TIME FISSURE STUDIOS 10 Bynner Street, #1 Boston, MA 02130 phone: 617-571-7999 fax: 617-314-7446 Web: http://www.timefissure.com

The Story
This 5 minute animation is the story of X, a small sewn figure that views himself as more that what he really is. Through self-realization, discovery, and creative expression, he finds that his existence is not what it appears to be.

xero is the first animated short from TimeFissure Studios. Up to this point in time the TimeFissure team have worked projects together in the corporate arena, and as individual contractors and freelancers. But in the hearts and minds of the TimeFissure team there has been the drive to create stories that invoke, enlighten, and entertain the viewer. TimeFissure has plans to create other entertaining animated shorts and music videos, integrating compelling stories and characters the audience can connect with.

“We wanted people to walk away from this piece not asking why we did it that way, but instead saying they’re glad we did it that way”, says Director Palmer Stinson. “When we were writing the story, we were more concerned with making the character someone that the viewer can relate to. We didn’t fuss as much about the level of visual fluff we could give it”.

TheProduction

LIGHTS
Light rigs were constructed in 3ds Max and used in all shots. The lighting rigs were adjusted for each shot to "tweak" the tone of the noir style lighting from the primary overhead light.

“Lighting was very, very important for this piece as is with most 3D animation”, says Palmer. “The lights in this animation had their own rigging. When we did the first set designs, everything would look great from far away, but when we got up close, we found that we needed to have better control over tone and shadows. We came up with this rig that ran on a track using IK. We could quite literally push the rigs around where we needed them for each shot. Vertical tracks for shadow softening and horizontal tracks for shadow accents. Since the lights were instances of each other, telling them what to hit and how to hit it was as easy as setting one light for each rig. We did struggle in the beginning to find right placement for the lighting when we were designing the set. The set went through many changes before we could get just the right balance”.

CAMERAS
“Camera work was a major challenge for this piece. As we were building the first set designs, We realized very quickly, that based off of our storyboards, our original camera placement wasn’t going to work very well for many shots”, says Palmer. “We found that some of the desk clutter was starting to be in the way at certain angles we wanted. I can recall a point when Lisa Coviello (who co-wrote and co-produced xero) was sitting over my shoulder as I kept nudging this camera around on a particular shot. She looked at me and asked me if this was going to continue to be a problem. I wanted to say no, but the expression on my face said yes. I looked to her and said... we need a cameraman. Originally, we did not intend to have a director of photography for this piece. We were going to rely on tricks we learned from previous work or we were going to use more straightforward camera work. Later that day, I was on the phone with Michael Sterling who is nothing short of a wizard as far as I’m concerned. I’ve known Michael since we were kids, and we have worked on projects together before. He has done camera work for pre-recorded and live TV, but never set 3D cameras before. He adjusted to 3D cameras quite well.”

ACTION
“Before we wrote the story”, says Palmer, “we had a brainstorming session. The goal was to find a balance with this animation between production time, resource availability, and story believability. We noticed there was a lot of cartoony stuff out there. We also noticed a great deal of science fiction and fantasy looking stuff, as well as lots of high luster looking renderings that push photo-realism. We like those types of work, but we wanted to do something that was feasible in the time frame that we had for production. We were not so concerned about pushing 3ds Max to the limit. We were more concerned about telling an entertaining story with a compelling character. Plus we really wanted to do something that was just slightly off beat.”

The main character utilized a custom (yet simple) rig created with default bones, splines and helpers. One of the goals of the project was to keep it relatively simple. The studio also made the decision to not use after market plug-ins for xero. Instead they relied on the default plug-ins and tools of 3ds Max. In doing so, they significantly reduced the amount of lead-time that would have been needed to implement the after market plug-ins.

CUTTING ROOM FLOOR
“Originally there was going to be an opening sequence with a scene looking out the window to the alley below”, explains Palmer. “It was intended to set up the idea of the main character (xero) living in a shady part of town. I really liked the look that was developing for the shot. We ended up removing it. Had we used it, we would have gone over the five minutes of run time allotted for the whole animation. We also decided that keeping the shot would make the animation less friendly seeing how there was to be a drunk person hanging on the dumpster in the alley. I really wanted this scene. I felt it brought certain [extra] darkness to the whole piece. It was hard to let the shot go. Anyone who has worked on a scene only to have it removed knows what I am talking about. It’s really tough sometimes not to get attached to a scene after you have put your heart into it. Ultimately you have to let it go just to move on the next shot”.

