Here's the process of creating an animatic.
Welcome to the second part of our short film making journey. This time we’re going to be doing a very important step in the process, cutting an animatic. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself when you’ve got an idea that you love, but how do you know if that idea is even going to work, or what it’s going to look like? That’s why the animatic is so important.
In this video we will block out the shots in Cinema 4D, rendering out some previz-style playblasts that we can then import into Premiere for editing. We’ll create an animatic that will serve as the framework to start animating and creating final shots
{{lead-magnet}}
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:
Music (00:00:02):
[intro music]
Joey Korenman (00:00:11):
So we've got ourselves an idea and it's even starting to feel fleshed out a little bit. Uh, we found a music track. We like, we found a cool quote to sort of tie the whole thing together. So, I mean, we're in business now, the next step is to cut an animatic so we can figure out how long each shot is going to be and to get a feel for what the final piece will be like. So you can do this using the Photoshop sketches, but since this is going to be a cinematic 3d piece, I thought it made a little more sense to do the rough edit, kind of like a [inaudible] on like a movie, uh, just using rough 3d shapes and blocking out the framing and action and camera movement as quickly as possible. So let's just jump right into cinema 4d and get going.
Joey Korenman (00:01:02):
Our goal in cinema 4d right now is to try and strip away all of the unnecessary decision-making all we want to figure out is where's the camera going to go? How fast is the camera gonna move? How's the framing going to look? So we are going to totally ignore details about, you know, the way the building's going to look and, and you know, the exact textures and lighting and all that stuff we're going to use. We're not gonna focus on that right now. So first I want to set up my scene, um, and I'm going to set it up using that 1920 by eight 20 resolution that we figured out, uh, in the last video. And I'm going to be working at 24 frames a second. When you change your frame rate in cinema 4d, you have to do it in two spots. You have to change it here and your render settings, but you have to have to, you also have to change it here in your project settings.
Joey Korenman (00:01:52):
Cool. So now we're, uh, we're set up. We're good to go. Um, one thing I like to do, so cinema 4d sort of, uh, it puts like a little darken kind of filter overlaid on your viewer here. So you can see your render area, but it's not very dark. It doesn't give me a great idea of what my framing is going to look like. So what I like to do is hit the shift V hot key. It brings up your viewport settings for whatever the current active viewport is. And if you go to your view settings, you can actually change this tinted border to have more capacity. So you can totally block it out. I don't want to do that, but I do want it to be fairly dark. I'm gonna leave it at maybe 80%. So now I just get a much better idea of what my frame is going to look like.
Joey Korenman (00:02:36):
All right. So there are, um, there's a few elements that we just need to add to the scene. So obviously there's going to be, um, a building. All right. And so the stand in for that can just be a cube. Um, and so I do want to make sure that I'm actually using the ground plane here as the ground, and, you know, by default cinema brings in 3d objects kind of in the middle of the ground. And so I'm going to do is, um, I'm just going to sort of roughly shape this like a building. Um, and then I'm going to hit the C key to make it editable. I'm going to open up in the mesh menu, uh, access center, which is one of the most useful tools and all of a cinema 4d. And I'm going to turn on auto update and then just scoot the Y down to negative 100.
Joey Korenman (00:03:22):
And you can see this just moves the axis around on your object. Right. Um, so I just want it right in the middle, but at the bottom, there you go. And so what's cool is that now I can just zero out the white position on the cube and it's directly on the ground. Cool. So there's our buildings stand in. Awesome. All right. So then we're also going to need a plant and we're also going to need a ground. Um, so I'm just going to use a plane for this, and this can be our, our ground. Um, and I don't need any detail in it. I'm going to turn the width and height segments down to one, and then I'm just going to scale this thing up. So it's really, really big. All right, cool. Um, so next, we're going to need a plant and we're going to need some mountains.
Joey Korenman (00:04:06):
And, um, you know, at this point, like I want to make sure that I'm kind of staying true to the original image and kind of some of this development that we did in the last video. So I'm actually going to go into the window menu and open up a picture viewer, and I want to open up, um, one of the frames, right? So I've got these JPEGs that I kicked out a Photoshop of the rough frames I did, um, which will help me with framing. And so then I can take that picture view, or I'll just dock it over here, make this part a little bit bigger. Right. And so now I can kind of reference this as I'm over here working on my framing. Cool. All right. So we are going to need some sort of little plants, so I'm just going to make a new cinema 4d project really quickly, so we can do a very simple plant and all I need is just like a little vine with a cool kind of angle to it.
Joey Korenman (00:04:58):
Um, so I'm just going to draw one. I'm going to go into my front view here and just kind of like draw like a little thing like that little spline. Um, and then I'm gonna grab an incited spline and a sweetener and just put those together. Um, now you'll probably notice some going fairly fast through this tutorial and that's because again, this series I'm hoping it can be a little bit more, um, you know, a little bit more of just like a peek behind the scenes, um, then you know, a, a strict, like, here's exactly how to do this technique, because I think that that is cool. It's cool to learn that, but it's even better to learn how to put all this stuff together. All right. So we've got this, I'm going to take the spline type. I'm going to turn off intermediate points.
Joey Korenman (00:05:47):
Um, I'll just set it to none. And so now I've got this very low poly, simple looking kind of, you know, kind of stem make it a little center and, um, you know, for the, for the actual flower part of it, I'm just going to add a platonic and I'm just gonna position it right there. Okay. So there's kind of like this little, this little head of the flower, um, and that's going to be a stand in for, you know, the, this more interesting looking thing that we'll do later. And then just, so it kind of looks a little bit closer to the, uh, to the drawing here. I'm going to add like a little leaf and that could just be maybe, um, maybe just a little polygon, right. And I can make it a triangle polygon. I can shrink it, shrink away down. He's my tea, hot key for that. Um, and then I need to rotate it so that it's actually facing the right way and I'm going to zoom in and just kind of position it in the right spot. And that's too big, but get something like that, you know, just trying to just try to roughly get some idea. Right. So there's a leaf, and then I kind of see one up here. So let me just add one more, rotate this guy around this way, move it up here, make sure that it's actually touching the flower.
