broken down into 20-minute reels and converted
into QuickTime movies. Since the filmmakers worked with the intention of
eventually scanning onto film, the QuickTime files were rendered back into
Sabiston's animation workstations at 12 fps. (Animation at 12 fps is
standard technique, as it halves the number of frames that need to be
drawn. The finished project runs at 24 fps with duplicate frames.)
By the time "Waking
Life" began its animation phase in February 2000, Sabiston and Pallotta
had already begun to attract some attention with the festival success of
"Roadhead," a short film that utilized an early version of Sabiston's
software. As a result, it wasn't difficult to assemble a solid team of
animators. "Most of our animators came to us by word-of-mouth," recalls
Pallotta. "Thankfully, we know a lot of talented people. They would show
us some artwork, and if we liked them, they were in." The plan from the
beginning was to "cast" one animator with one character from the film,
then let him or her interpret the material without a lot of supervision.
"We matched each person with characters we thought they could work with,"
says Pallotta. "I wish I could tell you it was more
complicated."
Sabiston taught each animator the ins and outs of his
yet-to-be-named software (known affectionately among the team as "Rotoshop"). "My program is fairly easy to use," says
Sabiston. "Its
interface should be familiar to anyone who has worked with computer
graphics." As he describes it, the application is essentially a painting
application -- complete with a pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet -- that
allows the animator to flip back and forth between frames. The key feature
is the interpolation tool. With it, explains Sabiston, "An animator has
the ability to draw a line, skip forward a couple of frames, draw another
line, then tell computer to create the missing frames. It approximates
motion and fills in the gaps."
Once the animated
sequences were complete, the project was broken down into approximately
72,000 individual frames, which were converted into TIFF format. The
material was then sent to technicians at Swiss Effects, the
cutting-edge post facility based in Zurich, who rendered each frame at
projection resolution on HD 24P. Sound mixing was completed after the
conversion. For the initial screening of "Waking Life" at the Sundance
Film Festival in January, the film was transferred from 24P to HD 60I, as
the festival did not have the equipment necessary for 24P
projection.
"When Rick, Bob and I
started the project," says Pallotta, "most of us were at a crossroads in
that we all were re-examining our approach to filmmaking. There is
something very elegant about that. So the basic idea from the very
beginning was to throw away our film background and create a new sort of
cinematic syntax. When your terms are like that, it is very, very
pleasurable. We have had 100% creative control and haven't compromised at
all. Disney or
Pixar can't do projects like
ours because they need to please a huge audience in order to make any
profit at all. We never left Texas."
From
VFXpro
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