RE-INtro V!-deo

Poser is a fairly 'user-friendly' software that helps in the creation and animation of 3D characters, although customizing a pretty generic looking 3D mesh into something more exciting visually gets complicated. The only real downside of this software package is its rendering engine: once the mesh and textures have been altered, lights have been setup and the animation finished, you are left with slow renderings and barely optimal light physics on those final renderings. This is why I exported the whole 35 seconds animation to bitmap 32 bits with no video package to avoid any kind of compression, then altered those 800 plus frames in Photoshop using macros (also known as actions). After FX or Adobe Premiere could have done a similar job, but not with the precision I felt those Poser renders really needed and knowing that once on Premiere when stacking 6 to 12 layers of high definition streams every saved CPU cycle would allow for a more efficient editing and continuous timeline scrubbing.

Once After Fx was ruled out completely in favor of Adobe Premiere to avoid keeping track of too many assets and ease time constrains. I focused on the editing of the raw 3D animation. A non-descript monochrome gradient background was created and matte layers exported to PNG with transparency where made to simulate areas of shadow and light to enhance and warm up the artificial character of Adona.

There is a point where a fast camera approaches the right eye of Adona and some smoke particles can be seen through her retina that required tracking of the particle element to actually align with the camera movement and scale progression shown on her eye. The smoke comes to a halt when it starts to disperse and Dodge blending at 70% was used in conjunction with a slow fade to complete transparency. The event leads to a few music imagery like speakers, a microphone and singing sessions that are so common in a recording setting at 2osos which ends in Adona dismissing the presentation in a calm quiet way.

A storyboard is a sheet of paper with small thumbnails that narrates a group of events in a graphical way. This format is widely used in cinema, theater, TV advertising and other film media and is quite similar to that of the peculiar visual narrative of comic books. Besides the visual advantage of seeing pictures instead of pages and pages of a writer's script, the script helps to determine the appropriate equipment needed to accomplish the project and the amount of ressources that will finally be invested on making such project a tangible reality. Certaintly, we can't really "touch" a movie's scenery, but it's a very satisfying feeling when we can get ourselves immersed in it.

After the storyboard was realized, it was time to adjust my expectations and what I wanted to accomplish. On one hand, I wanted to target the video for internet streaming, and it to preserve its humble nature of being just a digital art statement, and in the other I preferred higher resolution and a more flexible use of the final piece.

Looking around video based websites like Myspace, Hulu, YouTube and others, I remembered hearing about this great looking one called Vimeo on a forum dedicated to the now classic Canon HV20. Vimeo has a large video database, excellent interactivity and noteworthy scripts for video streaming throughout the web. They also allow users to upload video HD up to 1280x720 using their basic free service. I never liked the mediocre services of YouTube, so I decided in favor of Vimeo and put to use their HD video capabilities.

Creating a small video at Standard Definition or SD is not a painful task anymore with a reasonable late-model computer, but the switch to higher pixel count demanded 'beefier' computer equipment and expected longer production times, but there is where quad-core machines in parallel stepped into play.

The video score was composed right in FL Studio, a very straight forward music composition software that have video capabilities. An Arturia midi keyboard was used to play the orchestra string chords and choir voices. A sparse 8 beat intro into the action was literally lead by a powerful Vanguard sine lead with rich sub-sonic qualities, steady rhythm and increasing intensity that gives the introduction a dramatic but contained impact.

The percussive, rounded boom that takes place when Adona opens her eyes was created pitching slightly down a drum kick, softening its curve attack, adding heavy compression and applying a low-pass filter to boost that 'vacuum' sound sensation. All the other instruments where mix within' FL Studio in order to avoid exporting tracks into Nuendo for mixing and thus reducing the number of sound assets to control at all times. the whole mix was processed through a small FX chain made of a low ratio compresion with really low threshold, a parametric EQ to re-tune some troubling bands and a multiband compressor to achieve greater overall volume. The final result was then imported into Adobe Audition in order to add in synch with the video all the sound effects and speaking voices. Those were given some ambience by and positioning them in 3D space and mixed to stereo with a peak limiter added to the main master bus to tame and balance the final score.
The audio score was finally imported to Adobe Premiere, and the audio stream locked to the video stream. High definition using blue ray's MP4 format was used to publish the resulting footage.