Joey Korenman (00:07:06):
There we go. All right. Maybe move it a little lower than that. Okay, cool. So this is our little stand in flour that we just made in like two minutes. I'm going to group all these option, GS the hot key, and I'm just going to call it a plant. And then I'm going to copy this, go back to this shot here and paste it. All right. So now we've got our ground, our building and our plants. All right. And, uh, the plant is right in the middle of the building. So let's move that out here somewhere. Um, this is, this would also be great time to say, this is what I want to just go ahead and, uh, and save this here. All right. I want to make a new folder called [inaudible] college shots. Right. And, uh, and actually let me make another one. And these would be, this will be the previous folder and we'll call this S oh one shot.
Joey Korenman (00:07:58):
Oh one. There you go. All right. So now what I need to do is I need to make sure that that plant is right on the ground. So I am going to go back, grab that, uh, access center tool again, and I'm going to do the same thing. Uh, I need, I need to make sure why is all the way at negative 100, but because there's a whole bunch of objects here, I need to make sure that I have include children and use all objects on. All right. So now it will actually look through this entire, this entire setup here and find the lowest point and put the access there. So now I can hop into coordinates and zero it out, and it is on the floor. It's directly on the floor. So now let's try to frame this. Let's start to get some sort of rough framing here.
Joey Korenman (00:08:39):
Okay. Now you'll notice that the way I drew this, you're seeing the plant and you're seeing the top of the building. Now, just using the default kind of camera here. You're noticing probably that this building doesn't look anything like this building, right? Because this is very straight looking and this is angular and very dramatic. And so, you know, the reason that you're getting these extreme angles is a, because I drew it and I could draw whatever I want, but also because in my head, this is a very wide angle shot. So we actually need to use a wide angle camera. Now, if you don't know what a wide angle camera is, um, that's something you should Google, it's a little bit beyond the scope of this tutorial. Um, and actually there's an excellent grayscale gorilla tutorial that I'll link to, uh, that he, where Nick talks about different cameras and stuff like that, highly recommend that.
Joey Korenman (00:09:29):
But I'm going to use a very wide lens here. I'm going to try like a 15, that is a pretty wide lens. And what, what a wide lens does. All right. If, if, uh, if you may allow me, you can see how it really distorts perspective, right. It really exaggerates things. And that's how you can get these really dramatic angles. Right. So now this is a lot more dramatic. It's a lot closer to this. Okay. Um, so we need to frame the shot and I want to try and get it as close to this as possible. Okay. So what I want to do is I'm actually gonna use the coordinates manager here because I want the camera to be pretty much on the ground, but just above it just a little bit. And then I'm going to use the pitch rotation to actually kind of position it.
Joey Korenman (00:10:16):
And, you know, then we can come into one of these views and just kind of move it right where we want it. Okay. And I think, you know, somewhere like this, maybe we want it, I want that building to be a little bit bigger in the frame. So I'm gonna move the camera closer and then I'm gonna look up and I'm gonna move it down a little bit more. And you know, we're going to kind of have to fight this a little bit to make this really, really work the way we want. Maybe I need to shrink the building a little bit. Right. So that it fits in the frame. All right. So there we go. So now our building's in the frame and now I need to get the plant in the frame. So I'm gonna go to my top view here, and I'm just going to move that plant and it's going to be right about there.
Joey Korenman (00:11:05):
Now, one thing we need to be really, really careful of is we need to make sure that the scale of the building and the scale of the plant makes sense. Um, because if we don't do that and you can see right now that they're almost the same size. So that makes absolutely no sense. So I need to scale this plant way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way down. All right. And it doesn't need to be physically accurate or anything like that, but it does need to be a lot smaller than the building. Otherwise, it just won't really make a lot of sense. So now that we've shrunk that plant down, let's go back to our shot and let's zoom in here and let's move that plant very close to the camera so that now we're actually seeing it. Okay. And I'm going to try and roughly position it where it was here.
Joey Korenman (00:11:53):
And if I wanted some help with that, by the way, if you go into your camera and you go to composition, you can turn on composition helpers. And if you turn on grid, it gives you a rule of thirds grid. And so, you know, what I could do is, uh, I could take the building for example, and move it. So it's a little bit more right on that third if I want it to. Right. Um, and I could push it back in space like that. Cool. And then I could do the same thing with the plant, the plant. I could just kind of scooch over until it was, by the way, if you hold option, it allows you to do smaller adjustments. I could scooch it until it's right on the third. Right. And then push it backward and kind of mess with it until it's in the right spot.
Joey Korenman (00:12:33):
Cool. Um, so, okay. So let me, let me turn those helpers off for a minute. Cause I want to talk about something. So the way that I, uh, I just completely ruined my camera. There we go. The, the way that I drew this shot over here is basically like a triangle pointing up like this. And so even the, even the way that this plant is kind of bent, it sort of reinforces and make sure I go up here and this plant isn't really doing that. Right. And so I want it to, I want it to, I want to know without spending too much time, I want to make sure, um, that this plant is, you know, at least mimicking the shape of this one. And so I'm just rotating it now. Right. And so now just by making sure it's facing the right way, you can see it's pointing up there.
Joey Korenman (00:13:17):
Great. Okay. So we're getting pretty close to this framing. Um, and then we've got all these mountains back here, so I don't want to actually start modeling anything. So I'm just gonna use pyramids for that. All right. So what I'm going to do is take a pyramid. These pyramids need to be enormous because they're supposed to be mountains. They need to be much bigger than everything else. And then I need to move them back in space. And what I'm going to do is just move them backwards. Um, I'm going to hit the, a, the C key one more time to make them editable. So I can go to the access center tool and make sure that the access of these things is at the bottom. That way I can make sure that they are on the floor. There we go. Okay. Which means this needs to be a little further back.