MUSIC
xero features an original musical score by composer Stephen Gilbane who studied film scoring at Berklee College of Music. A longtime musician with many improvisational comedy troupes in New England as well as short films and documentaries, this is Stephens first foray into animation.

“He really came through with accenting this character with just the right score”, exclaims Co-Producer Lisa Coviello. “He really captured the spirit of our character.”

Palmer adds, “Stephen let us know almost immediately the direction he wanted to go for this piece. I’ve done many aspects of production in my career, but I’m not musician, so I’ll admit I had trouble at first visualizing the instrumentation as he explained it to me. Stephen has a great reputation and came highly recommended from a contact we have at MIT. I told him to go for it and to not be afraid to experiment. I was nervous a few times wondering what we were going to get back from him, though I did enjoy the nervous excitement of it all. In the end, he nailed it.”

Stephen explains, "I started the design of the score from xero’s dance, and decided I wanted to write an actual (short) song for that segment. I wanted a sound that was quirky and almost vaudeville, a cross between Tom Waites and Leon Redbone, so I used some clanky percussion, an accordion, and an upright bass. I didn't think I could maintain that approach across the whole piece, so the rest of the score for the animation is pretty standard orchestral underscore. That also had the effect of setting xero's dance, which is his emotional high point, apart from the rest of the piece."

RENDERING
Multiple render passes were used for several shots and were then composited in After Effects. The renders were processed by some interesting machine configurations.

Palmer explains, “For construction of the renderfarm, we were taking pieces out of computers that had long seen their peak usefulness. My brother Mark knew which processors would work inside of which motherboards. So one night in a basement in Kansas City, we got together, cranked up our favorite streaming radio station and built machines for the renderfarm. We really had to think ahead about which machines were going to get the tougher renders so we could best leverage speed, storage, and memory.”

Renderfarm Manager Mark Stinson adds, “There's also a space, power & heat constraint of having a monitor per render node on a home grown renderfarm. Having diverse headless boxes, we needed the ability of console management for anything with a GUI, as Microsoft Management Console (mmc) for Windows and Backburner already had their own remote management. Windows OS dialog boxes don't always appear in the Event Viewer logs, and you still have to dismiss them. We also cranked up the internal speaker's volume on every box so we could hear audio cues whenever there could be a problem. I choose to use the UltraVNC (http://ultravnc.org) package for remote management. The Windows 2000 Pro doesn't have a built-in Terminal Services like Windows XP Pro. Other VNC servers are just as good, but UltraVNC has extra features & characteristics specific to Windows. Almost all Windows VNC servers (UltraVNC, RealVNC, TightVNC, etc.) can be installed as a service so they can be remotely turned on/off via the mmc to minimize the VNC Server load to only when we needed to view a machine's console. To further eliminate the need of unnecessary VNC usage, I established a scheme of network file shares of the render output directories. This allowed us to peek into each box to see how it was progressing. Network Security is also a big concern. UltraVNC also has some encryption plug-ins, but being on a closed network, we didn't have to worry about encrypting the VNC or fileshare connections.”

The entire project from concept to completion had a scheduled time frame of 8 months. The 8 month production pipeline was designed to be fine-tuned to a significantly shorter schedule for use on future productions. Future productions will include other shorts and music videos.

“I have done many different aspects of production over the years, but this was my first time in the directors chair”, Palmer admits. “For anyone wanting to direct I would recommend they first do some work in as many specialties as they can. It makes it easier to be able to communicate properly with the people you are directing. Directing is no joke... it’s tough. It’s hard work, long hours, and a very rewarding experience.”

The animation will be available for viewing at SIGGRAPH in Boston from August 1st to 3rd 2006. Members of the TimeFissure crew will be walking the SIGGRAPH exhibition floor showing xero.

The xero teaser can be viewed at http://www.timefissure.com/xero.htm

TimeFissure Studios is located in Boston, Massachusetts.

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