Hasta La Motion!

A classic black-and-white commercial for Oasis cigarettes. Features a jingle that is more catchy than influenza.

A highly amusing 1965 commercial for Bayer Aspirin.

, by Rory Fellowes | Peoplestudios

Keith English at work in his studio in Santa Barbara © Keith English 2015

 

The artist Keith English

Keith English is, appropriately enough, an Englishman, a Londoner, but one who has lived in the US for most of the past four decades. He is a consummate animator, as you will see, an artist in the proper sense of the word (as opposed to the weird modern habit of calling anyone who works in media an artist). He is a genuinely creative and energetic man who loves what he does and is prepared to give his all for a project, whatever it may be.

I wanted to track the process of a project, so I turned to Keith as a man who has made more projects than most. Added to that, his company, Screaming Pixels (great name!), is small, just a few people working closely together, and that is a working atmosphere where one can hope to see something truly original, with a lot of creative energy focused on the project, ideas flying around, everyone allowed to make their contribution, sharing all of the process at some level, under Keith’s direction.

It’s not a wild and disorganised freedom, just a liberating work space, and in the modern film industry those are hard to find. I imagine Keith’s direction is fairly beady, as his eye for detail suggests someone who does not let anything past him that isn’t up to scratch. His films are hard to fault, though Keith could probably find fault with them. Like any true artist, he is always striving for better, always his own harshest critic. But judge for yourself with the examples you’ll find below.

I asked to talk to him about his current project, the latest in a series of short films he has made for the Sonoma International Film Festival to run before every showing during the festival, and the latest, for the 2015 Festival, which is the first that he has rendered using the RebusFarm Render Farm service, for which, as you will see, he has nothing but praise.

We talked about that, but we also ranged over the whole idea of creativity and in particular, Animation. I was myself an animator for more than three decades before I chucked it in for this writing lark, so we had a lot to share and discuss. We had a very entertaining conversation, in which we talked about this project, but also about a lot of other things around the subject of animation and film making, and some of that will get into this article.

A Carte Blanche brief

To begin with, I asked Keith how long he had been doing these short films for festivals, and what is the brief.

“I’ve been doing them since 2003 when I was asked to join a crew to make a film for the Santa Barbara Film Festival. There’s no pay for doing it, but you make a film that is viewed over 600 times. It has to play in front of every movie in the festival.

“In 2006 the rest of the crew I’d worked with before on these openings decided they didn’t want to do it anymore, and so I decided to take it on myself.

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Keith’s first solo work for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2006

“The brief is: Give us an opening. The purpose of the films is to display the sponsor names and they have to be shown at every feature and every event, so it gets a tremendous amount of exposure. “Apart from that, I get Carte Blanche. In fact, most of the time I won’t tell anybody what I’m doing. Last year I did one that the director of the festival did not see until the opening night, because we’d actually used a couple of modellers from Pixar and they had modelled him and we put him in it, and I didn’t want him to know he was part of it. He loved it!”

Carte Blanche is quite a gift to any artist, in fact pretty much unheard of these days, unless you’re sitting at home working on your own project on your own time, and showing it to a few friends. To make a film that will be shown to hundreds of people hundreds of times seems to me an extraordinary opportunity. Keith agreed, but justified their faith in him.

“People know from my track record they’re going to get something they’re going to be pleased with. They could never afford to buy this stuff that we do, so for them it’s a cheap answer and for us it is a tremendous exposure.

“And best of all for me, it’s playtime. I’m like, ‘Wow, what do I want to do this year?’

“I usually find the music first. Each one is different. Last year’s one I did for Sonoma was very funky. Even I thought it was funky, I just felt I wanted to do something that was much more toony and rough looking and more subdued colours.

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Extract from Keith’s film for the Sonoma International Film Festival 2014

There was one I did for Santa Barbara. My company logo is the Mannequin, and I did one where the Mannequin walks through this Italian hall, is the only way I can describe it. You start to realise they’re all props from movies that he’s looking at, there are red sparkly shoes, and the big model from Jaws is in there, and a red balloon, Charlie Chaplin’s hat and cane,  and other references to some of the movies I love, and it starts raining and at the end the Mannequin jumps up on a lamppost.”