Joey Korenman (00:13:59):
All right, cool. So there's, there's a mountain back here. Maybe I can rotate this thing. So there's a little more, it looks a little more interesting. Right. Uh, and then I'm going to just copy and paste it and move one over here. And I'm just trying to mimic this kind of contour that we achieved here. All right. And I can rotate this a little bit and move it back in space a little bit like this. Just try to find a nice little spot for it. And then maybe this one needs to be a little bit bigger in the frame. There we go. And then this one I'm going to copy and paste again. And I'm going to move this further back and try to get some, you know, just a little bit more, a little bit more something. All right. And maybe this one I can just kind of like stretch out a little bit too.
Joey Korenman (00:14:48):
Cool. All right. So let's take a look at this. I've very quickly, very roughly blocked out where those mountains are going to be, and I'm just making sure to maintain that, that nice kind of triangle shape to the whole thing. All right. So let me group these, let me clean up my scene a little bit. This is mountains, and then we've got the ground, the building and the plants. Okay. Let me capitalize this. So my OCD doesn't, uh, doesn't get the best of me. And so now we need to figure out like an interesting camera move for this. And, you know, so what I'm thinking is I kind of want to see the building and then we, we maybe pull back and reveal this plant. I think that would be a cool camera move. Okay. So, uh, how are we going to do that? You know, camera moves, there's a million ways to do them.
Joey Korenman (00:15:37):
Um, you know, so one way is I could just sort of actually just animate the camera like this, but, you know, generally, like we're going to want to be animating the camera, not just on one or two axes, but we're also gonna be rotating it. Um, and so there's actually a very cool tool in cinema 4d that makes this a lot easier. So what we're gonna do, um, let me first just frame this up exactly how I want it. Okay. So this, this framing right here, it's pointed right at the top of that, this thing is crowding the top of the frame. I might even want to just tilt up just a little bit more, right. Just a little bit. It really makes that building look imposing. So that is going to be the end shot. Okay. So I'm going to take this camera. I'm going to re I'm going to rename it end.
Joey Korenman (00:16:25):
All right. Then I'm going to copy it and I'm going to rename it start. Okay. So then what I want to do is look through the start camera and I want to put that star camera much closer to the building and maybe even like looking up at it like this, right. I mean, that's kind of an interesting looking frame. And so that's the start. That's the end. Okay. And I'm going to just hit the top little traffic light on both of those. So I don't see them in the company more. Now I'm going to add another camera and actually I could just copy one of these, turn this one on, and we're going to call this, um, camera. Oh one now on camera. Oh, one. I am going to right click and I'm going to add a motion. Camera, camera, morph tag. What this tag does.
Joey Korenman (00:17:11):
It lets you create two or more cameras and then morph between them. Uh, and it's a really easy way of, you know, having complex camera moves. So all I need to do now is go into my camera, morph tag, drag the start camera into camera one and the end camera into camera two. And now if I animate this blend, it will animate between them. All right. And there's, you'll see in a minute why this is really, really amazingly useful. All right. So first thing I need to do is add some more frames to this animation. I'm just going to make it 250 frames. I don't know how fast this needs to be yet. Um, but let's go into animation mode in the animation layout. So on, I'm going to start by putting a key frame on the blend 0%, and then I'm going to go forward.
Joey Korenman (00:17:57):
I dunno, 96 frames. We'll go to a hundred. Cool. So by default cinema 4d gives you an easy ease in after effects terms and easy ease curve, right? So it eases out eases in. And so, you know, for a lot of things, that's kind of what you want for camera moves. It's generally not what you want. Okay. So if we cut to this shot, right, and then the camera starts moving, it's going to feel a little weird. I don't want it to, you know, to, to feel like we cut to the camera and then the camera starts moving. It feels better when we cut in the camera's already moving. So I'm gonna take this Bezier handle here and just line it up like this. So what that's doing is it's, it's telling cinema 4d that on frame zero, this thing is already moving. All right.
Joey Korenman (00:18:47):
So it'll work much better as a cut and then it eases into that final position. Okay. So you could, you could actually manipulate this curve, but there's even a better way to do it. I'm going to just go into my key frame mode here, uh, and select all the blend key frames. And I'm gonna set them the linear right. Option L is the hot key for that, by the way. So if we look at our curve, now it's a linear curve, which is going to feel weird. Watch the end of this move. It's just going to stop. Suddenly. It feels bad, right? It doesn't ease, but that's okay because in the camera morph tool, there's this little arrow under blend that you can open up and then you can actually manipulate this curve. And this curve can actually control, you know, basically the, the interpolation and the easing between the two cameras and this is a little bit easier to access.
Joey Korenman (00:19:41):
Okay. So, um, and it, and it, doesn't clutter up this with extra key frames. If you wanted to put like another frame here and do it like this, right. Or, or typically maybe what you do is you would put another, another point here. So you could have a much harder ease if you wanted that. Right. That, I mean, let's just see what that looks like, but it's gonna, you know, it's kinda neat, actually. It kind of like, it kinda like makes it like the camera's jumping back and then it slowly settles. It's kind of a nice little, and actually, I dunno, I was kind of doing this as a joke, but now I kind of like it because right. You know, this is the first shot of the film. So maybe like, you know, we start on black and then there's like a big, like, like a drum hit or something.
