Ok so the first trailer wasn’t working – the re-cut frames it as a tech demo. I wrote a tune for it, too!

Edit: Oh, and the name! ‘The Decline’. Thoughts?

The Decline Trailer from Polygon Fiction on Vimeo.

So, we finished a version of the goddamn trailer. We have been working tirelessly towards this point since before Christmas – it is truly amazing how easy it is to under-estimate how long it takes to make content like this.

Every time we have finished a new iteration of the visual design we have sat back, boots on desk saying, “I think we’ve nailed it.” The likelihood of this being true became increasingly tenuous through every new approach, and by this, the bizillionth version, Wilson and I are more skeptical than ever that it won’t change again.

A good measure of whether it will need to change again can be derived from the plausibility of the getting the content done to this quality, given the time. On these terms I am hopeful, as rather than a major ramp up in ambitiousness – as our iterations have so often been – this is a significant step down on work load.

Importantly, I don’t think it looks like one. The motion graphics approach can be a stark and striking one, a style that is uniquely well suited to Web, I think, with a visual history of Flash-based layering and small windows that demand simple, low frequency detail.

The original trailer approach, here, is a good comparison for the fidelity/workload dichotomy. That video took roughly twenty four hours to render at the sub-DV res of 400×300, and would’ve taken more than three straight days to get through the full 1:45 minutes of animation we’d built. Waiting for such cumbersome render times tears apart the agility that virtual camera work should afford. We were unable to test unusual angles and lighting because we didn’t have time to let the frames play out – if there’s a problem, then that’s another twenty plus you’re waiting before you can even post process, let alone edit.

And after all the that? The results are un-malleable, muddy and difficult to touch in post.

On this, the other side of the fence – we can mainly fake animation in seconds, devote a much greater consideration to lighting and composition, and render our animated sections at full 720p HD in less than an hour.

It has been an interesting week, and though I become more aware of never saying never, I am more confident than ever that we’ve found an approach that can actually get our series made.

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The motion graphics discovery came at a cost. Like I found with The Monad – for the novice, everything technical becomes a piece of grimy sugarglass through which one can vaguely discern the original concept – only the barest bones of one’s intention on paper make it though to the end result. It is rare, and not necessarily desired that a piece comes out as intended in creative work but with this trailer, as with The Monad, the end result feels like a bad translation rather than a gripping re-imagining.

A narrative element underpinned our plan for this tech demo. Ultimately, this aspect suffered to the point of comic absurdity. I recommend that you watch this new iteration with the sound off. The filtration process that gave way to this result might be the subject for another post – there are surely lessons to be learned from the on-the-fly decisions that decimated the story aspect here.

Comp issues, bad mix, over-correction and all, here is the new version.

February Trailer from Sam Goldwater on Vimeo.

Finding a look and a level of detail for which the five of us can quickly produce content has been a battleground of taste and capability ever since we started.  The trailer for this (hopefully) final version will be done in the next couple of days. 

New render test: Magic Bullet Looks and AE. 

02:44: The environment for the trailer’s new version is rendering on three of the office machines. As each frame slowly builds, the virtual camera follows the space where the character will eventually be. He will be rendered separately once his clothes are stitched.

This is an untouched render so the the colours are flat and the hues are off, but it does superficially demonstrate the new texturing method we’re using: photographic diffuse maps, smart blurred and overlayed with a high contrast black and white detail layer.

We are scraping our way toward artificially attaining the painted look Studio 4c and Mimoru Oshii have dozens of master craftsmen to draft by hand. 

The lighting between these two images doesn’t do the shift in aesthetic a great deal of justice, but I found an example of work we were doing back in November. Below is the straight laced photo-realism attempt. This approach gave us problems later, when it came to our character design. Realistic backgrounds want realistic characters, and although our facial animation is getting stronger, its nowhere near photo-real.