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Keith’s film for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2012

“Each film is just completely different. I don’t know where they come from, I’m surprised myself, I think Wow, where did that one come from? It’s important to know the back story and sometimes that is nothing more than feelings.

“I’m a big story person, I believe it is all story, so when I do these little things, the part of the story I’m going to use (because these don’t really have a story as such), is that I want my polygons to connect with the audience emotionally. It could be it makes them tap their feet, it could be it makes them smile, it could be they look at “the beguiling eyes” as the director of the festival just described the piano’s eyes to me. It’s about emotional connection and for that I need to know who each character is. If you don’t have people connecting to the story you have apathy. You need them to want to know the next part, and what happens next.

“That little candle piece I did, which was the first one I did for Sonoma, was actually a tribute for John Lasseter, and they brought in a lot of Pixar and a lot of Disney, and then all the people he had worked with, the voice artists, like John Ratzenberger and Tony Shalhoub and even Robin Williams who was a great friend of John’s, he came and roasted him like crazy, and I have to tell you, when they said we want you to do a tribute opening for John Lasseter, I thought, Oh my God, what am I going to do? I mean, they can outdo me on anything I do.

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Keith’s tribute to John Lasseter at the Sonoma International Film Festival 2007

“I decided what I had to do was something simplistic, the character can’t have a face, can’t have arms, and yet we have to feel who he is, just from the little movement he has in his body (he can bend his body) and his legs, and how he reacts to things. For instance, the champagne bottle when he comes out is incredibly snooty. It’s little details like that. I designed the environment and it is obviously inspired by Disney. I love those Pinnochio type environments they used to do. That was the second solo piece I’d done. It took me a thousand hours to do it, because there are 97 characters in there. There are no repeat animations. I wanted to do a piece you could look at over and over again, so there wasn’t anywhere where you might say, Wait a minute, I just saw that character doing that. So that was an extraordinary project and a great opportunity for me.”

The Sonoma International Film Festival 2015

I asked about the Sonoma International Film Festival for 2015, which will open on 25th March.

Keith is an enthusiastic fan of this gem of a film festival. “Let’s plug Sonoma. It’s a wonderful little festival. It is Film, Food and Wine! Who wouldn’t want to go?

“For this film, Greg Dombrowski wrote the music. He definitely deserves a call out because that is where it all began. For me this is where I first see the story and the characters, when I first hear the music. It’s the font from which everything else stems and is therefore perhaps the most important part for me. I immediately loved this piece because while it starts with what would appear to be a very slow melancholy melody, it ends up as one of the, if not the, most rousing piece to which I have ever animated. I wanted this piece to be note perfect so to that end, the composer, Greg, videotaped a violinist, cellist and himself playing the piano. So everything you see is correctly played.

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The video of the violinist Tina Calhoon used to track the fingering for the film

“We’re not just animating it to “look” like they’re playing, they’re playing the correct notes, the correct strings, the correct positions on the fret board. I’m a bit of a stickler for detail. And I just found out we’ve got the ex-President of the New York Philharmonic sitting in the audience, because he has a film there, and I’m like, Thank goodness we did that!”

“I did most of the modelling, the lighting and the texture work. I love giving atmosphere to things. I did a little candle flicker that would reflect in the piano so you can actually see the flame. The environment is lit by about twenty candles. Actually, what I did for the violin, I found a free violin on the internet and then completely built the face on it. The piano I just put the face on some blanks. The cello is another beautiful model I found online that I put the face on. And obviously I did the legs and the spats and so on. The timpani I just built from scratch, the environment I built from scratch. I love doing the whole thing. The cello is an insane bit of texture work. I bought the cello actually. I think it cost me $16 to buy. It’s gorgeous, it’s so beautifully textured as you can see, but I put the texture on the violin.

“Mauro Contaldi did the amazing rigging, and Dorren Andrews in New Zealand did the animation with me. In particular he did that amazing finger and bow work on the violin.”

Keith has worked with Mauro for the last twenty years or so. He told me about a project they did some pre-visualisation work on, a film for Sony not yet made, called ‘Fall From Grace’, the story of the great battle between Satan and the Archangel Michael. Mauro rigged the wings. Satan had twelve wings, and Archangel Michael had six.

