The finished video

I've actually had quite a few requests to see the finished project, so I've posted the video on my site in two sizes, large and small.

Formation of the Tetons - small
Formation of the Tetons - large

Enjoy!

So it's come to this

I was hoping for a happy ending, really I was, but last week I sent a very stern letter to the producers, telling them that I'm turning this over to my lawyer at the end of the month, and sending a cease-and-desist letter to the park.

My contract calls for payments at four milestones, the third of which was more than passed by the first week in August. The final version was delivered almost two months ago. And I'm still waiting for payment on the last two milestones.

I HATE to get a lawyer involved, 'cuz he's just gonna take money that I can't really afford to spend.

I hope the sincere promise of serious action will be sufficient to get me paid before I have to resort to lawyers.

There's still time for a semi-happy ending.

Pay up, Sucker!

Well, the word is in. They've finally accepted the animation I submitted about three weeks ago. Time to pack up the files and move along.

Now, if I could only get paid!

Defying the laws of physics

I got back from vacation last week and got an email from my producer. The geologists had finally gotten some comments together on the final animation. (I had one week to build it; it took them three weeks to watch it and write up their thoughts.)

They want major changes to four scenes, but the glaciation is the funniest. Currently, it shows a single pulse of glaciers advancing and retreating. There are only six seconds alloted, so it looks like a wave crashing on a beach, more than glaciers - 2.5 seconds in, pause a second, 2.5 seconds out. But what can I do?

The comments, of course, complained that A) the glaciers move too fast and B) that I need to show two pulses of glaciers rather than one.

And I am allowed to expand the section to ten seconds. That translates to five seconds per pulse which, as the mathematically-minded among you have already figured out, is actually less time than I had before.

My task now is to make the glaciers look slower, in less time.

Right.

Uh-huh.

Faux 3D, Pt II

The final shot of the animation has been up in the air for the entire project. Every round of revisions that came in had a new version.

When time ran out, I'd built no geometry for a final, high-rez render of the Tetons. I did have a photo that one of the geologists liked very much: a sufficiently high-resolution photograph taken - I think - from the Space Shuttle, looking down on Jackson Hole and the Teton range.

I pulled it into Photoshop and prettied it up a bit, then brought it into After Effects. I wanted something more than a static shot to end on. I thought about doing a simple zoom out (or in) but that seemed boring too.

After Effects (AE) does have limited 3D capabilities, although it's all based on flat planes. With a shot from space, I figured I could get by without any real 3D geometry to the mountains, but I did want to do a real camera move, rather than a simple zoom.

I've recently watched some great AE tutorials by Andrew Kramer, and one of them was on creating a simple 3D scene in AE. Perfect. Thanks, Andrew.

I created a flat plane in AE and adjusted it to match the perspective of the photo as best I could. Next I projected the photo onto it, from the camera's perspective. Now, when I moved the camera in AE, the perspective of the scene shifted realistically. It's a subtle effect, but it's something the eye notices when it's not there.

I added another 3D plane, just above the landscape, and put some Fractal Noise clouds on it, to give a little parallax as the camera moves and reinforce the illusion.

The results were pretty good and, better yet, pretty fast.

After Effects to the rescue

With no time for long renders and fancy effects, I turned to Adobe After Effects to put together as much of this thing as I could in 2D.

Green Screen

The first place I applied After Effects (AE) was in adding some animated magma effects to some of my shots. I used a 'green screen' approach, coloring the 'magma' portions of the texture pure, blank green, then rendering out the sequence. The photo above shows a frame from a sequence where a 'plate' slides under North America, pushing up mountains.

I rendered the sequence and pulled the results into AE. In AE, I created an animated 2D texture to represent the magma - using fractal noise, Foam, and vector blur, if you want to know - then composited it into the sequence, keying out the green and replacing it with my magma. This was much quicker to render since my magma was only 2D rather than 3D.

Smash Zoom

One of the new shots added recently was the massive explosion of the Yellowstone caldera. This is a big, important shot, and it has to show a lot in just four seconds. Moreover, it's an explosion. I love blowing stuff up.

I decided to render a single, high resolution shot of the landscape seen from above. I added some subtle clouds in AE, to help hide defects in the texture, which I had no time to fine-tune.

I played around for a while with particle effects and whatnot in AE, but I couldn't come up with a convincing explosion that I liked. What I needed were some nice, real world shots of smoke and explosion. Unfortunately, I didn't have any. Searching desperately I found a single, low resolution MOV animation of a 'cloud chamber' - basically white liquid being pored into clear liquid, giving the appearance of a roiling white smoke cloud appearing. It was cool, but not exactly what I needed.

For starters, it's from the side, and my shot is from high above the earth - wrong perspective. It's also very small - 320x200 or so - and my final animation is for HDTV. But it's the only real-world video I've got on hand, so I work with it.

I pulled the video into AE. It occured to me that an exploding volcano shoots stuff out in every direction from the center. So I made about 9-10 copies of my video clip and arranged them like spokes on a wheel, but overlapping. This created something that looked a bit like a flower, or a cauliflower. I created a mask to hide the edges and add some asymmetry to my 'flower.' I also offset the various elements in time, so that they didn't look as symmetrical when played back.

Next I added an animated 'bulge' using AE's Spherize filter.

I used AE's Bend filter, animated, to bend the smoke plume as time progressed (hopefully) making it appear that the wind was blowing the smoke in one direction as the explosion progressed.

I added in some of the AE particle effects for smoke and fire I had experimented with earlier, to create the initial explosion and add some interest to the cloud.

I added a simple shadow effect under the cloud, and gradually pulled color from the scene as the cloud grows, to give a sense of ... I dunno, but it seemed appropriate.

Finally, because I've been watching too much Battlestar Gallactica, I added camera shake and an unnecessary smash zoom to really liven things up.

The final results, from start to finish, took me only about four hours, but it's probably my favorite sequence in the animation.

You can see a small version of it here.

OMG! Crush time!

I know I've been absent for a while, but the hammer has finally fallen and the long process is nearing its end. I got a phone call from the director a week ago which said, in effect, "They've noticed that it's behind schedule and we need it finished next week."

!!!

I'm sitting here, patiently waiting for answers to some of my pressing questions - how many glacial pulses do we need to see? Is there a magma pocket there? Or the vertical dykes straight enough? And, suddenly, I've got to do 6 weeks worth of modeling, rendering, and compositing in the next 6 days!

I haven't even built geography for several of the scenes, as they kept changing drastically every time we got a new round of comments in from the geologists. I'd built a couple of landscapes that weren't going to be used at all. It's not like tearing up a 5 minute sketch; there's a lot of work involved.

So I decided to sit tight and wait for final answers before committing any more time to scene building.

And now this! YARG!

Everything fancy I was planning just got thrown out the window. I've got several scenes to finish - and, in some cases, to start - in just a few days.