June 2014 status

Since we have been more active on our Facebook page, it comes the time when as an archiving solution all the development gets stored on the Blog.

Alice and Leopold meet the Queen of Hearts

The film project is coming along well, with many changes on the script, mostly making the scale of the film bigger with the tools we have at hand. It lays now on me on the direction, animation and modeling side. But also on the work being made by the Sound Designer Christian Tanto. As a collaborator the talented Bill Altenburg is giving me a hand on some hard surface modeling, like robots, set pieces or props. His work has helped me spend some time on the animation or designing the shots and lighting. What i have to say after a rough 20 minute unfinished film is that "Alice`s Adventures Underground" clearly owes more to an indie live action guerilla film than to an animation project. The mocap part adds to that immersion in the virtual Camera work. It is a solution that gives the editor (Mafalda Relvas) all the camera angles (in animatics) I figured out for each sequence, after she puts the scene together I spend some time refining those shots for rendering.
Meanwhile at this time Christian is mixing sound effects over the XML scene and some of the trimmed shots get rendered. This is a tricky solution, but because we couldn't get sponsors for a renderfarm our personal laptops and desktops have an extra nocturnal life, just like cats! This also needs another crazy solution of having the shots travel back and forward trough Dropbox or We transfer (used more for the Blend files). The usual routine:  I prepare the sequence  and upload the Blend file, Christian downloads it and prepares the batch rendering. The rendered sequences go directly on Dropbox for me to assemble the final compositing shots.
These composited shots vary from 2 layers to 30 or 40 depending of what I want the image to reflect. In the desert scenes, when we meet the family I wanted to give the film a very warm technicolor vibe like we see in Lawrence of Arabia but when Alice is lost on the Vorpal spaceship everything is mysterious, cold and foggy. But when Alice becomes aware of her goal on this world she is not scared anymore, the way the world is portrayed changes drastically.

The desert sequences where we meet the Liddell Family

Then the film is not being made in chronological order but by the sets. Each one of these places have different requirements, some require heavy compositing work, others work better when rendered directly with  a low depth of field and more closed shots, angles, lighting etc. Every camera trick I use today on digital animation are somehow derived from my experiments on an old sony handycam back on the 90`s.

Then come some disadvantages of  working on many different sides of the film. The one I really miss is not having much time to draw.  Because every shot is composed  directly on "camera" that excludes the need for a very complex storyboard. What I usually do is a quick sketch of the direction I want to have in that specific area of the film. It then becomes 3d, which tends to change the way characters and sets are displayed.

sketch for the doll house scene

3d animation is more out of control in terms of stylization than in 2d . Because I chose this style, to get a fairly quick reading of a rendered shot, everything needs to be mediated in terms of luminosity, framing and focus and we already know how 3d tends to love the eye candy of detail. So without compromising style or detail hidden positive and negative light sources are located on areas that take advantages of  more expressive qualities in the shapes. Sometimes a character gets lamps glued on him just to keep him "there".  

The shot before compositing, when lights get positioned. 

Some live action principles do carry to 3d animation, but I also think that every form of representation was once a drawing, even one that never left our mind. One made of brain cells instead of charcoal, painted with creativity instead of pigment. That is why the solutions need to be an extension of the problem. In this case getting expression trough textured surfaces and luminosity while keeping the freshness of a drawing. 

Alice Underground may not reached all the goals I had imagined, surely there were some supports that lacked and could speed up render time, provide an unique soundtrack or even finance our long work nights .  But sincerely the project becomes stronger by some of its limitations and while we want it to be a good film, I wouldn't´t rush it by any means. Underground is now targeted to be completed on the winter just to give us that margin. I would like to thank everyone who supported the project, the sponsors IpiSoft, Faceshift, Blender Foundation (for truly believing that dreams are better open source) and the fans who curiously await news of this strange Alice in Wonderland adaptation. 

Jules Spaniard Raimes (Julio Ramos)