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Beginning of the first sequence pre-visualisation for Fall From Grace

“Each wing had 560 joints in it. So Satan had more than 6,000 joints controlling every move of his 12 wings. If I wanted the wings to fold into a heart shape, in the way we see them portrayed traditionally then I wanted the feathers not to compress but to slide over each other. Mauro’s wing can bend into any shape and it all holds up. It’s an awesome rig.”

 

“On the Sonoma 2015 project we had a different set of problems. The bowing is beautifully rigged. You can do it all in the Channel Box. You can animate the angle, the speed, and even which string it’s on.

 

 

The violin with rig and Channel Box

 

 

His rig makes the bowing really precise and much more straightforward to do. And I wanted the fingers to do be able to do vibrato on the strings, so each of his left-hand fingers are IK controlled. He did an amazing job on those rigs.”

 

 

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Slo-mo playblast of the cello

 

 

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Playblast of the violin

 

 

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Rendered shot of finger animation on the violin

 

 

The disembodied hands were a curiosity for me. I wondered what was the motivation behind their design, the almost ghostly appearance.

 

“I actually wanted them to be translucent,” Keith told me. “I wanted them to be unattached, fairly simple, so that, they’re there and they’re very obvious because of their brightness, but actually it’s the instruments we should be looking at, and you just accept that these hands are attached even though you can’t see the arms. I didn’t want them to have that much significance, but I wanted them to be obvious.”

 

What makes the anthropomorphism of the instruments work so well is the way the faces are part of the instrument, not simply stuck on, but integral to the surface. This is first made apparent in the opening shots, when the piano comes to life.

 

“I love reveals,” Keith said. “I’ve always loved reveals, where the first time you see something you don’t know what’s coming. And therefore, starting with the smooth piano, and having the face form in the piano, believably part of the piano, was really important to me.”

 

 

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Playblast of the opening piano shots

 

 

“And then little cues, like at the end of the first shot of the piano and his eyes go up. There is a dissolve there, but it is very short. It’s like in the old days, when they used to do the three or five frame dissolves in the old movies, some of the old black-and-whites, I love that look. So I used that quite a few times in this. I love old style cinematography. I did something by accident on this, and maybe this has been used a lot, I’ve no idea, I just did it, and I thought, Wow, that actually looks good. So you get the first shot of the piano, that we pull back from, and then that cuts to black, and then we have a five frame dissolve up, and I actually, when I did that it was completely by accident, I didn’t plan the first piano to cut to black, I wanted a five second dissolve, but actually, it worked for some reason. I thought Wow, there you go, that can stay, I love it.”

 

 

The Iron Hand…

 

This talk of ‘old-style cinematography’ and the techniques of the early film makers and their editors led us off on a tangent. Both Keith and I have been in the film industry for a long time and we found in the course of our conversation that on work methods and work ethics, we are very much of the same mind. We come, it could be said, from an older tradition, and a lot of those things we developed our skills under and learnt by have been drummed out of the industry by the corporate style of modern film studios. Both of us have done our share of big budget movies, but we prefer to work in small studios, where you can still have some input, are still allowed some sort of creative freedom. Keith, has, after all, settled to run a small studio when it is obvious his enormous talent could have found him employment in any of the big Hollywood studios.

 

He launched into what I would guess is a oft repeated diatribe against the way many of those studios work, in particular Pixar (and I heartily endorsed his every sentiment). Pixar use a process they call the Creative Studio. As with Disney back in Walt’s day (and probably still), the film is worked out down to the finest detail in storyboards before any animation gets done, and when it does, the animators have no real creative freedom. They follow the board, or as John Lasseter has it, they ‘Trust the process’.

 

This is not how Keith likes to work. “I’m a small niche company. I didn’t want to be part of a big company. I wanted to do my own stuff, to develop my own look and feel.”

