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After a huge buzz and emails of visitors on TSP, we decided to get a bit more in depth information about this amazing solo project. Jason was very generous in sending us not only images of his workspace, but also what was used in creating the film.

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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. For instance, when nearing time to work on the animation’s sound, I researched all the available hardware on the internet and finally made the necessary purchases. As another example, additional computers were purchased right before I felt I really needed them. Much of the computer equipment was more expensive when I made the purchases two to three years ago. So, fortunately, those who want to put together equipment to produce an animation independently can do so for much less today. I really do not think there are many good excuses for not making an independent animation, whether it be short and simple, or long and complex. It is just a matter of how truly motivated and up to the challenge one is, and whether or not he or she is willing to accept the impact such a project will have on free-time. What follows are a series of photographs I took of my “Bedroom Animation Studio” set-up for f8. The film took 3 1/2 years to create (November 1997 – June 2001).

Item (1) was a Pentium III 600 with 384 megs of memory and a Diamond TNT Ultra video card. Earlier in the production, this computer, equipped with a Wacom 4 X 5, served as my Photoshop texture painting and After Effects composition rendering machine. Later on, I reconfigured the computer for sound mixing duties because it was the quietest machine. My other system was far too noisy and would have interfered and muddied up critical sound work. Sometime after seeing Saving Private Ryan, I decided I wanted to try my hand at 5.1 channel sound mixing for f8.(8) (the external input/output box is not very visible in the picture)] which I bought at Guitar Center. My main computer (2) was the machine all the Lightwave 5.6 and Project: Messiah work was accomplished with. This was the first computer I constructed explicitly for the project back in 1999. It was outfitted with a Pentium III 550, an Nvidia Geforce I, and 512 megs of memory (which cost me $1,000 in 1999!). The monitor (3) is a very good Hitachi 21” I bought after my refurbished 17” blew out. Steinberg Nuendo, a multichannel sound mixing program, is displayed on the screen in these photographs. Items (4) are two old, but very well made, indestructible IBM keyboards. Item (5) was a working reconditioned JVC SVHS VCR that crapped out before I finished f8. Now, it is just decoration. The cheapest solution I found for routing the six sound channels coming from the Lexicon Core 2 (8) to the sound monitors (10,11,12,13,14 and 15) was through a receiver. In this case, a Sony Dolby Digital/DTS receiver (6) with 6 channel phono inputs for 5.1 channel sound. Granted, I could have simply connected the monitors directly to the Lexicon and adjusted output volume through the sound cards software, but then I would not have had the safety and conveniece of one big fat knob for cranking the volume up and down; a real necessity as things can get unexpectedly loud with five speakers. Also, without a receiver’s multiple input switching capabilities, it would have been a real pain in the ass to reconnect the monitors so I could listen to regular 2 channel CD’s. Additionally, the receiver (via its SPDIF input) gave me the capability to listen to the multichannel soundtracks on DVD’s played off my DVD ROM equipped computer (1). Item (7) is a crummy and cheap PC Conepts monitor/mouse/keyboard switcher. I could never get the mouse and keyboard aspects of this device to work properly. Which is why I had to get two keyboards (4) and two mice. The video quality through the switchbox is not the best either. I purchased a portable TASCAM DA-P1 DAT recorder (9) specifically for sound effects recording. While the majority of sound effects were recorded in a closet I did capture a number of live sounds outdoors. The Items numbered (10,11,12,13,14 and 15) are the left, center, right, right surround, left surround and LFE (low frequency effects) sound monitors and subwoofer components necessary for 5.1 multichannel sound. These are KRK V8 sound monitors and an S12 subwoofer manufactured specifically for sound mixing and small studio work. Incidentally, the metal desk was a very poor mate for the sound monitors and subwoofer. With certain low frequencies, the desk rattled like a badly sound proofed and woofered-out car. A flashlight (16) is a necessity for those countless times I had to root around in the guts of my computers late at night. In the picture is a Mag-Lite. Item (17) is Tinny from PIXAR’s Tin Toy. This room got very bright during the day, making it hard to see the screen. I reduced much of the intrusive sunlight by pinning a bunch of tapped together reflective car shades over the window. I realized afterwards that I could have used one or two space blankets instead of five car shades. The shades also marginally aided in keeping the damn-hot, Texas summer sun out. Item (19) is a Sennheiser shotgun mic on a flimsy-cheap Guitar Center mic stand with a good AKG mic isolation mount. This was the microphone I used for all my sound effects recording. A flatbed scanner is a necessity (20) for scanning in art and texture map references. Item (21) is hard to see, but it is a Nikon Super Coolscan LS-2000 film scanner used for scanning in photographic film negatives and chromes, like the ones for the photos here. Item (22) is an oscillating fan, necessary during the summer, because, as I have already mentioned, this room got damn hot during the baking hot months (around 85 degrees inside the room, 100 plus outdoors). Since I could not run the noisy fan while sound mixing, I rushed to finish up my animation in late winter/early spring of 2001. One of my most important general references for f8 were my National Geographics (23). Also on the shelves are some photography books and DVD’s which served as inspiration for f8.

