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F8 won the Jury Honors Award at the Siggraph 2001 Electronic theater. Jason tells us a little more about the “behind the scenes” of his 3 1/2 year solo project.

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The Idea

I came up with this idea from an image I saw on a program which aired on The Learning Channel. In the show, human test subjects put their faces through oval slots in the wall. On the other side was a bizarre image with what appeared to be these framed faces lined up neatly in a sterile lab room. As I recall, they were to try and identify the aroma in the room. So it was that show which was the catalyst for f8. From there, my earliest notion for the animation followed a character breaking into a face vault, who then steals a face, puts it on, and then attempts to make a break for it but is gunned down by armed guards. It was to be no more than 2 to 3 minutes. Even at this very beginning stage, I knew I wanted my character to be wearing an outfit inspired by old fashioned diving gear, medieval armor and astronaut suits.

The Script

Around this time, I introduced the idea to my brother who was immediately interested. The two of us bounced ideas off one another; and pretty soon it grew to a much larger scale. The script, which went through 5 drafts, went on to take around a year to complete. I got a lot of good advise from friends at Ringling who read early drafts. At this stage in the process, I actually drew a full storyboard on cards and edited it all together with Premiere. However, the idea changed so drastically, it was all thrown out. After that, I built low quality previz models and made an entire animatic. This to was completely thrown out and was not referenced at all for the finished animation. In the end, I relied on very crude cave man drawings. Also, before beginning a specific sequence, I liked going through the set with my virtual camera and stand-ins to figure out shots. I discovered a lot of camera angles I would never have imagined this way.

The Models

The main character was the first model I built. It ended up being the only character which I designed myself for f8. The primary 3D package I used for the project was Lightwave 5.6. I have been asked a number of times why I chose to use that program. Well, it’s a program I had purchased for a student discount a year or two prior. I did not really have the money to buy another package nor the desire to attain one through other less ethical means. Since the very start, I knew that I would not be able to use Lightwave 5.6 as it was to animate the project because of its limited animation capabilities. I did know that it was going to take at least 2 years to build all the models. I figured that a newer more capable version of Lightwave or a character animation plugin would come along by the time I finished modeling. I also held off buying a newer, faster computer, because I knew it would be too slow and dated by the time I got to animation. At this time, I was using a Pentium 200 with something like 128 megs of memory. It was very slow going at the beginning, when it came to building the models, because I was in the middle of my junior year at Ringling. Consequently, I only finished 4 major models. It wasn’t until after I graduated that I was able to spend an entire solid year building all the models necessary for the animation. On average, it took me around 2 to 3 weeks to build and texture a major character or prop. The 2 main characters are around 300,000 to 400,000 polygons. I built everything with metanurbs which is Lightwave’s version of subdivision modeling.

The Art

Andrew Jones served a very large role as a concept artist. I was already about 1 ½ years into the project when I asked for his help. After I graduated, we collaborated frequently via email on designs and story points. I sometimes emailed him really crude drawings and, more often than not, he would email be back a concept far exceeding anything I had come up with.

I used Photoshop with my 4 X 5 Wacom to paint all the textures. I was limited to rudimentary forms of texture mapping: planar, spherical, cubic, cylindrical. It was quite a challenge texturing some objects at times. For some complex shapes, I had to use multiple textures on different axes and carefully blend them with Photohop to avoid unsightly seams. Everything was rendered in layers whereupon the final compositing was achieved with After Effects.

The Animation

I was very fortunate in that just as I was finishing up with the models, Project: Messiah was released. It was this Lightwave plugin which enabled me to actually do the animation. As soon as I finished animating a scene, I handed it off to the computers to render. Rendering took anywhere from 1 minute to 90 minutes a frame, per layer. I had on hand 2 PIIIs (my main work computers) and 2 AMD 800s. The computers went at it 24/7 for almost an entire year. So, this whole process of animating, rendering and compositing went on for a solid year with no pause. Everything went very smoothly and, thankfully, none of the AMD computers ever crashed while rendering.

The Sound

I recorded all the sound effects myself. Most effects were recorded in a walk-in closet which was the quietest room in the house. However, even then, there was still some sound seepage, whether it be from a passing plane or the water pipes in the house. Other effects were obtained outdoors. For example, wind noises, a small water fall and a large flock of noisy birds. I had on hand a Sennheiser shotgun mic, a mic stand, Sennheiser headphones and a Tascam portable DAT recorder. The final sound mix was accomplished using Steinberg Nuendo audio mixing software. I monitored the mix with a set of KRK V8 studio monitor speakers and a KRK S12 subwoofer. The music was created by Casey Hess of The Jump Rope Girls with assistance from Don Relyea.

The Conclusion

Although this project ended up being a lot bigger and took a lot longer than I had originally anticipated, I am very glad I went through with it. I learned a lot having to do every job mostly by myself. I think every animator should create at least one piece on their own in their lifetime – to test their mettle as it were.

UPDATE:

We have gotten a lot of emails asking us where you can find the full feature of Jason’s f8. After emailing Jason with the questions he responded with this:

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Hello,
The animation can be purchased from SIGGRAPH. It’s on one of the Electronic Theater DVD/videos: Issue 138 and the Animation Theater DVD/video: Issue 140. It can be viewed online at the Sci-Fi channel’s Exposure website in the crummy realplayer format. That’s the only legitimate place online showing it. I signed an exclusive license with a company in LA. That’s why it’s not available elsewhere on the internet; Sci-Fi was an exception. The animation is covered in the newest issue (December 01) of Computer Graphics World.

Best,
Jason Wen

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If you would like to read more about f8, be sure to read our related articles:

Interview: f8‘s Setup Lowdown
I have been asked about the equipment I used for making f8 quite a number of times. So, in interest of full disclosure, I will run down a list of pertinent hardware and this-or-that which I cobbled together in order to produce my animation. Much of this equipment was acquired through accumulation. This means I did not grab it all in one swoop.

Interview – F8’s writer Howard Wen
We were fortunate enough to be able to catch up with some of the creative talent behind the F8 short film. This time we had a great interview with writer Howard Wen.