 

In the big studios that dominate the market today, “Everything is homogenised,” Keith said. “We see the same characters being recycled, nothing extreme, no overdrive in the animation, everything predictable and safe. What we never get from them is characters we’ve never seen before, no new worlds.” There are a few exceptions, he said, citing Fox’s Sid the Sloth as a wonderful example of a quirky, unpredictable character. “The way his eyes work, so one eye focuses on something and the other eye is just slightly slower getting there. That eye drag. I love it.”

 

The problem, as Keith sees it, is what he called The Iron Hand. Everything has to be seen and approved by a whole bunch of people. “A lot of them are not creative people, people in the middle of that process.” Keith worked on a Sam Raimi horror film called ‘Drag Me To Hell’. Keith produced a test for the evil hanky in the garage. He got notes from the VFX Supervisor in an email. Sam would add his own notes in red to the email, so Keith had Sam’s notes in front of him and he did the test in response to those notes.

 

“I used Maya’s nCloth and had the leading third of the hanky transparent so the movements were less predictable. I turned the set on its side so I could use gravity to make the hanky stay horizontal adding turbulence to make it seemingly fly, and not have to use wind to keep it up.” Sam had said it looked as if it was being pulled in their practical photography puppet shoots, which it was. “Then I added Influence Object Spheres to make it deform it’s shape to appear more wing-like.”

 

But Keith’s supervisor thought it looked wrong and kept asking for different ways of animating the hanky. This went on for a while, until one day the supervisor came to Keith and asked for one more test. Keith agreed, but only on the condition that the supervisor finally agree to show the first test to Sam. He did.

 

“Sam came back and said to redo all the hanky shots according to that first test. We had spent two weeks doing unnecessary work, because my supervisor didn’t understand what Sam was asking for. He wasn’t an animator, wasn’t creative. That kind of thing really pisses me off. Creative to Creative is the only way to go”

 

 

 

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Extract from Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell – hanky animation by Keith English

The trick with CGI, with animation, with all of VFX work is in handling the technical aspects in such a way that the audience is unaware of them. As Keith put it to me, “it all looks organic but when you step behind the camera it’s all technical, and it always amazes me that you can bring this massive group of technical people together and end up with this beautiful spongy/ organic story on the screen that doesn’t look like anyone touched it and you just happened to be there. That’s the beauty of film to me.”

RebusFarm

And so we came to RebusFarm. They have sponsored this film by providing their services for free, but this is not why Keith is such a fan of the cloud render service they provide. It was clear throughout our conversation and in subsequent correspondence, RebusFarm really impressed him.

“RebusFarm were an integral part of being able to take down all the boundaries and just run with everything we could muster. I could never have rendered what I’m doing on this current project in that time, if it hadn’t been for RebusFarm. I have never ever rendered to this level before because I always knew the consequences of heavy render time to delivering a project on time. I’m working on this 18 hours a day, I’m working from 5 or 6 in the morning and I work until 11, 12 at night. There was no spare time available, no machines here available.

“If Rebus hadn’t stepped in on this we could not have let ourselves fly creatively like this. I’ve got motion blur set to it’s highest level of 15, global lighting and depth of field, plus it’s setup to render OpenEXR to a quality level of 1.5 versus the Mental Ray’s preset Production setting of 0.6. I’ve got so much going on in these shots, it slows rendering down, to the point where, if I’ve got 900 frames it would take me 300 hours to render. RebusFarm will render those in about 30 minutes. I don’t have to wait 12 days to composite that, I can do it an hour later. It’s utterly insane. It’s warp speed. And very, very addictive.

“I’ve got to say, the thing I find most impressive about RebusFarm, is with German precision is the only way I can describe it, when you download their app, it’s inside your animation programme. You do this scene. You press their little app, it checks the scene for you, it tells you if it’s OK, and then you press upload.

“Normally you have to give these services a project file, with all the textures, all the caches, and everything else. RebusFarm goes and looks for it all, pulls it all together. If there is a problem, it says, ‘I can’t find this piece, it’s not coming from your project, it’s coming from a different project. Would you like me to change that for you and import it and save it under a new name?’ This is what it does. You just say Yes and it brings in everything that you need, and then sends it up. It’s extraordinary. It’s addictive because it’s so easy. I love it. They’ve done a great job.

Problems, what problems?

