TITLE: Or All The Seas With Oysters
NAME: Zachary Brewster-Geisz
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: zach@brewstergeisz.cjb.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.hash.com/users/zachbg/
TOPIC: Transformation
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: oysters.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Hash, Inc.'s Animation Master v8.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Animation Master (modeling, animating, and rendering); QuickTime 4
Pro (editing, compositing, encoding to .mov); Movie2MPG (encoding to .mpg);
Photoshop 4.0 (titles, textures)

CREATION TIME: 
    About a month and a half from conception to final render.

HARDWARE USED: 
    iMac DV Special Edition, 400MHz G3, 128MB (or 640MB--see below)

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    Have you ever noticed the old abandoned bikes on city
streets?  Have you ever wondered why it's so easy to find paper clips, or wire
coat hangers?  Have you ever felt there was something... alive... in your
closet?


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    I recommend viewing the movie. ;) If the movie
stutters, try playing it again after it's completely loaded into your browser.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


First of all, credit where credit is due.  This animation is based on a short
story by Avram Davidson of the same title.  In the original story, safety pins
are the pupal stage and coat hangers the larval stage of bicycles (which are,
after all, the only man-made devices that have both male and female sexes). 
Over time, the concept has morphed into an urban legend where paper clips have
taken the place of safety pins; I decided to use this version because, frankly,
I couldn't imagine a situation where I could use safety pins without having to
animate cloth, and who wants to animate cloth if they don't have to?

More credit: I did most of the modeling myself, but the hands at the beginning
are based on a free model by Andy Gibbons; I adapted them rather than starting
from scratch to save time.  The coat rack was modeled by Eggington Productions;
it's a free model at http://www.eggington.net/Hash/Models/ under the "Props"
section.  (It's in Animation Master format.)  The main character's underlying
skeleton was also developed by Eggington, and adapted from their Armored Knight
model, found at the same website under "Characters."  (And it was a bit of a
trial to adapt a virile knight's skeleton to work on a short, chubby
custodian.)  All the other models are by yours truly.

As of this writing (Sunday the 15th, the DEADLINE DAY!) I have no idea whether
or not the film will look like I want it to.  For various reasons, as of last
night, I hadn't finished animating the most crucial part of the film: the
actual transformation!  Right now, it's nearly done, but only the first 57
seconds of the movie are rendered.  I was cursing Hash's name--the program kept
crashing--until I tracked down the culprit to a bad RAM chip that I just
installed a week ago.  (I got clued in when the iMac was acting funny even with
no extensions installed.)  I'm now running on my old memory chip, but since I
kept getting "out of memory" messages when rendering before I installed the
chip, it's to say the least unlikely that I'll meet the deadline.  And to top
it all off, I've never really compressed to MPEG before, and I don't know
whether I'll bust the 5 meg limit.

So why am I writing this instead of animating?  Well, after yet another crash
(this one just a run-of-the-mill thing--I hope) I need a break from looking at
coat hangers and bikes.

Anyway, excuse me.  I learned bunches of cheating techniques when making this,
mostly because of the time crunch.  I had plenty of time on the modeling--I'm
quite proud of the demon bike, and somewhat less proud of Ferd (the janitor,
named after a character in the original story).  His head is possibly the worst
mesh I've ever made.  The rest of him is OK, though.  I would have liked to
spend more time smoothing out his joints, but I had to settle for what I had.

The animating took very little time, all things considered.  (No wonder--except
for the scene in the hallway and Ferd's trash walk cycle, I had about 2 weeks
to do it all!)  Here's where those cheats came in--after numerous headaches
with getting Ferd to pick up the small trash can, I decided to NOT show him
actually picking up the coat hanger.  A wide angle shot would have shown it
magically levitating off the desk and landing perfectly in his hand.  Likewise,
when his feet aren't in the shot, you can be damned sure they're just sliding
on the ground and only his hips are moving.  Not exactly groundbreaking
techniques, but I never had occasion to do them before.

This is by far the most complex animation I've yet done.  The most difficult
part was actually the very beginning, with the hands and the paper clip. 
Special thanks to the folks who gave comments on this section on the
Animaster-l list.  The rest of the stuff I simply didn't have time to post so
it's virgin territory.  Ta-da!

If you care about inside jokes, the pages seen at the beginning are from an
early draft of my wife's masters thesis, the picture on the desk is of my son,
and the legend on the trash can is a tribute to the company that produces
Animation:Master.  There were going to be other jokes--mostly in the form of
bulletin board clutter, since the walls look awfully bare to me--but alas, no
time.  Maybe later, when I can address such questions as "how does the guy sit
at the desk, since there's no chair in his office?"  Ah, hindsight...

UPDATE!  Well, if you've viewed the movie you know that I couldn't render
everything in time; that's why there's no shadows in the case of the last bike
shots and why it's a quick poly-based render of Ferd at the end.  In the
interest of full disclosure, I should also point out that the MPEG file was
kindly given a brief extension by the IRTC admin team, since my first attempt
to compress it resulted in a too large file.  However, what you've seen was
what I could compile by the deadline--no cheating, in that sense.  Still, I
acknowledge that I was late, and the judges should take that into
consideration.

I want to finish this, if I can ever get the damn file to open (the reason the
rendering wasn't finished is that about two hours before the deadline, my
project file just wouldn't open for some odd reason).  I think that I've pushed
my computer to its absolute limit.  Not to mention the file size, as you can
see; the compression is pitiful.  Lesson?  When entering a contest, don't bite
off more than your machine (or you) can chew.

Still, I'm glad I stretched myself, and I'm estimating I should have a finished
version of this movie up at my website (above) by mid-August.  With any luck,
by then I'll have gotten more memory--WORKING memory this time.

Thanks to the IRTC community.  I think this is the first time a Hash product has
been used in the contest.  Wish it were a more auspicious beginnning.