Joey Korenman (00:20:23):
And this is the first thing. Boom. Right. And there's a few seconds before you end up seeing that plant. Right. Like you're looking at the building and then the plant comes into view men, happy accidents, people. So looking at this, I want this shot to take a little bit longer, I think. Okay. Um, and really, I just want, I want a, more of a pause before we see this plant. So let me just come in here and actually scooch this back a little more, just so that the ease on this, you know, basically like th this ending part, this ease here takes a little bit longer. Okay. And then let's take a look at that. So we've got that cool kind of jumped back move, and then we see the plant. That's really interesting. Yeah. I like that. I do like that. And because we made this kind of to scale, you can see that by the time this is in the frame, these things are barely moving because they're really far away.
Joey Korenman (00:21:21):
Right. And it really adds to the scale of the thing. Great. All right. So this is working pretty well so far, so I like that as far as our first shot. Okay. Now, once the camera comes to a stop, I don't really want it to come to a complete stop. And remember, I don't know how long we're going to sit on this shot. So, you know, what I want to do is basically keep that camera moving just a little bit. And so this is why using this camera morph tag is awesome because all I have to do now is animate the end camera drifting backwards a little bit. So let me look through the ending camera and you can see the ending. Camera's not moving at all, but what I could do is maybe come somewhere in the middle here, and I'm going to put key frames on X and Z for that camera. And I'm going to go somewhere here and I'm just going to slowly. I'm just, I'm just going to have it drift backwards. Okay. And I'm just going to kind of eyeball where it's going to go. Okay. And put key frames there. And so you can see that it's just drifting backwards a little bit. Okay. And it's probably drifting a little bit too much kind of sideways. So I want to push it back this way.
Joey Korenman (00:22:29):
Cool. There we go. All right. Then what I want to do is go into my position curves, right? For the, uh, for that end camera. And I want to make sure that they make sense. So, um, I want them to ease in, cause I do want that move to kind of be blended. Like there's two camera moves happening now. There's the one caused by this morph tag. And now there's actually key frames on the ending camera. And I want those key frames to blend into the morph motion, but I don't want them to ever stop. So I'm just gonna bend that down like this. I'm going to do the same thing on Z.
Joey Korenman (00:23:08):
There we go. All right. So now if I look through the morph camera, it's gonna morph back to this camera and then it's going to keep drifting very slowly all the way to the end. Okay. Or all the way until this last key frame, which is at 1 74. So let's actually just move. Let's just move that back to like 1 92 and we'll make 1 92, the last frame of this. All right. And let's just do a quick preview of that. Cool. And I'm trying to like hear the music in my head and maybe the voiceover starting now, one I'm not loving is as this thing, drifts, this composition starting to get a little unbalanced. And I think we might need to make sure we might need to have that. You might need to have that drift a little bit, a little bit. We might have to cheat it a little bit.
Joey Korenman (00:24:09):
Right. It's getting pretty empty over here. And now there, there is going to be probably another mountain over there and that might help it, but we could also, we could also do this. We could go to this key frame and put a position I'm on the ending camera right now. I'll put a position on the heading rotation and then we'll go here and we'll just, just turn that camera. Jeez. A little bit just like that, just to rebalance that shot a little bit. Um, and now, because I changed some things, I just need to make sure my animation curves are still doing what I want and they're not, of course we go like this and we'll look at the rotation too. All right. And let's see what that looks like.
Joey Korenman (00:24:55):
Cool. All right. So we, you know, we kind of settle and we just get this nice little drift and I think it might be cool too, because I like that subtle rotation that's happening. Maybe we can kind of incorporate a little bit of that at the beginning too. So maybe that start camera. Um, I could just kind of rotate it a little bit this way. Right. So that we're rotating that way kind of already in the beginning. Right. And then what I could do too, is I could come to the, uh, I could come to my key frames here for the ending camera and I can start them much earlier. So that, that rotation actually starts to happen on the initial drift. And I know I'm going through this fast, but I hope that you're kind of picking up a few things here and there and, and you're going to, you know, get excited to go play around with these camera tools and try to make these like interesting kind of cinematic camera moves.
Joey Korenman (00:25:49):
All right. So this feels pretty good. Um, and that's it, I mean, like, we're, we're basically ready to like use this, um, in our edit. So let me, um, let me show you how I like to set up shots to get rendered when I'm doing stuff like this. So I'm gonna go into my render settings here. I've got my standard render settings and I am just going to hold command and duplicate them. All right. And I'm going to call this play blast, play bass. I believe play blast is a Maya term. Um, but it basically just means a very, very fast software render. Um, and so what I need to do is just set up a render setting here that is going to give me a very fast render that I could just save out and then import into premiere. So I'm going to change the, uh, the size to half HD, some a lock, my ratio, change the top to nine 60 and this'll make the renders four times faster.
Joey Korenman (00:26:45):
And then I'm going to change the frame range to all frames. And then I'm going to change the renderer to software renderer. Okay. And software renderer basically just creates frames. That look just like what you're seeing here. So they render almost instantly if I hit shift R and I don't have a save name set up, but that's okay. I'm just going to hit. Yes. You could see how quickly it rendered that whole shot for me, 192 frames in like, you know, three seconds. And this is what it looks like. It doesn't look exactly like this, but it's close enough and it's going to work perfectly for our, uh, you know, for what we need. Okay. So here it, here, it is at a hundred percent. All right. And you can see, like, you know, now there's some things about this that might throw someone's eye off the ground here is like totally black.
Joey Korenman (00:27:37):
Um, and that might look a little weird. So what we could do is just put a light in the scene and I'm just going to put the light, like way back here and way up high. This is a pretty big scene, but I'm just going to put a light in the scene, um, just to, just to light things a little bit, um, so that when we then do our play blast again, you'll now have, you know, some lighting, right. Just so you can see everything, you get a little bit better idea of the, um, you know, the kind of tones you're going to get. And I, and I'm going to turn that light down a little bit too. It doesn't need to be like so bright. Maybe it could be like 50% and see what that looks like. That's too dark. Let's go up to 75.