“As long as you set up and work out of an exclusive and properly set up standard project directory which contains everything for the project such as textures and master files to be referenced, then Rebus will not have any issues. I was using Maya, and for that they use the standard Maya directory setup. RebusFarm cover a broad range of softwares, which I haven’t tried yet, but I expect the experience is just as straightforward and easy as it is with Maya.

“The only accommodation I needed to make which breaks Maya’s normal directory structure is that instead of letting Maya write nCache Hair to the Cache/nCache/[Project name] when you tell it to write the cache, you have to save directly into the Data directory with no folder or anything else. But that’s a simple change in the cache writing Options Box. Other than that, if you have everything in the project directory where Maya needs it to be, then RebusFarm will collect it all from you. It’s seamless.”

It should be added here, by way of illustration of the way RebusFarm is constantly seeking to improve its service, that they are currently engaged in bringing the cache saving into line with the directory structure of Maya in their Maya plugin.

Keith went on, “Problems can only come from incorrectly set up projects as far as I can see. I am using Maya 2014 and Maya 2015 on two different machines and uploading to them and I’ve not had any hitches.

“If you don’t set up a unique directory for the project (which is the first thing I always do on any project even if I am rendering it on my own machines) then your project will write to the default Maya render directory tucked deep in your own file directory system. And when you use a texture Maya will then write that as an absolute path which will include your Drive, Username and other path garbage, which no other machine can recognise.

“When you set up and work out of a project, then Maya doesn’t even see the project name, so instead of looking for a texture under C:User/Documents/Maya/Default/sourceimages/texture-name it will simply write sourceimages/texture-name. And as long as someone on the other side of the world working on a different OS, is working inside a unique project (even if they’ve given it a different name) and with the same textures etc which you have in your project, then they can open that file and Maya will only look in that project for the file it needs.

“If your Project is stored locally you may not see the problem until you move to another workstation and try opening the file through a mapped network drive. Assuming you haven’t set your Project before opening a scene file, it is possible that Maya will be looking for your nCache or texture image file in the wrong Project. If the Project-relative part of the file path cannot be resolved, Maya will fall back on the file’s full path. If the full, or absolute path to your nCache or texture image refers to a file on the C: drive, but you’re actually accessing this file via a mapped network drive (let’s say you want to start a batch render on another workstation), Maya is going to be unable to resolve the absolute path.

Keith hearts RebusFarm

“I’ve never used a cloud render service before. I’ve always sat with my machines running 24 hours a day for weeks doing this stuff! And this is like, what have I been doing all this time? And they do it at prices that I think make it really viable for small companies. I’ve always thought I couldn’t really afford to use render farms. But when I look at RebusFarm’s prices… If I render 100 frames it’s about €30. If I do a thirty second ad, and I build every effect I want to into it, if I do some massive effects thing that would kill me on rendering, it will take them probably fifteen minutes, half an hour to do the whole darn job, and it will cost €300 to €400. And OK, the client can pay for that, that’s worth it to me. Just to get things back more or less instantaneously. And the gratification that goes with that is extraordinary. I love that part.”

THE SONOMA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2015

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The Sonoma International Film Festival 2015 © Keith English

Last word to Keith: “This is like, going to the local frozen food section of the supermarket to get a curry versus you fly first class to New Delhi and have the greatest Indian chef cook for you, and it’s a hundred times faster! Who the hell would want to go to the frozen food section again?

“Rebus rocks!”

To see more  of the work of Keith English, go here And for his company Screaming Pixels website, go here

Part 1

RebusFarm

Chrysler is attracting attention in the Middle East with “The Performer”, an integrated advertising campaign in which Saudi Arabian Hip Hop celebrity Qusai duels musically with the new Chrysler 300C, in association with Arabs Got Talent show. The soundtrack was composed in its entirety with sounds recorded from the actual car, turning the Chrysler 300C into a real polyphonic musical instrument. Sound engineers recorded a range of sounds, from doors slamming, petrol flaps opening, to the roaring engine itself. A virtual poliphonic synthesizer called “The Perfomer” was developed to create the original track. Four 30 second documentaries document the process leading up to the launch of the Performer commercial, each serving as a teaser broadcast on TV before the reveal of the main performance. a QR code on YouTube allowed users to download and create beats and melodies on their own devices using the Performer. The innovation has also been sent to musicians and composers across the world for them to use as an instrument. A three minute tutorial video, released online, provides an introduction to the multi-patch instrument for N.I. Kontakt sampler. The Performer campaign won one Gold (Media), one Bronze (Interactive), and various shortlists at the Dubai Lynx 2015 awards.

