11.27.05
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving...we certainly did! :)

So last week's big news was that The Mantis Parable won the Starz People's Choice Award for BEST SHORT FILM at the Starz Denver International Film Festival (alongside Sundance, Telluride, Tribeca, Seattle,...Starz Denver International Film Festival is widely considered one of the top 10 international film-festivals in the United States). Woohoo! Amazing!

7.30.05
This week I was notified that The Mantis Parable has been nominated to receive an award at the Rhode Island International Film Festival in Providence, Rhode Island August 9th - 14th. Fingers-crossed! Woohoo!

Also, The Mantis Parable has been officially recognized by IMDB.com as a short-film and has finally received a voter rating (currently 9/10!). If you've got a second (and you've actually seen the film), head over there to vote and/or leave a comment! Thanks!

6.12. 05

DOUBLE WOW!!!

The Mantis Parable has won Best Animation at the Winnipeg International Film Festival! I was shocked considering the great competition (some of my favorite animations involved in the competition include last year's Academy Award nominee "Gopher Broke", and the traditional animated "Handshake", and "A Plan"). What a wonderful weekend I had watching so many awesome films and befriending such great film-makers - Nessa and Dwight, Luke, Ross, Terry, Milt, Sidney...not to mention Rod and Paris. Looking forward to the next time we cross paths!

Later that day, The Mantis Parable was honored with 4th-Runner Up for the Golden Space Needle Award for Best Short Film at the Seattle International Film Festival! It sounds sort've silly to be excited about 4th-Runner Up, but the Golden Space Needle Award for Best Short Film is a pretty big deal, especially considering my film is an animation short - in the kids program no less.

Woohoo!

3.18. 05
Long time since my last post! What on earth have I been doing?

Well, one thing I got the opportunity to do was to take my kids to Robots, the new CG animated film from Blue Sky Studios, the creators of Ice Age. Robots is visually spectacular, and proves that Blue Sky belongs at least up there with Pixar and Dreamworks in this regard. Everything in the film is made of metal, which is accurately shiny, rusty, chipped, polished, whatever. The animation is smooth, fun, and just generally fantastic throughout. While I wish there could've been a little more room for character development (the characters were a lot of fun, but I wanted to know more!) I really enjoyed the film and my kids did too. Woohoo! :)

2.19.05
COMPLETE!

That's right folks! The Mantis Parable short-film is complete in DVD form and ready to be thrown onto the film-festival circuit. I can't tell you how wonderful I feel today to know that it's finally done and people will get the opportunity to see it. Thank you to everyone who has encouraged me throughout the last 18 months+, I couldn't have done it without your support! :)

So, what does finishing the film mean? Well, it will mean a few things. Sitting to the left of me is a first batch of 10 DVDs, 6 of which will go off to film-festivals next week. Having the film finished will also free me up to spend more time plugging Making Of pieces and Production Journal elements into the site. One of the first things I will be doing to the site will be updating the Intro with the final version (very similar to the one released last summer, but with the completely final visuals, sound, and music). Anyway, I've got a million things I could talk about, but most of all, I simply want to shout:

WOOHOO! :)

1.17. 05
Ok, finally an update. :)

I've completed rendering the Intro, and as of this morning, Act III. Tonight I will move on to Act II. I hope to have Act II rendered by the end of the month, if not sooner.

I guess I didn't mention this in my last post, but I've also decided to render everything at 24 frames-per-second instead of 30. As I mentioned previously, while investigating the film-festivals I discovered that many of them will require a 35mm film version of the short - film being 24 fps. So for the following reasons, I made the 11th hour decision to do everything at 24fps: (1) It's a lot easier to go from 24fps to 30fps (video/dvd) than 30fps to 24fps. (2) There's just something about film. As my friend Terry Coolidge said: Josh, are you making a video? or are you making a film!? Well, after all this work, I'm definitely making a film. There's a certain elegance to film that is hard to put your finger on, but you know it when you see it, and believe it or not, some of that has to do with the 24fps. Hard to explain. :) (3) It's 20% less to render! Basically, although the length of the film (in terms of time) is exactly the same, there are 20% less overall frames to render, which helps me on a number of different fronts. Instead of 13,000 frames to render (30fps), I now have 8.040 (24fps). Woohoo!