Joey Korenman (00:28:25):
Yeah, that's better. Okay, cool. All right. So there you go. So now you've got the first shot, basically ready to, to render out. And now that we've got this, you know, this play blast rendered in our picture viewer, and none of the play blast is done. Uh, we're just going to go up to file and say, save as make sure that you set the type to animation. Make sure the format is quick time movie, go to the options for the QuickTime movie and, uh, for the compression type. I like to use apple pro Rez 4, 2, 2. Um, but if you're on a PC, you may not have that. You can really use anything as long as your editing application can read it. Um, you could even use H 2, 6, 4 if you're using premiere. So I'm going to do pro S 42, and I'm gonna make sure my frames per second is 24.
Joey Korenman (00:29:12):
So it matches this I'm gonna hit. Okay. And then, uh, I have a folder set up, see 40 outputs previous, and I'm just going to call this shot. Oh one V one. And just like that, it saves out a QuickTime movie and you are good to go and you can bring that in. So let's do one more shot. All right. So this was shot one. Now we're going to do shot two and I am going to actually just hit save as, and save this as a completely new cinema 4d project. So to start the second shot, let's go into startup layout here and let's open up our picture viewer and load in our second reference frame. Right. And we'll dock that over here, hide this part. All right. And let's try and get this type of shot. So I'm going to go into my start camera and I'm just going to, I'm gonna pivot to, I'm going to hold the three key on my keyboard.
Joey Korenman (00:30:09):
I'm gonna pivot around this part of the building, and I'm just going to kind of zoom in, try and line it up this way. Um, by the way, I use the 1, 2, 3 keys on the keyboard to move zoom and rotate around. Um, there's a lot of different ways to move the camera around and cinema 4d. That's how I do it. So, you know, this is still a 15 millimeter lens. It's a very wide angle lens. And you know, one of the things that wide angle lenses do is they exaggerate distance. And so, you know, the plant, which is down there. I mean, if I hit render and do a quick render, it's just a pixel. You can't even see it. So, um, for this shot, I'm going to use a different lens. And, um, you know, why don't you use a little bit of a longer lens, it'll compress the distance.
Joey Korenman (00:30:52):
So why don't you use like a 75 millimeter lens? Okay. That's also going to get rid of some of that distortion, um, that we were seeing on like the edge of the building here. Uh, I'm also going to hold the right mouse button as I rotate this camera, just so I can like Dutch the camera a little bit and try and get an even more extreme, you know, kind of angle coming out of the building here. And what I want is for this building to be pointing like, you know, like there's lines literally pointing right to that plant. Okay. So here's my building. And then the plant is way over here. So I want the plant up here. So, you know, there's kind of two ways to look at this. I could try to frame the camera to actually get as close as possible to this while leaving the plant where it is, because that would be more accurate, but who cares?
Joey Korenman (00:31:40):
This is filmmaking, right? So you, you cheat, um, and you do this in our, on a real set all the time, too. You move the camera. All of a sudden the shot doesn't work as well. So you cheat, you move stuff around. So I'm going to take this plant. Uh, I'm going to turn off the Y axis here. So I can't accidentally lift it up in the air and I'm just going to drag it and put it right where I want it. And I want it like, I don't know, right about there. Okay. And I'm just gonna like, try and find like a nice kind of camera angle where this makes sense. And I'm going to drag this thing over here. Cool. All right. So you've basically, you've got the building. You can see, this is just, it's really finicky. Just re there we go.
Joey Korenman (00:32:20):
That's pretty close. All right. And you've, you've got the building more or less pointing to the plant. Okay. It's pointing in that direction. Now there's another aspect of the shot. That's really important. Um, which is the shadow that the building is casting. Cause that's a big compositional element and we can't see that here. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna take this light and just delete it. And I'm going to add a new light. That's an infinite light. An infinite light is basically like the sun it's infinitely far away. Um, and so all of the light that it casts is directional. So let me jump out of this camera for a minute and let's, uh, let's preview this. All right. So here's my light and it doesn't matter where you position a directional light. It matters which way it's rotated. So an easy way to control that is to add a target tag to that light, and then just target something.
Joey Korenman (00:33:10):
So I could target like this building. And so then what's cool is then you can just move the light around and you can, and it'll automatically rotate. So it's a little bit easier to control an infinite light that way. So then I want to turn on Ray traced shadows, and I want to go up to my options and turn on shadows. Now this lets you, if you have a graphics card that supports this, it lets you preview shadows. This looks terrible. You can see they're very crappy shadows. So the reason this is happening is because, um, the shadow map that's being created for this preview doesn't have enough detail because it's trying to cast a shadow, basically a from everything in the scene and also onto this enormous ground plan that we've created. So what you want to do, if you're trying to preview shadows, let's go back to our start camera here.
Joey Korenman (00:34:00):
Um, actually, no, let's stay here for a minute. So, uh, what you want to do is simplify the scene as much as you can. So these mountains, we don't see them anymore. I'm going to delete them from the scene. And you saw that that changed the shadow a little bit. The big thing is you need to make the ground plane much, much smaller, and you can see as I shrink it, the resolution to that shadow map gets a lot better too. So now, if we look through the start, I can, uh, let me first move this light around. So it's actually in the right spot to cast a shadow. Let me undo what I just did. I'm a zoom in here zoom way, way, way in, and I'm gonna move that light, right? So that it's behind the building and I have to zoom way in, cause my scene is so big.
Joey Korenman (00:34:47):
There we go. And you can see I'm moving it around and you're seeing the shadow. Now here, let me go into my light settings for a minute and, uh, change the density of that shadow. So we see it, but it's not totally black. Cool. And what's awesome is I can control where that shadow is just by moving the X and Y position of that light. So if I want, if I want to pretend the sun's high up in the sky and then it's lowering and that shadows now it's like covering up the plan. I can do that. Or if I want it to kind of swing around, you know, like this, I could do it that way too. Now what I'd rather do is try to match something like this, like this, this looks cool. Um, and it might be cooler if I came over the top and I tilted a little bit more.
