Though it has been awhile, we have updated Officer Murphy, here is a look at mocapped animation used to create the shot of Murphy walking through the deserted graveyard. We’ve uploaded the video to Youtube, but we’ll try to get a much higher-resolution video uploaded to the site in the next day or so.

Fortunately, we can keep working on other stuff as this renders in the background across our render farm. So, tomorrow, we’ll be working on Poser animations from the motion capture data we grabbed earlier this week.

We also spent some time in the Motion Capture studio, and we managed to capture motions for Murphy and Kowalski for three separate scenes. We’ll be doing a few more days of Mocap for this project before we get right into the character animation in Poser.

We put in some time today working on what will be the first scene of the film. This is an opening shot of the Bayou where Officer Murphy has his very bad day.

The scene itself was rendered in Vue 6, and based on the render time we may just decide to do this shot old-school. Meaning: we render out a single oversized frame and then use After Effects to simulate a zoom in on the frame. Done right, this can be quite effective.

The problem is that to do this shot, we’re talking about 0.5to 1.0 Hours render time per frame, over 300 frames. Even the render farm won’t be much help there. This is one of the advantages of going non-photorealistic in your animated films – you can get away with time-saving tricks like these.

Today, we were able to complete the texturing of Officer Murphy’s co-star, Officer Kowalski. We used Daz’s Victoria 3 as the foundation for Kowalski and used the Real World Heroes – Police for the uniform. Both of these are available from Daz3d.

Although the uniform itself is only available for Michael 3 and David 3, this was easily addressed by using PhilC’s Wardrobe Wizard 2.0. The clothing conversion proved to be very straightforward.

The one hitch which did occur was in the conversion of the Utility Belt. To ensure that the holsters and pouches were consistent with Officer Murphy’s, we ran the Wardrobe Wizard conversion on the Utility Belt itself and then used Modo to re-position duplicate holsters from Murphy’s belt. It took us a few tries to get it, but as you can see, it looks just fine on Kowalski.

We also took the opportunity to change the shading style we’ll be using on our characters. Rather than using the tri-tone celshading style we used on Murphy yesterday, we’ll be going with a soft-edged duo-tone shading style for the production. Ordinarily, this would mean another half-day spent retexturing Murphy to the new shading style, but one of the nice features of Unimesh figures like Daz’s Michael 3 and Victoria 3 is that they share surfacing data. One figure’s material sets can be applied to another’s with just a click of the mouse. And since we used Wardrobe Wizard to convert the uniforms, those share surfacing data as well–another click or two to convert Murphy’s uniform to match Kowalski’s and we’re set.

So far, we’ve used standard poses to show off Murphy and Kowalski. Next week, we’ll animate them using motion-capture-driven animations.

Day 4 was spent finalizing the texturing on our lead character, Officer Murphy. We decided right from the onset of the project that we would be going for a Non-Photorealistic look to the film for two reasons.

First, NPR allows you to really accelerate production by simplifying your lighting rig for each shot. With less lights to worry about, you can get your scenes set up and rendering faster.

Second, we really like the “toon” look. We’ve used a combination of shaders, textures, and post-processing techniques to get a look that replicates the cel-shaded stylings of anime and cartoons.

Officer Murphy is based upon the Daz Michael 3 character, with the Real World Heroes – Police clothing and props set.

As production continues on Officer Murphy’s Bad Day, we managed to reach a crucial milestone today. We finished and locked down the script.

Our locked script runs to just over 14 pages and 76 scenes. That seems like a lot, but our writing on this script is a bit more verbose than what would be considered the industry standard. We wrote the script so that each scene represents a single shot, including camera directions and scene transitions, as well as a detailed description of the action. We think that the script will actually weigh in at 30 seconds/page rather than film’s usual 1 minute/page.

On any film project, the script is the roadmap delineating all of the assets, performances, and FX required to reach the objective – a completed film. Though there may be some additions and deletions to the roadmap as the project moves towards completion, the script covers every major and minor element anticipated to be part of the film. Without it – without having a script ready to go – there is really no way to complete a film.

As such, the script is the first priority in the preproduction process.

We’ll look at preproduction in more detail in later posts, but broadly speaking, preproduction covers everything you do before actually creating frames of film, or animation in our case. Because the preproduction process is so broad, it becomes very easy to get bogged down or sidetracked. The script is what will keep you moving forwards as efficiently as possible.

If you’re starting out on your own project, focus on getting your script done first. It will make everything else in filmmaking that much easier and faster

Well, we started the project yesterday, managing to get about four pages of scriptwriting done. We also did some searches for assets to use in the project. In short, the bare bones of pre-production. Since we’re going for speed on this project, we’re going to keep the story fairly simple.  Here’s the logline:

“Officer Murphy thought meeting the first Zombie of the day was bad enough. Then he ran out of ammo.”

Nice and simple. And it makes scripting very simple (and fast) as well.

Today consisted of pre-production and scriptwriting. We used existing assets to build up Officer Murphy by giving him a police uniform. Unfortunately, we just couldn’t find the right hat. No problem–into Modo for about an hour and Officer Murphy has a very nice new chapeau.

We also kept working on the script. We’re up to about nine pages as of this post, and we’re not done for the day. This is going to be a very short film, so we’ll probably top out at 12 to 15 pages. We’re actually writing it in a shooting style script, so it’s much more verbose than a standard script. Camera directions are explicitly given, and there are a lot of scene breaks since we try to write each shot as if it were an individual scene. It will work much better this way once we start prepping the shots for production.

The title? Well, we’re calling it “Officer Murphy’s Bad Day.”