The Performer App pairs with the Chrysler 300C Performer poster enabling you to play the car like a musical instrument. All the sounds are sampled from the Chrysler 300C which embodies world-class levels of craftsmanship and technology, as refined and inspiring as a world class musical instrument. The accompanying poster has been printed with conductive ink that when touched generates the sounds of the car through your smart phone.

Campaign Background

Chrysler Middle East sponsored Arabs Got Talent (AGT) for the 2nd successive year. The sponsorship platform provides significant reach and visibility for the Chrysler brand. Instead of airing a generic TV spot, the objective was to establish a connection between Chrysler and AGT, enabling a clear association between brand and program, increasing the brand awareness among young arabs. To achieve this we partnered with co-host of AGT, Qusai, to turn the Chrysler 300C into a musical instrument, sampling extensively each and every sound from the car. The campaign followed the format of the show. During the ‘Audition’ stage our 4-week TV campaign aired individual chapters each week following Qusai and our sound engineers exploring, identifying and ‘sampling’ the sounds of the Chrysler 300C. The culmination of the 4 chapters was the final 60” TVC of which the soundtrack was composed, arranged and produced using only sounds from the Chrysler 300C. To support the TV campaign, the region’s first playable posters and the world’s first re-targetable press inserts were created; allowing users to play the Chrysler 300C like a musical instrument from the printed material connected via Bluetooth to the user’s smartphone which became the speaker/amp. This concept was complemented online via a digital banner campaign on YouTube and across the Google Network, in which the user could play the car’s sounds using their smartphone as a piano keyboard after connecting it to the banner, via Google Channel Connect. A promotional campaign in showrooms rewarded people test driving the Chrysler 300C with a Performer Kit containing a playable poster with headphones. Finally, all the sounds sampled from the car, were mastered in a professional software musical instrument and sent to top influential music producers and hip hop artists across the region and internationally, as a Direct Mailing piece.

AGT’s co-host Qusai helped uncover the talent of the Chrysler 300C by turning it into a musical instrument, detailing the whole process as a five-parts documentary. This engaging TV content took viewers on a 5-week journey that mirrored the format of AGT. During the show’s audition phase, in fact, we aired the chapters about the sound sampling process, while during the show’s live phase, we aired the 60” TVC, of which the soundtrack had been composed, arranged and performed using only, and exclusively, sounds from the Chrsyler 300C.

Even though the campaign only went live on January 3rd, within 8 days Facebook video views exceeded 2million, worth 4 years of streaming time, and the test drive requests increased by 286% year on year.

Credits

The Chrysler The Performer campaign was developed for Chrysler Middle East at Publicis ME/Dubai by chief creative officer Bechara Mouzannar, regional executive creative director Alex Brunori, creative director/art director Arvind Krishnan, associate creative director/art director Avinash Namadhari, client services director Charles Eddy, associate account director Hani Tayeh and agency producer Andreea Mititiuc.

Filming was shot by director/editor Luigi Pane (commercial) and co-director/editor Francesco Caradonna (documentaries) via abstr^ct:groove with executive producer Giada Risso, cinematographer Diego Indraccolo, line producer Claudia Amendola, producer Alessandro Salerno, 1st assistant director Alice Gatti, camera and steadicam operator Emiliano Leurini, colourist Daniel Palluca, animator Valentina Vicini.

Service in Dubai was produced by Joy Films by executive producer Dania Quaglio and producer Chiara Maioni.

LED installation designed by abstr^ct:groove.

Original music by Qusai was mixed by programmer/arranger Juri Ricotti, 300C sounds recording engineer Pierpaolo Caputo, sound designers Daniele Famà and Michele Benedetti (Gigasound studio).

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