Joey Korenman (00:35:31):
Right. And, um, you know, I kinda want, I think now at this, I want the building to be a little bit thinner, so I'm just going to scale it a little bit, just like this. Um, so that, that shadow is not so not so fat, you know, I just want it to be a little thinner and I'm, and I'm just kind of messing with this camera a little bit more to try and get the shot that I'm sort of seeing in my head and seeing over here, there we go. That's kind of cool. All right. And I don't know, I might, I might want to actually play with a little bit of a, of a wider lens. So maybe instead of 75, why don't we go down to 50? So we get a little bit in the reason I wanted to do that. Cause I wanted a little bit of a perspective shift here and I wasn't really getting one.
Joey Korenman (00:36:17):
So if we go down to like a 25 millimeter lens, now the shadow really has a lot of perspective on it, which is cool. But now you're like so far away from the plant, but then again, we could cheat that by scaling the plant up for this shot, Purdue quick render. It's hard to see the plant, but I don't know, but this does feel pretty cool. So I don't know. Maybe we leave it. Maybe we do end up with kind of a little bit of a wider lens here. Cause I like, I like the interesting like perspective change that we're getting in that shadow. All right. So, uh, so let me, let me go ahead and just kind of tweak it, tweak the shot here a little bit. Cause now we've got too much of that building in the frame. I didn't want that much.
Joey Korenman (00:36:56):
I just wanted like some like that you can see how finicky this is. Like you can draw anything you want, but then, you know, you actually want to try and like get that shot and it doesn't really work. So I don't think I'm going to be able to get that exact shot. Um, but I still like the way this is looking and I'm gonna scale that building up a little bit more. There we go. Just so that it's actually kind of, you know, touching its own shadow. I think that'll, that'll be cool. There we go. Cool. All right. So let's say we liked that shot. Um, so we're basically going to be cutting from here to here, right? I'm just doing a quick little preview going from between my start camera, which I've moved in my end camera, which I haven't. All right. And so let's say that this is our shot.
Joey Korenman (00:37:42):
We like this. Okay. So let me, we're going to start with the light here so that the shadow isn't actually touching the plant and I'm going to, I'm going to put it pretty close though. Okay. And then let's go back to frame to the first frame and put a key frame on Y and let's say, you know, we want that to take, I don't know, three seconds, 72 frames before it actually is covered up by the light. Okay. But then it's gonna keep going. So let's, uh, let's just go here and animate this so that now it's touching it, it took three seconds. And now that plant is being covered up by the shadow. Okay. Now we can go into animate mode and we can go to the light key frames, go into the curves and I'm going to select this key frame and hit option L and this one option Ellison.
Joey Korenman (00:38:32):
Now these are linear and basically want to continue that movement all the way to the end. So I'm going to go back to my light at another Y key frame, and I'm just going to move it down until I'm basically drawing a straight line. Right. And this is how you can, um, you can basically maintain the velocity of something. And then I can just delete this key frame. I don't need it anymore. All right. And so now if I preview this, you can see that shadow creeping. Right. Very cool. All right. So now what should the camera be doing? Um, and also I'm, I'm having trouble differentiating the building from the ground right now. Um, so let's see what happens if we put another light in the scene and we move it, let's see if we can get like a little bit more or actually an even easier thing to do would be to just, uh, make a quick texture.
Joey Korenman (00:39:26):
I'm gonna hit shift F to bring up my materials and I'm just gonna put this on the building. Um, and I'm gonna make the building a little bit darker just by changing up the brightness just so we can see it. I mean, that's really, it, that's all it is like, you know, this is all just placeholder. Cool. Okay. So then I'm going to delete my end camera and I'm going to copy my start camera and rename this end. And all I want this move to do is basically to drifts. Hmm. We've got to think about this. I think what would be interesting is to drift the camera, let me short sort of mock it up. So basically drift the camera this way, because then the building is basically like imposing on the screen space of this plant. So if it started over here and kind of went like this, that would be cool.
Joey Korenman (00:40:17):
Okay. So let's have it end here and let's have it start a little bit more like this. And then we've got our morph tag on this camera and it's already animated. So we can actually just start. We can just hit play and it'll, and it'll actually preview our move. Now it's going to really, really slow actually. Here's why, here's why that wasn't really moving at all because the camera two was the end camera that we deleted. And so now we need to drag the new end camera in there. Now, if we hit it. Okay. So you remember that, um, that interesting curve we built here, so that is going to be a problem. Now we don't want that. Now what we want is a nice linear curve. All right. So I'm just going to make this linear, I'm just going to select, select the, uh, the points and make it linear. And this is going to work better as a cut. When you cut to a camera, that's already moving. It feels better. Okay. And so now you can see that shadow kind of creeping and crossing over the plant. Okay. Now I think I want that shadow to be back a little bit further at the beginning. So let me go ahead and, um, and change the Y position. So it's a little bit further back. All right. And then I just need to select light, key frames again and hit option L to make them linear.
Joey Korenman (00:41:40):
Cool. Okay. And I can use any part of this shot that I want. So, you know, I think like I'm probably only gonna need a few seconds of it, right? So like 120 frames might be all I need. So let me make all my key frames fit inside 120 frames and shorten my shorten, my shot. And so now I've got this shot. Cool. All right. So now we've got shot two done. Um, so now let me show you something. If I hit shift R to render it, we're not seeing the shadow. So the reason why I'm not seeing the shadow is because that shadow is actually it's like our graphic card is making that it's an, it's an enhanced open GL thing. So if you want to use that, you can't use the software render, you have to use the hardware render. So once you open the, the hardware render or setting this little option pops up and you can click on it and, uh, turn on enhanced, open GL and turn on shadows, and you can actually turn on anti-aliasing to and crank it up.
