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Millennium
Bug:
A Far Cry From a Y2K Disaster
by Lee Lanier
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Millenium
Bug. ©
Pacific Data Images. If you have the QuickTime
plug-in, you can view a clip
from this film.
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Millennium Bug is a tongue-in-cheek
Surrealist peek at the future of urban sprawl. As a computer animator at PDI
(and modeler/lighter on Antz), I was able to develop a "quick
and dirty" digital technique that gave this short film a unique and gritty
look.
Millennium Bug started life as a series of black-and-white photographs
snapped along the San Francisco waterfront. Ten of these photos were printed
as 5x7s, scanned onto a Silicon Graphics O2 workstation, and doctored with
Adobe Photoshop for UNIX. The resulting images became backgrounds -- "virtual
sets" if you will -- for the piece.
Bringing Stills to Life
3D elements were modeled, textured, lit and key-frame animated in Alias
PowerAnimator. Set-ups were kept simple -- joint rotations and limited skeletal
deformations were favored over complex inverse-kinematics systems. Textures
were often culled from the black-and-white photos themselves. Procedural shaders,
often employing noise functions, were also used to great extent. Backgrounds
were loaded into the Alias image plane, allowing the virtual camera to be
matched to its real-world counterpart (which happened to be a 35mm still camera
with a 50mm lens). Similarly, the backgrounds served as a guide for match
lighting. Ultimately, the animations were rendered at 1K with motion blur.
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A
Self-Portrait.
© Lee Lanier. |
Rendered animations were integrated "into"
the prepared backgrounds via Matte, a compositing program proprietary to PDI.
Realism was maintained through careful foreground
to background layering and the consistent use of shadow masks. Additional
2D tricks were utilized to create the illusion that Millennium Bug
was actually shot on old motion picture stock; this included the creation
of artificial grain, splices, scratches, dust, 3D parallax, and "handheld"
camera moves. Various background components, such as automobiles, were brought
to life through 2D key-frame animation. The final composites served as the
film's sole shots.
The Final Touches
Millennium Bug required no editing.
The length of each shot was carefully calculated on paper. Final frames were
renamed and numbered from "1" to "2016," then sent to
a PDI film recorder in a single batch. Sound effects were captured with a
cheap portable cassette recorder and omni-directional microphone; the recordings
were dumped straight onto a PC laptop and saved as .wav files. Various Windows
shareware programs were used to create original MIDI instruments, compose
music, and create the final mix, which consisted of two tracks. Sync was maintained
by referring to a compressed .avi movie file created with SGI media tools.
A Zip drive was used for backups and to transport files between the UNIX and
PC systems. In the end, the piece was simultaneously mastered on D1 video
and 1.66 ratio 35mm film.
Millennium Bug is two minutes long. Yet, as
a solo undertaking, it took nine months to complete. Based on the positive
festival response, however, it has proved well worth every strange and unusual
moment.
Lee Lanier was born one fine spring day. In school, he enjoyed making dioramas. He left Ohio for Hollywood, becoming a Script Supervisor. He later chucked reality and joined Disney as a computer animator. Eventually, he went to PDI to toil on Antz where he made Millennium Bug on the sly.
Note: Readers may contact any Animation World Magazine contributor by sending an e-mail to editor@awn.com.