welcome! my name is ivan sarosacz - aka jeva - and I'm the director, designer, animator, the creator of the animated short : mr. smith.
I know I should have finished this page at least a year ago .. but look how good it finally looks? :D anyway, I hope that this page will give you some insight on the creative process, the school of eam, my anti-hero, the technical challanges I had to conquer .. about the things I had inside my head during the making of this movie and even earlier. it took me five month to finish this movie. a lot of work, many sleepless nights, lot's of problems and challanges, but those were some of the best days of my life. I just hope you'll enjoy this site and the movie as much as I enjoyed making it. if you have quastions or comment you can reach me at the following email address: jeva2791@gmail.com
european animation masterclass takes place at the international academy of media and arts in halle, germany. I won't copy and paste the info they got there, just click on the link! what I want to add to it is that I really learned a lot there .. good people, lot of experienced teachers, many hours o creative fun. worth a click.
teachers: Paola Piozzi |
Prof. Gerhard Lampe |
Prof. Eva Natus-Salamoun
| Petr Fasianok
| Gyula Szabo | Oliver Cotte
| Piet De Rycker |
Elena Miroglio
|
Takashi Masunaga
| Connie Fleche |
Andreas Quandt
in turin :
Jiri Barta |
Dan Boulos |
Vincenzo Gioanola |
Laura Fiori
advisors: Konrad Weis |
Olaf Ulbricht |
Tony Loeser
friend in need:
Peggy Froschke
martina, beatrice, tom, brendan, ersin, ellen, olaf, paola .. + carola somewhere off screen.
THE HISTORY OF MR. SMITH
yes, he has a history. first of all: mr. smith and I go a loooong way back. the base story of this short comes from an early novel I wrote around 93' . it was a story about a guy, who has given up hope, who lives his boring life by a daily routine and has almost no dreams at all, except one: he wants to have hair. this story I had was a bit too complicated and long for a first movie, so I came up with a short story for the same guy: mr. smith. (right now I'm developing a short movie based on the original story .. the hair wish. hope I'll have the opportunity to direct a second smith movie, but don't worry, it's not going to be a trilogy. ok, I might want to make a prequel :) I'll show you some of the previous incarnations of mr. smith.
this is one of the earliest smith versionss. done using 3ds max. maybe my 3d skills were a bit limited back then .. :)
that one is the oldest drawing I could find. a frog from the front, an egyptian from the side .. nice mix. it has some resembelance to the final design that appears in the movie.
this one was done using softimge|3D .. a bit better than the first 3d one, dont't you think ? I still like the simplicity of it.
the second version using si|3D, this time I was more experienced with the 3d techniques. this was done using nurbs.
the v.01 body design
this is one of my favourite smith incarnations. has too much hair though. I think I'm going to go back to this one and re-develop my character for the next short based on it.
this is as far as I got with the 3d version before I went to EAM and did it all using traditional hand-drawn, flat, plain, 2d technique.
so here are some samples from the process that led to the final look of mr. smith in the movie.
character research ... these are two of the many pages.
this is the final model sheet. unfortunately we did not have too much time for character developement. I think he is still a bit too complicated. I plan to simplify him for the next mr. smith show.
BACKGROUND & PROPS
I tryed to give a lot of depth and detail to the bg to be in contrast with my simple and flat charcter. the props and elements are also detailed, but very simple.
the main scene: the alley
these are some of the bg designs I made. the entrance scene is one of the many scenes that got left out later .. no need for scenes that don't add nothing.
prop designs that did not make it into the movie. I planned to have a TV, and wanted smith to be a tv addict. flashy tv light looks good! that thing on the left is not a bomb. only people from eastern europe recognise the battery and know how it was used with clocks, radios etc. so it was changed to a traditional clock.
THUMBNAILING
before storyboarding it's thumbnailing! this is one of the most fun parts of the moviemaking. you can just do whatever you want, freely express and experiment with the story. click on the 3 images to see the full page.
STORYBOARD
first I'm going to show you 2 sequences that were cut out early, in the storyboarding process. the first one is the "nerveride", my favourite .. so it had to go. in this sequence I wanted to show that even mr. smith has at least one neuron in his grey brainmatter that is in color. the sequence starts off with the reflection of the fish. the reflection triplicates, representing the 3 wishes and then the 3 golden fishes swin through the eye to the depth of mr. smith's brain, to his dream.
the second one is the "shadowplay" part. in the first versions mr. smith would have first hide behind the trashcan. this is the sequence that would follow.
and finally, this is the last storyboard. we had a strickt timing, so we didn't have too much time to refine our storyboards, had to move on .. to the actual production phase. this is my "final" storyboard, but I made some changes later on .. click on the image to see the full version.
ANIMATIC
this is the last animatic from the storyboards. we had to finish it by the time we went to turin for a week ofworkshop. we did sand, oil etc. animations, had a lot of fun, but the most interesting part of the workshop was showing our animatics to the students there and discussing it with them. it was a really good experiment and it helped a lot.
since I knew that I'm going to use a mixture of 3d and 2d for he backoungs, it was obvious that it's far more simplier and faster to do the layout in 3d.
so after the layout was done I added some details to the 3d part and then I drew the small details with a simple pencil, based on a printout .. sg like this.
FINAL LOOK
this was the first test for the final look of the movie. it's still not the final look, but it was the first time I had a clear vision of what I wanted to achieve.
LINETESTS
here are six linetests. we used ernest for linetesting, a simple and effectiv tool .. with many flows. :)
ANIMATIC UPDATEs
when I had finished the keys for a scene, and everything was ok, I added it to the animatic .. I updated my animatic every time I had a ready scene to see if it works together or not, if the pace and the cuts are ok. this is why the original 1.5 half minute movie ended to be almost 4 minutes long.
some word on the process needed to get my drawigs into the computer and ready them for further work. the school bought a simple scanner used by secreataries etc. so it had some flaws. the other part of the problem was the program called CTP, which caused a lot of headaches to me, that's why I replaced it. so the method I came up with was the following. first I had to paint a part of the scanner black, so we can see the pegholes in the scans. the scannig was quite smooth with the auto feeder after installing the newest drivers. than I imported the sequence into aftereffects and stabilysed and cropped it. then I imported this sequence into toonboom and made an expo list. later on I used bauhaus mirage to paint and make masks for the things I needed, and finally I used digital fusion for compositing. simple ehh ? :D
COMPOSITING
the last part of the process was compositing. here I'll show you how one of the scenes was put together. first, the lighting from 3d.
a bit of colorcorrecting. this is the only part - except the dream sequence - where I used colors.
the hand drawn detail layer gets on top of it ...
that is a Z, depth layer that gives me the distance of the surfaces from the camera.
so I can apply a defocus like this
here comes mr. smith .. with a mask on his left eye
color corrected, "shaded"
composited on the background
the fish .. ohh, fishy, fishy, fissssh. is it in the closet?
color corrected
shadow added, reflection in the eye added, blurred
and finally .. added to the bg with a little glow. done!
FINALS
the only thing left is to thank you for reading it all and to give you some full resolution images and once again the link to the movie itself. thanks! click on the images for the full res versions.
cheers!
j
and a bonus image: a bg that you don't see almost at all, but has some nice details