Books include:

Full Moon, Architecture Today, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, Blade Runner: The Inside Story, Paul Cadmus, The Fantastic Art of Beksinski, 2001: Filming the Future, Car Crashes & Other Sad Stories, Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures, Pennsylvania Station, Josef Sudek, Requiem, Inferno.
Some DVD’s include: Björk: All Is Full of Love, Björk: Volumen, The Stanley Kubrick Collection, Alien, Blade Runner, Grave of the Fireflies, The Thin Red Line, The Iron Giant, Fight Club, Yi-Yi, Aelita: Queen of Mars, Metropolis, Das Boot, Rushmore, Citizen Kane, and The City of Lost Children.

Some musicians (24) which I relayed to Casey Hess as my personal influences for f8′s music score are: Wendy Carlos, Portishead, Aphex Twin, Björk, Radiohead, Lisa Gerrard, Vangelis and Kodo. I collected a lot of xeroxed reference material for f8 which were filed, more or less, in a large plastic filer (25). Items (26) are two network cables (all four computers were networked via a Linksys 10/100 4-port hub) connecting to two barebones AMD Athlon 800 computers (27). The AMD computers were identical, with 256 megs of memory, low end ATI video cards and two very lousy 14” vga monitors. These two machines were used solely for rendering. Not pictured in any of the photographs is a Panasonic mini DV camcorder. I output the animation to the video camera via a firewire card I had in one of the computers. I made VHS copies of f8 from the mini DV source tape. Many festivals require Beta SP. So, I had to go out and have a video duplication house transfer the animation from mini DV to Beta SP.

Fortunately, faster computer equipment can certainly be had for much cheaper than the ones I put together myself two to three years ago. Heck, just one of today’s top-of-the-line PC’s is almost as powerful as all my computers. I think firewire is the best thing to come along for the independent animator and am glad it was released in 1997; right when I needed an excellent video input/output solution. Luckily, the prices for the cameras and firewire boards have decreased dramatically. The firewire card I bought in 1997 was the first PC firewire board (DPS Spark) to be released. It cost around $400 and was damn flakey. Today, there are a wide variety of firewire cards for about $30 without all the instability and buggie software issues I had to deal with. The Panasonic camera I bought in 1997 for $1,300 would only classify as a basic, low end, entry level $500 camcorder today. Thankfully, because DV video transfered via firewire is nothing but a digital file transfer, with no generation loss like analog video, the price of the camcorder is not a determining factor for a camera’s firewire input/output video acumen. Paying more for a higher quality camera generally buys better through the lens video capturing capability. Today, I think an animation could be finished for as little as $2,200 to $5,000, if one is working from the ground up. What really increased the cost for myself was the scale of the animation (13 minutes) and my desire to mix the sound in multichannel surround sound. The length and complexity of the animation made it necessary for me to get more computers (the two AMD’s), otherwise, the animation would more than likely still be rendering today. Personally, I think sound is very important, which is why, rather than making do with PC speakers or home audio speakers, I used up a lot of time researching sound equipment, and finally, spending a sizeable chunk on specialized sound monitors and recording gear. While I will be the first to acknowledge that everyone is unique with innumerable needs and circumstances which could make producing an independent animation difficult, I hope this rundown will provide a good indication of what sort of animation can be produced with a mix of consumer hardware, entry level professional equipment and a lot of dedication.

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