Final Frontier
Final Frontier is the my last film created at RIT! It's about funerals... IN SPAAAACE.
Film Festival Appearances
Ridgefield International Film Festival
Rhode Island Comic Con Film Festival
Production Timeline
February 2014: Vague Pitch
You can find the pitch here.
This is me formalizing a scattering of ideas for the film. I had a pretty comfortable jumping off point. I wanted to flex my 3D muscle, but I wanted to blend in 2D elements. I was also really into doing a sci-fi film; something about feeling small in the vastness of space, extreme distance between people, and the awesomeness of space. I think I felt that a lot, about to graduate from college: about to embark on something huge and vast, with no real clue where I would really end up.
Oh, and I really, REALLY wanted to incorporate otters somehow. Didn't happen. Dammit, this film is a failure.
April 2014: Official Proposal
You can find the proposal here.
It's certainly worth mentioning that, before any of this, I selected a faculty adviser to guide me through this process. I got lucky with Pete Murphey; our weekly meetings were instrumental to this film. He tells it like it is.
Anyway, he, myself, and this document went into a small room with some faculty that would decide if I could actually make this thing. It passed, yay!
Getting to this point - the biggest hurdle was developing figments of ideas into an actual story - involved a lot of "throwing up", just writing and drawing stuff, oftentimes forcing it out. Usually I typed in a basic text editor - like Sublime Text - and wouldn't stop until I had "x" ideas. It was a nice process, I got to be active, instead of "waiting for inspiration to strike".
Some of these ideas involved dinosaurs, Boy Scouts in space, a Flash Gordon-type desperate for love.... and most of these ideas were shown to Pete, and most of them didn't really light a spark for either of us. But a sketch of an astronaut with a shovel, a lunar rover, and a gravestone on the moon got a reaction. He liked it, which was great because that idea really got my imagination going (people have been sending ashes to space for years! This company just started up, but they're not the first: Elysium Space). So then I poured buckets of sweat, drafts, and brainstorm sessions on the idea until it became the draft in the pitch. And it's still so far from the story I would actually produce.
September 2014: Story Development/Design
A lot of time passed since April! Most of that was Summer and an internship. But after some distance, I was able to see my film with fresh eyes, and try to mold it into something I can actually make. The last draft felt way too big for a film of this size.
So while that was going, I was sketching! Here are some I dug up:
October 2014: Animatic
Doesn't look too fancy! But the story is now about 70% there; most of the big beats were figured out, and I made some important changes to streamline things. The story is now all from astronaut's (whose name is now Jim, by the way) perspective, cutting out all the stuff on Earth. I also introduced these YouTube/Facebook/Internet 2.0-like "ratings" for each funeral, and I settled on the ending (coffin explodes --> "OH DANG!!! --> "Okay, that was actually a pretty cool way to go" --> first actual, genuine reaction from everyone on Earth).
The climax, though, wasn't working. I needed something to spur a big conflict between the robot and Jim . And it didn't really make sense to anyone. The kid on the screen is really attached to the deceased guy (his grandpa, although it's never stated), and Jim notices the boy is clutching this rocket ship toy. Jim then notices the grandpa has the same rocket toy in his coffin, and opens the coffin to show it to the kid. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense... the kid probably already knew about it, opening coffins when you're not supposed to isn't very kosher, and it focuses a lot on this prop (the toy) instead of the characters. And, on top of this, there are other issues with clarity - people not understanding who these characters are, and what they're doing. Some of which has to do with the sketchiness of the drawings, but most of which has to do with my storytelling. So, lots of work to do! But I also knew enough to start building props and stuff.
And hey... animatics are cool! You can show them to people, and it's mostly a movie, so you get good feedback! Wish I made this sooner.
November 2014: Visual Development
A lot of things were happening here - finalizing designs, finalizing story - but I'll highlight some technical design I was starting. I made a rough 3D model and animated it in an evening, and I added a 2D face. All rough, but the point was to focus on what I could do in After Effects to get a style I want.
From Maya, I exported my film in a bunch of different ways, using render layers. There's a version I rendered out that's just shadows, one that's just ambient occlusion, one that just renders depth, and more... these tests are showing various configurations of these layers, and were shown to people to see what they like.
I decided to not make the 2D and 3D elements look similar to each other, and instead tried to emphasize their differences. So make the 2D look very 2D (sketchy, textured, organic), and the 3D look very 3D (emphasize polygons, computery "perfect" shading, leave the textures to the 2D stuff) . This became the big manifesto behind the film's style.
January 2015: Modeling/Rigging Complete
This is the big focus of the holiday break! And this is a picture I had laying around of some work in progress stuff - including a logo that didn't make it into the film. Poor robot wasn't colored yet...
Shut up Jim, your face is complicated
And here we have a glimpse of Jim's temporary head! The idea is that I would model and roughly animate this, and later, use it as reference to re-draw a 2D head over it.
And then I decided that was too much work, and having no head was cooler.
February 2015: 3D AnimatiC
New animatic! In... 3D! With most of the 3D assets in (we're missing craters and a robot arm used in a couple shots).
And, yet again, that darn climax was giving me trouble! Tension doesn't build enough. And what's up with the robot's grey noodle arm slapping around Jim? Didn't work for the audience, didn't work for me... it needed more.
Going forward, there would be a lot of animation (most of the shots were ready to animate!), creating the robot arm, creating flames for the robot's rockets, figuring out background, working with Ed Foose who was doing all the sound... oh, darn, that sure was a lot of work. That was how I spent March and April. 90% of my work, though, was the animation. Bye-bye, Spring Break.
Oh, and the coffin is for a kid now. Turns out, deceased kids get audience reactions.
May 2015: Compositing
I made fire! Thanks After Effects, and your particle systems!
And my roommate Sam Root made me awesome watercolor space backgrounds!
And Ed was chugging away at some cool sound!
At this point, the 3D/2D animation was done, and it time to put it all together. Here's all of the render layers for one section of the film, from Maya. (I added a checkerboard behind some of them for you too see easier)
I had to render out the film several different times, to get all the information I’d need for my final composite.
From left to right:
Row 1: Color, Ambient Occlusion, Depth, Reflections
Row 2: Shadows from ambient light, ambient light, light from robot's antenna, light from robot screen's glow
Row 3: Light from laser, light from rockets, masks for rockets, dots to track rocket flames
Row 4: Mask for Jim's globe, mask for all screens, shapes to help track the screens
All of that got mashed together to make the final render!
Bonus Fact
For some time, I used a placeholder image on the robot's video screen. Hi lemurs!