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Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 16, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
A toad song
How does our childhood shape us in adulthood? This was originally the subject of Kariem Saleh’s graduation film. During the course of the project, however, the director discarded this approach in favour of a simpler starting point: a visit to a psychiatrist. “A Toad Song” now describes the theme that an adult cannot be happy as long as they deny their inner child. “We initially worked on a much more complex story, but it probably wouldn’t have been manageable in the time available.
That’s why we started again several times and tried to scale the concept down to a feasible framework,” recalls Kariem Saleh. As a result, a good year of the 3.5-year production time was spent on brainstorming and conceptualisation. It took the team just under three months to produce a test shot and realise the majority of the RnD. In the following two years of actual production, the animation work took up most of the time, totalling ten months[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
A high switching rate
A total of around 50 people were involved in the complex project. But never at the same time, as the work was divided into many different phases, which were coordinated by producer Alexandra Stautmeister. The largest number of team members working on the film at any one time was ten. At the beginning, the core team consisted of three people; after the RnD, two of the team members graduated and two new ones joined the core team. Over the course of the project, more and more people joined the team to help out for a few days, weeks or even months. In between, the project had to be interrupted several times as the team members pursued freelance jobs and Kariem also produced a second short film as commissioned work. “Because there was no budget for staff, almost everyone involved was a student. It wasn’t always easy to find new helpers at the animation institute who had time for the project. Looking back, I can say that the constantly changing team was the biggest time waster, because it meant that the distribution of tasks and the reviews took a lot of effort to ensure that the results were technically and creatively consistent in the end. Without the help of the numerous fellow students, I would probably have cancelled the project at some point because it would have been impossible to complete,” Kariem is certain.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]Haptic hypnosis machine
The aim of the look and animation was to create a haptic impression. The team therefore built miniature sets as true to detail as possible, which were digitised using photogrammetry, finalised and integrated into the film. The colour concept developed by art director Silke Finger for all set elements and characters also supported the haptic look.
The creation of the miniature sets took a total of six weeks. Valentin Kemmner led a team of around four to five helpers, who were always able to work in phases. The money for the modelling materials was available to the students thanks to the Caligaris Prize from the Filmakademie-Förderverein. The team bought most of the building materials, PU foam blocks were provided by the Stuttgart-based company Paul Bauder GmbH. In order to plan the miniature sets true to scale, the students first roughly pre-built everything on the computer and then plotted screenshots of the individual elements on a scale of 1:2 as building templates.
The model of the hypnosis machine was around 45 centimetres high, which corresponded to a height of 90 centimetres in the 3D scene. The surfaces of the models were kept matt so that there were no reflections in the photos for photogrammetry. As these change depending on the viewing angle, they are a problem for the triangulation algorithm of the Agisoft software and lead to errors. “At the time, we only knew of a few professional photogrammetry software packages that had a licence model and price-performance ratio that made sense for us. Cloud-based solutions were out of the question due to the large number of scanning processes, which would have taken up too much time for data uploads. Agisoft Photoscan also made it easy to check the level of detail and the overall result and estimate the time required,” says Kariem.
The aim of the photogrammetry was to obtain scans that were as precise and detailed as possible. To achieve this, the team built an electronically controlled turntable that rotated the model, which was illuminated as diffusely as possible from all sides, in front of a green screen using a stepper motor and repeatedly triggered the fixed photo camera. The images then underwent an automatic keying and despill process so that an alpha mask was available for each image, which was used in Photoscan to analyse the silhouettes more precisely.
The extracted geometry was then reworked in ZBrush and artefacts were removed, the model was retopologised in Softimage and a low-poly version was created. Mudbox was then used to transfer the textures from the high-res model to the UV layout of the low-poly object. The artists also generated a displacement map from the difference between the high and low geometry, which was used as a shading basis in Houdini with Arnold.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]Biscuit monster and piggy machine
In addition to the real-built and scanned sets, the team used the movement of hand puppets as the basis for the animation of rough 3D characters, which was refined in the further course of the project using traditional keyframe animation on the final models. The premise of the computer-modelled 3D figures was therefore that they would also work as hand puppets in terms of their basic proportions: The psychiatrist is 25 centimetres tall and Svobodan is 60 centimetres tall. In addition, the team relied entirely on the skills of designer Jelena Walf, who had already proven her special style in numerous book and illustration projects, for the character design. This meant that only a few drawings and drafts were needed before the final templates for the 3D characters were found. The challenge in creating the 3D models was to retain the charm of the graphic drawings.