Joey Korenman (00:42:46):
Um, and it'll just smooth out your lines a little bit. So now we should see our shadow. There we go. So there's our shot. Okay. And if we play it, you can see there it is. Okay. So now we've got two shots ready to go, and I'm going to save this one out and then I'm going to make some more shots. So from here, I spent the next few hours making the rest of the shots, and I made sure not to focus on the details that don't matter yet. Like, you know, what the plant looks like and what the building looks like and the exact setup of the mountains and the scenery and stuff. Uh, I just used, you know, like a simple sweep nerve to make the plants. Um, so I wasn't too concerned with how I was actually going to pull this off yet.
Joey Korenman (00:43:30):
My main focus is we're framing and camera movement. And once I had the shots that I thought I needed, I took them into premiere to put together an edit. Um, first I recorded a rough voiceover track. I brought in the music from premium beat, and then I started putting together the edit now that I have all of these, uh, shots rendered out and there are eight of them. Um, and you know, I, I'm assuming I'm going to have to go back and tweak some of these once I start messing with the edit, but the goal is put together something just to help me figure out if this is even working on any level at all. So, first thing I need to do is create a new sequence. Uh, and I usually work at 10 80 resolution, 24 frames, a second, um, and premiere, uh, I'm coming from a final cut pro is what I used to use.
Joey Korenman (00:44:19):
So, um, I'm still a little confused by all these options I get with premiere, but this is the one I usually use. I just use the XD cam 10 80 P 24 setting. And why don't we call this animatic? All right. So I'm gonna start by laying out the audio. So I've got my music track here. All right. And we'll put that on track one and I'm not going to really do too much editing to it yet. Okay. I'm actually just going to leave it like that for now. We'll edit it later. Right now. It's three minutes long and change. It's obviously not going to be that long, but we'll, we'll do with that in a second. So here's the scratch voiceover that I recorded and there's a few different takes I did in here. Um, so let's just, listen. I think one of the later takes is what I liked better are often the sources of great weakness.
Joey Korenman (00:45:05):
See, this is why I want a different actor to do this. Cause I don't like the way this is sounding at all. But you know, you work with the tools you're given are often the sources, the powerful are not as powerful as they seem. Okay. So I want to just find the beginning of the scratch. Giants are not what we think they are. All right. That's the first line, the same qualities that giants are not what we think they are. Right. I liked that a little better because it's got nice separation. All right. So we'll say giants and we'll lay that in all. We'll put that on track too, and I'm not worried at all about where these things are actually ending up because that's going to move around. Once we start putting the picture down the same qualities that appear to give them strength. All right. That sounds okay. Are often the sources of great weakness are often the sources of great weakness. Let's see. I'm not really liking any of these takes, but the power I'm just going to use the are not as, are often the sources of great weakness. All right. So that's the next line.
Joey Korenman (00:46:15):
The powerful are not as powerful as they seem nor the weak is weak. The powerful are not as powerful as they seem like that. One better. The powerful are not as powerful as they seem. So we'll put that in. And then the last line, nor the weak is weak, nor the weak as weak. And I like that take best. Okay, cool. So now we've got our voiceover roughed in there. Uh, I'm just going to cut the audio right here. All right. And let's just listen to it. All right. Let me just do a quick, rough little mix here. I'm just going to bring the, uh, the music down a little bit.
Joey Korenman (00:47:03):
Giants are not the same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. Powerful, not as powerful as they see as cool. All right. So at least the tone of it is kind of what I'm going after here. So let's just start laying the shots in and see how this thing is working. All right. So we're going to start with shout one. All right. And now all of these shots were rendered at a resolution that is less than 19 20, 10 80. Um, so what I'm going to need to do is once I lay each one in, I'm going to right click it, and I'm going to say scale to frame size, and that'll just scale it up
Joey Korenman (00:47:58):
Right now. There's this long buildup on the music until this first piano hit. And I don't want any of that. I just want that piano hit giant. I want that to start off the edit. All right. So I'm going to, uh, Michigan to take this and slip it a little bit. I'm gonna slip it two frames. Here we go, John. So that's now the first note we hear. Okay. And the reason for that is because now let me scoot all of these, uh, voiceover audio sections down. Cause now you've got this cool piano hit right at the beginning of that move. And if you remember, there was kind of this happy accident where the beginning of that move was almost like a burst, right. And we might even be able to like lead in to this a little bit over black. Right. That's that's kinda nice Giants. Not, we think they are cool. I don't know. I like it. I don't know about you guys, but I'm excited. All right. So now let's do shot two. All right. And let's see what we got here.
Joey Korenman (00:49:11):
Same qualities that appear to give them strength. All right. Now here, this is going to be important. Okay. So let me first scale this to the frame size. So when this shadow crosses over that plant, I want to cut to here where it starts to get darker. And we start to see it at the bottom of the frame like that. All right. So let's set this up and let's move this over the same qualities that appear to give them a peer to give them strength. When we hear, give them strength, I want to cut because you're seeing, you know, and this, this is where like, you know, having kind of some kernel of a story in your head can really help. The story I'm telling is you think this building is very strong and it's proving its strength by casting a shadow over this powerless little plant. And at the same time, I'm showing you that visually you're hearing it the same qualities that appear to give them strength. All right. So now the next shot is this little shot here where I very crudely mocked up this idea that these vines start to come out from the base of this plant. All right. So let's just put this in. I'm not quite sure how this is going to work yet are often, let me scale this up
Joey Korenman (00:50:31):
Are often the sources of great weakness. Okay. So we're hearing are often the sources of great weakness at this point in the story, you know, we're not quite sure what's happening yet. Okay. So I'm going to move the voiceover down because I don't want to give away what's happening. I mean, I suspect the audience when they see the vines coming out, they're going to have some idea like, oh, okay, this, the vines are now the strength of the plant. It's kind of counteracting the giant newness of the building, but the building can't move and these vines can grow, but I don't want to give that away totally yet. So I'm going to actually cut this together first. So the next shot I created has the vines kind of, you know, growing in this overhead shot like this. Okay. So let's just, let's just take this end point here and cut this together. All right. Let me scale this up. Let's just take a look, what we got.
