TITLE: Side Effects

NAME: Markus Altendorff
COUNTRY: Germany

EMAIL: maal-irtc20030115@anthrosphinx.de
WEBPAGE: 

TOPIC: Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: maal_sfx.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Maxon Cinema 4D 9.603 Studio Bundle


TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Photoshop, Apple Final Cut Pro HD


CREATION TIME: 
    Two weeks


HARDWARE USED: 
    Macintosh G5 2000 Dual (Editing), Mac Mini (Render)


ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

Made-up technology aboard a surveillance craft orbiting earth.

*** CONTENT WARNING ***
Dressing of characters may be considered inadequate 
depending on your cultural background. You have been warned.


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 


Any MPEG player should do (tested with Windows Media Player, ATI Player,
Quicktime Mac 9/X), including VideoLANclient and MPlayer 2

Side note for Quicktime Player: At least on my machines, the video is
much darker than with any other player i've tried. May be some gamma
table effect or whatever.

Play it twice. 1. Read the dialogue to get the story. 2. Look at the
video. Sorry for the lots of text, but there's a limit to what story you
can tell with gestures alone...

General recommendation: Make sure to set up the brightness right. By the
way, regarding one comment "it's the artist's job to balance the
lighting" - yes, i try. Really. But it's your job to balance your
screen. The videos look just fine on mine...



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


+ Credits / External sources: 
-----------------------------

Textures of planet earth: NASA Blue Marble Project
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ "These images are freely available to
educators, scientists, museums, and the public. NASA images are
generally not copyrighted." (NASA Website).

Of course, the three-rings gimbal is a parody of the (IMO utterly goofy)
spaceship drive that appeared in the movie "Event Horizon".

The "Lazifyer" idea bears some obvious similarity to the SEP (Somebody Elses
Problem) generator by the late Douglas Adams. It's hard to make fun of SciFi
without tripping over one of his ideas... though the point i wanted to make
was totally different from his.

+ Alterations to raw renderings: 
--------------------------------

- Subtitles added in Final Cut Pro - Fade-over between scenes added in
Final Cut Pro. Ditto for freeze-frame effect and descriptions.

No further enhancements or compositings werde made.

+ Things i hate about it: 
-------------------------

- Cop-out of lipsyncing for the last part by placing the camera farther away.

- No lipsync when A. and L. are standing near the machine.

- Changed the storyline due to time constraints.

- Little improvement of the overall look of the characters since 2005. 

- Started far too late with this project, 
so it seriously lacks serious polishing. Walk cycles are rather crude (though
i'd like to point out i didn't use any references for it - trial-and-error is 
half the fun of after-hours dabbling)

+ Things i love about it: 
-------------------------

- The not-so-subtle message :)

- Finally, automated secondary motions to some aspects of the character models

- A chance to dump a whole archive of 3D objects into one scene

- Big improvements on the interal rigging of the characters

+ Some tech talk: 
-----------------

- I am very impressed with the Release 9.6 of Cinema 4D. 
Yes, i did write the same thing in 2005 about 9.1 :)

- Both characters had their hip bone removed and replaced upside down.
I.e. the central handling point is no longer at crotch height (half-height 
point according to classical body proportions), but at about navel height. 
From there, legs rigging works downward, arms and upper body rigging works 
upward. Advantage: Hip motions no longer require compensation by chest motions.
Walking cycles are easier.

- The "3D handheld projector" during the main titles is based on a two-pass
approach, with a visible light source and camera with equal viewing angle
combined. First, the floating display (and nothing else) is rendered from the
point of view of the light source. The resulting movie is placed as an alpha
mask onto the light source with volumetric lighting.