“For the animation of the characters, we developed a mechanical data glove, the Piggy Device, which allowed the live transfer of the hand puppet movements in Maya to the characters. This approach created a distinctive animation look because many details and happy accidents could be taken directly from the live game. A pure pose-to-pose animation would have made it difficult to create the erroneous and spontaneous look,” explains Kariem. After the motion capturing with the Piggy Device, the material was cleaned up and reworked, i.e. certain things were adjusted, removed or reinforced until a solid basis was available. A second rig was connected to the capturing data and moved along with it. It was a classic Maya skeleton in which handles were animated as normal – an offset animation, so to speak. In the third animation step, facial animation and secondaries were added. Sascha Langer built the majority of the character rigs. In the end, the team had created 13 characters for the entire film.
Useful old games console
The Piggy Device, which was used for the hand puppet show, has rotary potentiometers (editor’s note: electrical resistance component whose resistance values can be changed mechanically) built into the elbow and jaw, which send a voltage signal to the Arduino controller as analogue sensors. The rotation of the head and the position of the upper arm were measured by digital 9-DOF (degrees of freedom) sensors, which are also used in smartphones. “Capturing the positioning in space was made possible by a component that Florian Greth had discovered in an old games console controller: a so-called cable sensor combined with a small joystick. A nylon cord was pulled out of a spool – similar to a hoover cable. The number of turns the spool made made it possible to determine the distance of the pulled-out end of the cord to the sensor. The cord ran through a small joystick that could be tilted forwards, backwards or to the sides. This also made it possible to measure the exact direction of the pulled-out cord. With this data, we were able to measure the point in space where the end of the string was located at any time, so that we only had to attach it to the head of the piggy device,” explains Kariem.
The Arduino Micro Controller then collected all the data and sent a string of numbers to the computer 50 times a second via a USB connection. To receive the data string in Maya, break it down into its components and convert the transformation and rotation values, which were then mapped to the character rigs, Amit Rojtblat developed a Maya plug-in, which the team named “Cookie Monster”. The plug-in has an interface with which different takes of a shot can be recorded, whereby an animation curve is recorded for each attribute. For example, the arm from take A could be combined with the head from take B at a later date.
The mechanical construction “Piggy Device” and the specially developed Maya plug-in “Cookie Monster” were given their internal names in reference to puppets
internal names in honour of puppeteer Jim Henson (“Muppet Show”, “Sesame Street”, “The Fraggles”).
Less – a good basis
The decision to work with Arnold in Houdini for lighting, shading and rendering was made by Lighting and Shading TD Vincent Ullmann, who had already gained a lot of experience with Arnold and Softimage and was keen to test Arnold under Houdini. Kariem comments: “A big advantage of Arnold is the very logical physical shader model and the physically correct results. You can make very good changes here, as you can already achieve a good basis with very few light sources.”
“A Toad Song” has won various awards since its release, including the “Best in Show” award at Siggraph 2017, and was also one of the almost 63 projects submitted for the Oscar category “Best Animated Short Film”.
About Kariem Saleh
Kariem Saleh gained his first experience as a filmmaker in his home town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld, where he was involved in the realisation of educational films as an editor and director at the Technical University. in 2OO7, he completed the summer programme at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles and an internship at Stan Winston Studios in Van Nuys. This was followed by a six-month internship at Rise Visual Effects Studios in Berlin.
From 2OO9 to 2O15, Kariem Saleh studied at the Film Academy in Ludwigsburg. During this time, he made several scenic and animated short films, both within and outside of his studies, which Saleh realised as a writer and director. In addition to his work as a writer and director, Saleh has been working as a VFX artist on German and international cinema productions for over eight years, currently for Rise FX in Berlin. This year, he plans to found the company “RainDogs Gbr” with colleagues from the animation and make-up effects sector (www.raindogs-berlin.com). The aim is to be able to offer contract work in the fields of animation, VFX and film as well as make-up, miniature and animatronic effects. The company is also planning its own projects for short film productions and VR. As with “A Toad Song”, the basic idea behind everything will be to build as much as possible by hand and to combine the advantages of practical effects, set and character construction with the digital world of animation.
More information at: www.kariemsaleh.de[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