Music (00:51:27):
[inaudible]
Joey Korenman (00:51:27):
Cool. And then I had this shot in mind, which I thought was pretty cool where we start climbing up the building and then the vines kind of climb up the top. This is going to be very tricky to do for real, but I think it will be cool. Um, then after that I want this shot where it's like the plant kind of looking as the vines grew up the side of the building. Right. Let's take that as the outpoint let's put this in and then the final shot has us going up the side of the building and we get to the top and then there's a pause. And then the plant grows back on top. All right. So now it's kind of one, and there's another, there's some room here to put the quote there, if we decide to do that. All right. So let's just lay this out, uh, leave it like this, and let's just fade the music out and let's just not have the voiceover in there yet. And let's just get a sense of what this feels like so far Giants, Not think they are the same qualities that appear to give them strength.
Music (00:52:38):
[inaudible] [inaudible]
Joey Korenman (00:52:52):
All right, so I'm gonna stop it there. So obviously I forgot to scale these to frame size, so let's do that, but this is, you know, at least visually this is working for me and I want to make sure there's a little bit of a hitch at the beginning here. I want to take the shot in the middle.
Music (00:53:14):
[inaudible]
Joey Korenman (00:53:15):
All right. And then we're probably going to end up holding on that. Alright. So let's start putting the audio back in. So I felt like I wanted the video to continue on this shot. Okay. Are often the sources of great weakness. All right. Now maybe great weakness makes more sense to hear on this shot because this is the first time we actually see the vines climbing up the building. So I'm actually just going to knock that, knock that audio forward. I don't know. Maybe a second half are often sources of great weakness. There we go. And then the powerful are not as powerful as they see And then here or the boom that comes up. All right. So let's take a look. We've got our audio laid out. We've got our picture, you know, laid up against it. Um, and you know, I'm already getting some ideas of things I want to tweak a little bit. So let's go ahead and just take one final, look at this. And hopefully, you know, this was eye opening. You could see how quickly this came together. Um, just doing some really rough previous, editing it together, music VO, not editing the music at all. Um, but let's just take a look at this
Joey Korenman (00:54:40):
Giants, The same qualities that appear to give them strength
Music (00:54:56):
Are
Joey Korenman (00:54:56):
Often sources of great weakness. The powerful are not as powerful as they see As weak. Cool. All right. So I think we're on the right track. Now let's talk about some of the things that could be stronger here. All right. So I think it would be cool. Like at the beginning here, it's just totally over black Giants, maybe that's okay. But maybe there's even like some other interesting thing we could do. Like maybe we're traveling along the ground and then we look up or something, you know, like, so there's something happening. Giants Are not, we think they are All right. Now, this there's like this nice piano hit and I want that shot to cut right on it. All right. So I'm actually gonna just move this, edit back a little bit, same qualities that appear to give them strength Are often sources of great weakness. All right. So there's a big gap in audio between these two. So I think we're going to try space this out a little bit. John Giants
Music (00:56:30):
Are not,
Joey Korenman (00:56:30):
We think they are
Joey Korenman (00:56:34):
All right, so I'm going to move this one up a little bit, same qualities that appear to give them strength. And I think that the way this line is set, isn't working for me as well. Let me see if I have a better take on these that appear to give them strength, the same qualities that appear to give them strength. That was terrible. Oh, God of great weak weakness, our full, all right. So I'm gonna have to rerecord that line, but basically what I want. I want it to say the same qualities that appear to give them strength, the same qualities that appear to give them. And then I want to pause strength. All right. So I want to draw that out a little longer. I also think it would be qualities that appear to give them strength before we cut to this shot, it would be cool. If this flower light sort of gave us a little bit of an anticipation that it's about to do something, maybe it shutters or shakes or something happens or it bends down. And then boom, then these things pop out
Music (00:57:42):
Are
Joey Korenman (00:57:42):
Often sources of great weakness. Powerful are not as powerful as they see As cool. All right, now the music edit is definitely going to need some work. Now let's just, just take a listen to some other parts of this song. You can hear it gets a lot more epic at the end. And so I'm going to want to cut the music, uh, so that it actually, you know, once this plant starts to kind of, you know, show what it can do and the takeover, I want the music to change. And then at the end,
Joey Korenman (00:58:31):
I want that big ending, just like that. Okay. So I am going to go make some tweaks. I'm going to try, I'm going to cut up the music a little bit. I'm going to rerecord that line of VO, and then we're going to check out, uh, where the animatic stands using this vis slash 3d method has a ton of advantages for one, as you can see, you can get a pretty good idea of how the shots are working from one to the next, even with really simple geometry standing in for the final actors. Um, and so after tweaking a few shots, um, tweaking the audio a little bit, putting everything back together, refining it until it felt right. Here's where I ended up Giants are not what we think they are the same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. Powerful are not as powerful as they see As
Music (00:59:56):
[inaudible].
Joey Korenman (01:00:03):
Well, heck this thing is actually starting to feel like a, like a real piece, uh, even with my terrible scratch voiceover track. Um, but it sure doesn't look like a final piece. It doesn't look like a real beautiful thing yet. Uh, but that's okay because that's the next step
Music (01:00:38):
[inaudible].
