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THE MAKING OF CUBISM. an interview with Director Paul Howarth.
 | Paul
Howarth is the resident director/digital animator/music producer
at Sydney's hot new media company Lashgraphics.
A talented bass-player and former member of legendary 90s rock
band Cyberia, Paul was the first person the cube turned to when
they wanted to make the Cubism music video ... the following interview
took place when Paul was just putting the final touches to the
video. |
What makes a good 3D animator?
Paul: I'm not really sure, I think you'd need to ask one. I just know that for me, it's large amounts of strong coffee and heaps of cigarettes.
How did you approach the making of the Cubism video?
Paul: Hearing the song itself conjured visions of a very cartoon like world where everything is cubic with square edges. All the people and animals, the trees and power poles, everything has a very removed and saturated feel about it. So I applied that initial mental picture right through the entire video.
Where and how did you shoot the performance sequences?
Paul: After some discussion with the cube, we decided not to include the actual band members but instead make the faces for the characters from close up shots of their individual facial parts i.e.: the nose and one eye from one guy with the mouth and eye from the other guy. We set up the blue screen shoot at the Lashgraphics facility in Sydney with the intention of shooting the vocalist's lips to create the master lip sync track as well as shooting various facial parts from the other band member. We got a little carried away with the idea and ended up with about a dozen people all volunteering their various facial bit up for the camera.
We shot all the facial footage on DVCAM and then captured via Firewire into a Dual Xeon PC. All the live action footage was shot and captured in one day and was almost instantly ready to start comping up the individual face sequences.
How did you integrate this with the digital landscape?
Paul: All the individual face sequences were composited from different peoples facial parts to give each character a bizarre set of facial expressions. Each face was exported as a 550 pixels square TGA sequence totalling 6200 frames per face. I then used these frame sequences to texture the faces of the 3D characters.
What was your greatest challenge making Cubism?
Paul: There were many challenges making Cubism. Everything is rendered "in scene" so all the shadows and reflections are being generated real time in the render, so this added dramatically to the total render time. I also had 13 full length TGA sequences of 6200 frames each, including all the faces, the day to night sky and numerous other background animations. By the time I was ready to start final renders, I had over 20 gigabytes of data being used by the scene. I used our in-house render farm consisting of 25 Intel CPUs ranging from 2.4 Xeons down to over clocked 700's. Including re-renders of certain parts, I had all 25 CPU's going 24/7 for over six weeks.
What software did you use?
Paul: All the 3D work was done in Lightwave 3D V7.5, because the majority of the video was rendered "in scene" there was very little editing to be done. We used Final Cut Pro to compile the face sequences with Adobe Premiere to join the rendered frames back together and Digital Fusion for final output and colour adjustments. Lightnet was used to control the render farm.
What hardware did you use?
Paul: The entire clip was created on PC except for the face sequences which were created on a Dual 1 Gig G4 Mac. My main workstation is a Dual 2.4 Xeon PC, which was used as the master Lightwave machine. The final broadcast video was exported from a Matrox Digisuite system.
How did you hook up with the cube?
Paul: They were working on their album and asked me to play bass on a couple of tracks. It all expanded from there, and Lashgraphics has been working hand in hand with the cube ever since.
What are they like to work with?
Paul: It's a very close working collaboration. They are really committed to their music and have a very strong understanding of new media and how it works, so it's a strong and creative relationship.
What have you learnt through this process?
Paul: That's easy, I should have been somewhere else six years ago!
No, I'm only joking. I've learnt that I need to keep my polygon count down or buy a bucket load of really fast render nodes. For cubism, I didn't want to use depth of field blurs or object replacement techniques. I wanted to keep everything "in scene" wherever possible and avoid compositing. Working this way did cause some grief but it gave me the look I was after. I could also add more cameras to the scene and try different perspectives and parenting. Everything was completely editable from frame 1 to frame 6200.
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