Film Completion is For the Birds

In other words... I FINALLY FINISHED MY THESIS FILM!



Destiny is For the Birds from Michael J. Ruocco on Vimeo.

Yeah, I know... it's a little late... 1 year, 4 months and 22 days late, to be exact. But hey, who could blame me? A lot has happened in the last year that needed my attention, while poor ol' thesis-y here sat on the back burner, like a half-baked piece of humble pie. I guess my reasoning was "Hey, it did it's job! It showcased what I could pull off as an animator, I graduated... hell, I even won an award with it! What's the point, then?" . And for a long time, yeah, that was my excuse. Despite some coercive nagging from friends, colleagues, and especially my dear ol' Ma, I stubbornly stood my ground and refused to budge. But over time, I really began to feel guilty about it. This short wasn't a one-man show, a lot of great people helped me get it as far as it did. I mean, just look at the credits!

Josh Tomar  and Chris Zito did some really excellent voice work for the film. Andy Scherman provided wonderful music accompaniment and sang the credits song. My girlfriend Shannon did the color styling and colored every single background (except one, which my friend Cory did the flat colors for). Many wonderful underclassmen, first and second year students, took time out of their busy schedules to help color a lot of these shots for me when I was scrambling for time. Even fellow thesis students gave a hand with coloring shots too, despite their own deadlines they had to meet. Not to mention countless students, teachers, classmates, friends, and family members who gave me a lot of support throughout my final year of school. And I wanted to be a selfish, lazy so-and-so and stow this thing away in a digital trunk to never be seen again. It was unfair to them. So I finally broke out the ol' thesis folder (which I fortunately did not delete), took out the shots that needed to be finished and started finishing them.

But before I go any further with the "finishing the unfinished thesis" part of the story, let me go back and talk about the genesis of the film:

I started thinking of ideas for my thesis back near the end of my third year. The first thing that popped into my head was using these two characters for something, but I held myself back. "No, no, I've drawn these characters a million times before over the past three years... I want to do something different for a change. Something original". So I thought of a bunch of different ideas that I wanted to do. One was animating to a piece of classical music like in Fantasia, another was resurrecting an unfinished film from my second year, and one was just a little too gruesome, even for me... but after every idea, I would always ended up falling back to these characters. Out of desperation, and time, I decided to use them anyway. But what could they do? What should the story be? Would it work? The one good thing I had on my side was that I knew who these characters were completely. They had been cemented in my mind for a long time by that point, and I knew what they could and couldn't do. In a way, I let the characters dictate and tell me what they ought to be doing, rather than forcing something upon them.

At the time, I had just chosen Howard Beckerman as my thesis advisor, because we had a pretty good relationship up to that point (and still do!), and I felt we understood each other on the same level. He came up to me on the last day of class and asked me something:

"So, how do you feel about thesis preparations for next year?" 
"Anxious."
"Good! Good! That's a good sign!"
"Why's that? What's so good about being anxious?"
"That means you're seriously thinking about it! You're nervous and scared because you know this is important, and you care about getting things done and doing a good job on it! If you didn't care, you wouldn't be anxious!" 

Reassured by Howard, I left for the summer and focused on my film. Thinking of the story, throwing around relative gags or lines, laying out shots and boarding, all the while throwing things back and forth with Howard for advice and clarification. In many ways, Howard was the perfect guinea pig for my film. If Howard could understand it and follow the story, then everyone else who'd see it would be able to as well. Howard kept me on the right track.

By the time classes started again, I had everything planned out and was ready to start production. And at exactly the right time, the trailer for the new Winnie the Pooh film just came out on Youtube. It was that final inspirational push that got the creative juices flowing again.