12.13. 04
In order to keep my "promise" of having the first-pass done this Fall, I need to complete the visual first-pass of the film in 7 days or less, and I think it's gonna be close, but I'll make it. I'm starting to get excited about the possibility of the film finally being finished in the next few months. Woohoo! I've already started creating the pages of tweaks and fixes I'll need to do before rendering the final pass, and last night I made some significant headway with the music (at least I think I've made progress). I haven't actually laid the music side by side with the visuals yet, but I think I've got some riffs of the main theme that will work for the various parts.

In other news, over the last week or so I've added a couple sketches to the www.joshstaub.com site. So stop by there if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Also, adcritic.com ran a little story on the 3D Illustrations I did for a local advertising agency and their "Fear No Mirror" campaign (the Bathroom Scene was the "kernel" of one of the illustrations). There's a little blurb about me in the story (3rd section down), and a link to a pdf of the images. I'll warn you, the color and compression in the pdf images are terrible. I hesitate to even show them to you because they're so ugly. Oh well. What are you gonna do? I plan on posting some nicer versions of the images at www.joshstaub.com in the next few days, although, with all the self-imposed pressure of getting the first-pass of TMP done in a week, who knows?

11. 8. 04
Hard to believe, but The Incredibles actually exceeded my lofty expectations! Amazing! I spent the entire time grinning from ear-to-ear. Great work Pixar!

In other news, there has been quite a response to the Bathroom Scene image. I've had both interview and tutorial requests (not to mention several kind and gracious emails) from folks who just wanna know more about it and how it was made. I'm hoping to find some time in the next few days to put something together. I'm also planning on posting the other 2 scenes from the Ad Campaign on the joshstaub.com site in the near future. Stay tuned! :)

10. 25. 04
Ok, so I know it's been a terribly long time since I released any sort of clip... I just don't wanna give anything away! :) In any case, HERE is the first pass of a quicky animation of the mantis take-off - flying (jumping) up to peer in to the top of the jar...I rendered this just over 2 months ago. Enjoy! :)

The "bridge" between the 2nd and 3rd acts is done (didn't I tell you it was tiny?) and I'm just about to start the 3rd act. Woohoo!

7. 18. 04
Several new items of interest for you to check out -

URU: Complete Chronicles - This is the grand-daddy of all URU games. It includes not only the original URU: Ages Beyond Myst, but also URU: To' D'ni (the underground cavern expansion) and URU: Path of the Shell. To be honest, with all three put together, it's an enormous game and it seems a crime to sell it for $39.99. But, well, I'm biased of course. :)

URU: Complete Chronicles Official Game Guide This one was a bit unexpected. Originally, I had heard rumors of a Making Of URU book, but it appears that instead PRIMA has taken all of the content from a Making Of book and put it into the back of this "Official Game Guide". Basically, the last 100 or so pages of the book is chock full of color behind the scenes photos, pre-production images, sketches, game shots, etc. AND tons of commentary from a handful of "Cyantists" (including, frankly, an obscene amount of commentary by yours truly) covering the making of Myst, Riven, and URU. If you ever want to hear me comment on my "day-job", well, this is the book for you. It's amazing how much stuff is in there, and they're selling it for $13.99!

However, I would be remiss if I didn't mention a few things about the book. It IS a great book and there's tons of great stuff for fans in there. However, it seems ridiculous that a few people who have been critical to the success of Cyan and our products appear to have been left out almost completely (I've only skimmed the book so far). Namely, Jason Baskett - our "animation guru" since Riven, Steve Ogden - great artist and fellow short-film freak (and creator of ANIMWATCH), and last but not least, my WIFE (then Bonnie McDowall), who is mistakenly left out of the list of people who actually worked at Cyan before even I got there. There's a bunch of other great people who have been left out too. Ugh.

Anyway, it is a great book with lots of great images and information, but just remember there's always more than meets the eye. :)

5. 31. 04
Great WIRED article on Pixar and the upcoming movie The Incredibles. Check it out!

