TITLE: Still Life
NAME: Jeffrey D. Shaffer
COUNTRY: Japan
EMAIL: oyume@gold.ocn.ne.jp
WEBPAGE: http://www.pitt.edu/~oyume
TOPIC: Life
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: slife.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Cinema 4D GO

TOOLS USED: 

    VIDEO:      1) sPatch (banana & curtain)
              2) Digital Camera for picture of banana skin
                3) PhotoStudio 1.5 (edit banana texture & final 
            pencil image)
                4) ImageMagick (TGA sequence to PPM sequence)

    AUDIO:           1) Honer G3 "Steinberger Licensed" guitar
              2) Zoom 505 Guitar Effects Processor
         3) Kenwood Portable MD recorder
              4) Goldwave (editing audio clips)
                5) Quicktime 3 (convert MOV audio track to WAV)
                6) WAV2MP (convert WAV to MPG audio track)

    EDITING:         1) Premiere 4.2 (fades, splicing, audio mixing, TGA
             sequence, and MOV audio)
                2) MPLEX (Join audio and video tracks)




CREATION TIME: 
    3 months -- (2=design, 1=animation)
RENDER TIME: 17.5 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    (a) Intel Pentium 233MMX with 32MB RAM
                (b) Intel Celeron 500 with 64 MB RAM


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     A still life that refuses to stay still.



VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   
     Double size is nice if you sit back just a little.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      The banana and the curtain were created in sPatch, then converted
   to DXFs. Then I loaded them into Cinema 4D. The apple was taken from
   a Cinema 4D tutorial, the orange is a randomized sphere (to give it
   a NON-perfect look), and the bottle is a lathe spline. Oh yeah, the
   figure is standard object in Cinema 4D -- an IK-ready figure... I 
   just used his upper half for the shadow.
      Cinema 4D GO doesn't let you change lighting or textures or turn
   objects on and off during an animation. So, I made everything as 
   seperate SCENE files. I have 9 different files. So I edited them all 
   together using Adobe Premiere (but a bit older version.) That way I 
   could make things appear and disappear and get fades.
      In just a few instances I used Premiere to change the timing of a
   scene, where I thought it was too fast or too slow, but I tried not 
   to rely on that. But the one thing that REALLY helped in the render 
   time, was when there's a STILL shot, a scene where nothing moves, I 
   just made one still and had Premiere hold that frame for the 
   time-length I needed. That helped a lot for time and ease!
      All of the action is key-framed, but not too well. This is my 1st
   animation with C4D, and I've only owned the software for 1 month. 
   Since everything you see here was completed in a month it probably
   shows!
      Final production involved putting all my scenes together and
   making a poster. I also had to record the music and sound effects. 
   Then I saved the whole thing from Premiere as a TGA sequence (video) 
   and an uncompressed MOV file (audio). I converted the TGAs to PPMs, 
   and ran them through CMPEG. I opened the MOV audio file in Quicktime 
   3 and converted it to an uncompressed WAV. Then I ran the WAV
   through WAV2MP. Lastly I joined the audio and video files using 
   MPLEX. If you want more details, please ask.


PS -- Sorry there's no source -- it totals about 6MB zipped.

PPS -- *sigh* I can't get my movie to upload with the sound added, so
       alas, here's a saddened version of my work... :'(