But there was a big hiccup. I originally started animating the film traditionally on paper. But by the time Christmas break came around, I only got a little over a dozen shots completed. One day near the end of the break, I was spending hours on one small shot and not getting anywhere. Then as a test, I animated that shot in Flash in about 20 minutes. I realized at that point that I wouldn't get the film done if I kept animating on paper, so I switched to Flash, only because it was quicker to clean up, color and composite, rather than have to scan every drawing in. So I went back, scrapped everything I did up to that point and started over.

So I only had a couple months to animate, clean up and color my whole film, and it definitely shows, especially in the clean up, which I had only about two and a half weeks to do. I was originally going for that sketchy 60's Disney Xerox style, but in the end it just looks like a scribbly mess. I feel that I had some decent animation throughout, but my rushed clean up sort of butchered it. And to top it off, it made the coloring a heck of a lot harder to do. A lot of broken lines, gaps in the artwork... it was a pain. Luckily I had a few really patient underclassmen helping me color those shots while I rushed to get others cleaned up.

And like the rest of my other thesis classmates, the end got really really hectic. The final deadline loomed and we were all rushing to get everything put together in time for the April 15th deadline (coincidentally, on Tax Day). Since the sound editing labs were booked full by the film department students, I did all my sound editing using Adobe Soundbooth (a horrible program) in the back room of the animation studio the night before the due date. Knowing that I wouldn't be able to get the film 100% complete by the deadline, I submitted a rough-cut of my film, which was complete except for about 10 shots that were left in the rough animation stage. After the Dusty screening, a lot of people came up and complimented the rough animation parts, because they thought it was interesting to see the rough stages of animation before it's polished, so it wasn't too bad. Overall, the film went over decently at the screening. The laughs came where I wanted them, and I was content with that. The biggest one came with Howard Beckerman's caricature on the brochure. Of course most of the audience was made up of SVA students, so it's not that surprising.

After that, I just packed the film and all the related files in my computer and left it to gather digital dust, which is where it stayed until a few weeks ago, and eventually now!

I believe I've improved a lot as an animator since then, so it's kinda hard to look at this now with a straight face, but I'm mostly satisfied with the results. I learned a great lesson from this film, which is to not bite off more than I could chew. Having fluid animation, full color and a film as long as this (clocking nearly at 6 minutes) definitely took a lot out of me. That's why since then I've kept things as minimal as possible, like with NEST and my upcoming short which I'm currently storyboarding. As long as something is kept on simple terms and executed as such, you can always add more on top of it later on. It's best to work with bare bones and build everything on top of it once you got the structure down, like an armature for a sculpture.

I want to thank everybody who helped me make the short, those who supported me throughout the production of it, and to all the people who begged/nagged/stuck a gun to my head to finally finish the thing. It wouldn't be here without you!

To see some early production artwork that I posted during the last year, click on the "Destiny is For the Birds" tag.

Keep on animatin'!

What's in store for me this summer...

Well, besides that....

I just need to clean up and color those last couple of shots and it'll be all over. I want to start sending the film out to festivals and see if it has the legs for it. Sadly, I've been pretty preoccupied with stuff at home, so I haven't really had the time to put any more work into it. I just gotta bite the big bazooka and get it out of the way so I can move on to some of the new things I planned on doing.

While a lot of my friends have started working at some of the neat studios in the area, I decided to take a bit of a break. My body's been pretty wiped; I never really had a break since the summer of 2009. So I'm taking most of the summer off to relax and work on some stuff I've been putting off, like sculpture, kinetics and life drawing, which I never had time for over the past year.

Part of that time will be spent with my girlfriend Shannon, who's coming over to the East Coast for a month or so. I'll show her the sites, spend some quality time, and best of all, a trip to DISNEYWORLD!!! I'm really looking forward to it!

Another thing I've been planning for a while now, and now that I have a good chunk of time I can finally start working on it: my web comic! I've been writing out the story and will start drawing out some comics, which'll be posted on this new blog I started HERE. I'm gonna backlog a few comics so I have a bit of a head start, so I expect to start posting on a weekly basis starting in mid-late July. I'm really looking forward to it.