4. 02. 04
As you've probably noticed, there have been some changes to the site. Hopefully you approve! First and foremost, I'm not forcing your browser to spawn a "master" window anymore. The reason I had been using that system is because I've been doing most of the site work with layers but frankly I'm a control freak and I wanted to make sure that the content was centered properly, which is a real nightmare to do with layers without taking total control of the window. In addition, layers can cause problems with Netscape browsers (ugh) and I'd heard a few reports of that sort of thing happening recently with the site. There are still some little things here and there that I'd like to clean-up, but the majority of the site update is finished. Here are some of the new "features"-

1. No more spawning of the master window. This should alleviate problems those running at lower resolutions may have been experiencing.
2. Layers painstakingly converted to tables. This allows me to still center the content in the browser, AND add the fancy mantis background pattern. :)
3. The guestbook is now visually more consistent with the look of the other pages. You can also now scroll through the entries instead of clicking through endless pages. That thing had been annoying to me from Day 1. :)
4. The Mantis Shop is almost open for business. You'll notice that the link is down there, but I haven't turned it on quite yet. A couple pixels more of tweaking and it should be fully operational. If you want a sneak peak at what will be available, click HERE (but don't buy anything yet!).

I'll probably go into more depth over the next few days, but one of the big hurdles was trying to convert my old "server-side-includes" (the scrolling tables in the Production Journal and Making Of Mantis sections) which worked great when embedded a layer, but don't work the way I need them to inside of table cells. Thanks to Derek (qa tester from Cyan) for helping me find the solution - IFRAMES! Anyway, it's been a lot of late nights for me trying to figure all this stuff out, and it's very close to done.

Enjoy!

3. 20. 04
The Mantis Parable is being featured among the 3D Short Films in production in the upcoming book Inspired 3D Short Film Production. Stay tuned!

3. 05. 04
Installed a new 160GB internal hard-drive last night. It's amazing how disk space just goes when you're working on a short film. To put things in perspective, a full-resolution (1024X554) animation-compressed (lossless) quicktime movie of the intro (34 seconds) takes 1GB of space. The 2 minute First Act requires 4GB of space, and that doesn't include all of the various movies that are put together in the After Effects project to generate the film. Basically, my 80GB hard-drive is down to about 3GB of space (even after some spring cleaning) and it was time for a new drive. Ah, it feels good to be able to breathe again! Heheh.
(Of course, thanks to the magic of Sorenson 3 compression, the download version of the intro is only 9 MB - thanks again Sorenson for supporting The Mantis Parable!)

BTW, welcome to The Mantis Parable to all who arrived via the generous link from cgchannel.com! Enjoy the project! :)

1. 07. 04
Added The Mantis Parable Studio to the Making of Mantis section (finally). It's not full of exciting new film images, in fact it might be incredibly boring to most people, but hey, I like to see what other people's work spaces are like, so here's a look at mine. :)

12. 01. 03
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

I discovered something last week about compressing movies with Sorenson 3 I'd like to share. For you movie trailer junkies out there (I'm one) you may have noticed that most really nicely compressed quicktime movies you see on the internet (like at Apple's Quicktime Movie Site) use Sorenson compression, or specifically Sorenson 3 compression. I've used Sorenson for a while now, and haven't gotten nearly the quality results from my movies (ie. ones that look great and are reasonably sized for downloading) until now. For those with similar Sorenson compression problems, you might give these settings a try -

(1) Aim for a "Total MB size" instead of compressing to a Kb/sec target. Not sure why, but in my testing I've discovered that 2 movies
(2) Turn the quality slider to "highest" quality. This may sound obvious, but the key is setting this and then doing (3)
(3) Allow Sorenson to drop frames. I was always afraid of setting this, but it turns out that Sorenson is pretty smart about dropping frames, and additionally, the frame-rate doesn't perceptively suffer at all. Can you tell the difference between 30fps and 29.3fps? Me neither.

For some reason, these 3 settings had evaded me for years, and now that I've stumbled upon them, there's no going back! :) Hope they're helpful.

11. 03. 03
Slowly but surely still making progress. I'm over 1,000 frames of caterpillar animation at this point, which when added to the other odds and ends (shots without the caterpillar) has gotten me over the 1 minute mark. I hope to get through a particular animation snag tonight and over the next week or so I should be able to finish up the first pass of ACT 1. Stay tuned.

Also, don't forget, Finding Nemo comes out tomorrow on DVD!