See you guys soon!

SVA Aftermath, or "What have I learned from all this?"

Yesterday, I received my diploma and was pronounced a college graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, along with the nearly 50 fellow animators who I lived and worked alongside for the past four years. And after packing up my dorm room and leaving the city one last time, I reflected on what I've been through here. Sure, there were plenty of bumps in the road and politics to deal with, but overall I really loved being part of SVA and I'm pretty bummed that this stage of my life is over.

The past few weeks have been pretty crazy, especially the last one. Last Sunday was our big animation screening; 42 films in about 4 hours. Yes, a LONG show. But to me, those few hours really flew by. I saw all my friends have their few minutes of screen time and felt really proud of them. Despite the bias, what with them being my friends and all, I really felt our year's show was pretty solid, diverse and a lot of fun! And even mine, being a bit unfinished, went over pretty well with the crowd. I had pretty sore arms from all the hugs and handshakes I had as I made my way out of the theater.

And that was that, or at least I thought it was.

Two nights later, I came to the awards show to support whichever of my friends was going to win. I ended up walking away with one of these:

"No Obelix, that's not a menhir."

Definitely a shock to the system. I'm still kind of in denial over it. But I'm glad I was able to share this award onstage with my friend Zach, who also won (we tied), and Mirella and Zack, who won for production design and stop-motion respectively.

I was left both humbled and proud, not only of myself, but of all my friends that I worked alongside on the 5th floor. Even though it has my name on it, I feel that it really belongs to everybody. Over the last year, I've been exposed to so many inspiring and talented people, and I sincerely believe that without their influence or guidance, I would never have gotten this far in a million years.

It's pretty surreal. One of the first posts I made on this blog was about my acceptance into SVA. I didn't know what was going to happen, or what I was going to learn or who I was going to meet. I've had so many unforgettable experiences since then, and I feel that I've grown not only as an animator, but as a person. And it's only the beginning.

So that's it. I've won my first award, got my degree and finished my college years. So now what do I do?

Well, I think I've earned a bit of a rest. After finishing those last pesky few shots of my film, I'm gonna take most of the summer off to relax and recharge my batteries. I'd like delve into other types of art like sculpting and painting, which I never had the time to do while I was in school. I want to hone my drawing skills a bit more and try to build a portfolio. I'm also going to (re)start my comic and make a separate site for it. And on top of that, Shannon's coming to visit for a month, and we're taking a little excursion down to Disney World! It'll be a fun and relaxing way to cap off my educational years, and come August, start my professional career.

Thanks everyone!

Storyboard to Film Comparison

I made a side-by-side comparison chart for my film. The images on the left are panels from my preliminary storyboard from last July, and the images on the right are from the finished film, 10 months later.

These few examples are special because they pretty much stayed the same from my first pass (albeit a few minor changes here and there). Not every shot in the film was copied verbatim from the storyboard. Some of my original ideas for how shots were going to be laid out were either too flat and uninteresting (like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon) or so complicated that it would've been a real pain to animate once I got up to layout and animation later on.

That's why it's always good to get a second opinion on things. That's why I had my thesis advisor (and good friend) Howard Beckerman help me out on every step of the process. To me, Howard was my "test audience" to see whether things were working or not. If he didn't understand what was going on, that's when I knew that I needed to make some changes so he would understand it.

Whenever I had an issue, I went to Howard for advice on how to fix it, and every time we would straighten things out so they worked. Sometimes it would be a minor tweak in the camera angle or a pose, and other times whole story ideas were thrown out the window. It's hard to let some things go, but for the sake of clarity it's important to fix things so the audience won't be left scratching their heads and asking questions.

CONTACT!

Here's a few selected images from my film.

I'll eventually post it up online, but I'm going to try to submit to a few festivals to see if it has the legs for it.

Or wings.

God, I hate bird puns.

Thesis Backgrounds

Hey, my thesis is done. Now I can sleep!

Here's all the backgrounds from my SVA thesis film! While I drew all of them, my girlfriend Shannon did all the color, so most of the credit should go to her for making it look so pretty and stuff.

Another Preview (and it's more than just one second this time)

Here's another little sneak peek at my short. It's Shot 17 (out of about 65) all roughed out and ready for cleanup.

It's a dialogue shot. One of many. The dialogue shots are usually the ones I hold off on, but nonetheless, this was one I really was looking forward to doing because of how juicy the dialogue was. Maybe I went a bit over the top with the physical acting, but I enjoyed doing it.

All the rough animation was done in Flash, and all my cleanup is being done in Toon Boom, which is a really great program. I'm gradually switching over to it from Flash, and for the better too!

Randy's voice was done by my friend Joshua Tomar, and he did a really spot-on job. Check out his website and take a listen to his voicework: http://tomamoto.com/voice/.

THESIS SNEAK PEEK!!!!

Sorry folks, that's all you're getting.

:P

Animatic Sneaks

I've been busy as hell these past few weeks (and will be for some time to come), so here's a couple sneak peek images from my recently finished "revised" animatic to tide you over.

I've made a few important changes throughout the film, so consider about 45% of the previously-posted storyboard to be "obsolete". Also, I cut a minute's worth of footage out, which makes me really happy.

I've been using Toon Boom Storyboard Pro for the animatic, which I can only describe as "Godly". It's easy to use and loads of fun to work with. It makes making animatics so much easier. Another nail in the coffin for FLASH.

My Thesis Storyboard

Here's the first draft of my storyboard for my thesis film. If the drawings and descriptions are too small to see, click on them to direct you to my Flickr gallery, where you can see them full size. (I would put the larger size here, but the blog layout is too small for it to fit).

While drawing it out, I tried to make the drawings expressive and clear enough that you can pretty much tell what's going on without reading the dialogue or the action notes. It's a good thing to keep things like that in mind, since not everyone who'll eventually see my film will understand English.

I plan on making a revised, more fleshed-out version soon, but this was just to get things down on paper.

A Little Background Work

Production on my thesis is revving up pretty soon, so I need to prepare myself for the oncoming onslaught of work that I'll be focusing on for the next 9 months or so. One of the things I'm working on are my background designs. Since landscapes and stuff like that aren't my forte', I need plenty of practice.

These two were roughly based on 2 scribbles I did in my storyboard. I sketched them out in about 10 minutes (each) and then sent them over to Shannon to color them for me. And she did a fantastic job of it, too! She told me that she never really colored backgrounds before, but these are marvelous for a first time. She'll definitely get plenty of practice at it, I'm sure!

While I'm definitely satisfied with the way these two came out, they're still experimental. I'm not quite sure which way I plan on going as far as execution. What I'd really like to do is make them look like something out of a Disney Winnie-the-Pooh feature. I find those to be the most charming and welcoming backgrounds Disney ever did. You just want to walk through that forest. Check out a few here at Rob Richard's fantastic blog!

Here's a few examples from Pooh's Heffalump Movie that I quickly snagged.

I don't wish to go into THAT much detail in my thesis (I'd never finish it if I even attempted to), but this is what I'm using as a reference to inspire me. Its sort of a point to bounce off of.

Over the course of the next year, I plan on posting bits and pieces from my thesis as I go. Backgrounds, storyboards, concept art, rough animation tests, etc. So consider this place a "production blog" from now until next May.

TAKE-OFF!!!

If I can illustrate my 4th year thesis film with one drawing, this would be it.

Thesis production starts..... NOW.

Dodo Turnaround

Here's a turnaround I did of the dodo for somebody who's making a 3D model. Tried to make things a little easier for him.

Since he's also gonna be in my thesis film, I could use this when I hand my designs/concept work to the thesis committee later this year. I'll make turnarounds for the other 2 birds sometime soon.