9. 23. 03
Re-worked some bits of the caterpillar animation after a couple of discussions with an animator buddy of mine - Jason Baskett. Jason has far more experience animating characters and had some good advice as to how I could go about adding some fluidity to the caterpillar motion. Some of his suggestions basically encouraged me to do some things I'd considered doing but was too unsure about doing to actually DO them (does that make sense?). One of the things I've realized working on a project like this in my spare time: If I have a theory about how best to do something, but I'm not sure it will work, I tend to not do it, or I'll let it stew for a while, pondering, questioning, etc. until I'm pretty sure it will work. It's a time consideration. In order to be most efficient with the little time I have I try not to spend my precious time solving problems but rather doing the work I'm confident will contribute to progress. Jason was kind enough to actually create a couple of simple examples for me of what he was suggesting, and these samples were more than enough to prove to me that a little time and effort incorporating the suggestions into the caterpillar's movements would be worth it. In a couple of hours the "upgrade" was complete and I'm thankful for having spent the time doing it. In addition to smoother caterpillar movement I've been able to simplify and better define how I'll make the caterpillar move from here on out, and that alone has been worth the effort. Thanks again Jase! :)

9. 12. 03
ANIMWATCH, the monthly short-film magazine (spotlighting The Mantis Parable among others) has been updated with a must-read feature on Christopher Mullins - creator of the short-film BLUE. In addition, ANIMWATCH has added a new short-films list with several other already released films available for viewing, and updates it's news section frequently. What are you waiting for!?

8. 26. 03
I've had a particular jar on my desk for the last few months as I've worked on The Mantis Parable. During the construction of my CG jar I spent quite a bit of time examining how light refracts/reflects off of the jar, how the top is constructed, etc. Well, the other night before filiming the Frolicking Mantises video I collected some dirt and a branch from my backyard and stuck it inside of the Jar. Here's a side-by-side comparison of the 2 jars.

Looking forward to picking up my copy of Lord of the Rings: Two Towers today. Woohoo!

8. 12. 03
Big opening day for AnimWatch. CG Channel picked it up which brought a lot of added traffic to the site - over 13,000 hits today with over 300 unique sessions recorded. Hope people enjoy what they see so far! As always, comments and questions are encouraged and greatly appreciated! :)

In production news, I was up last night until 1:30 (ok, this morning) working on more caterpililar animation. I'm up to 22 seconds now in the film and it's flowing nicely. Still a lot to tweak and refine, but it's coming along. Hope to get a Making Of Mantis piece together in the next few days.

8. 01. 03
We had planned on taking a family vacation to Glacier National Park in Montana, but 2 days before we were to leave, well, it burned down. Not all of it, but 50,000 acres of it by last count and so the park has been temporarily closed. Instead, we traveled westward to Seattle, WA and stayed there for a few days. Seattle is incredibly beautiful in its own right, but we also got the chance to travel to Hurricane Ridge (aka. the top of the world), and visit the Seattle Aquarium. All the kids (including my daughter) just freak out and run around pointing at the fish yelling "Nemo!" or "Dory!" or "Gill!". It was all very refreshing and relaxing, but I'm back home now and ready to continue work on TMP. While I was gone I rendered out a part of a long section of TMP I call the "panic-cam", but it will require some tweaking to get the timing right and will either need to be partially re-rendered and composited, or tweaked and re-rendered again completely. Oh well. It looks as though the sequence actually rendered much more quickly than I expected, so I'm not concerned.

In any case, I've decided to post a picture of the inside of the jar shot I was working on just before I left. HERE it is.

7. 15. 03
Did a bit of post-processing preparation work tonight. I plan on putting the film together in Adobe After Effects and I expect to play with the look of the film a tiny bit during the post-process stage, specifically giving a softer look to the scene, accentuating the specular hilites, perhaps tweaking color, etc. Tonight I brought a few images into After Effects to play with and after some tweaking I've achieved something I'm fairly happy with. It's subtle, but I think gives it a nice feel. Perhaps if I get a moment I'll post a comparison shot (before and after the effect layers).

I'm also looking at doing Depth Of Field effects in post-process instead of during rendering. Considering that rendering without depth-of-field is taking between 1 and 2 minutes a frame, and with DOF takes 10 times as long (about 20 minutes a frame) it's probably worth thinking about. There is a great looking plugin called LensCare by Frischluft that looks promising (and best of all, it's inexpensive). Of course, when you're making a short film in your spare time for FREE, everything is expensive. :)

6. 29. 03
Got the index page and basic layout setup complete. Og says he's "shocked" by the white background. Heh, heh. I'm not normally a white bg type of guy I guess. :) Steve Ogden is a friend and fellow CG Artist (he used to work here at Cyan Worlds) who is working on a short film called Down In Front. Visually it's looking great, and with Og's sense of humor I'm sure it will be hilarious. Daily, we update eachother on the progress we've made on our personal projects. Sort of an accountability group for short film creation.