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Phil 'Captain 3D' McNally is sweeping the boards at animation festivals worldwide with his short film Pump-Action.
By Karen Charlesworth |
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| Phil "Captain 3D" McNally's three-and-a-half-minute film Pump-Action is currently sweeping the boards at animation festivals the world over - recent successes include first place in the World Internet Animation Competition, Grand Prix and Overall Festival Winner at SMOFI 2000 and First Place in the computer animation section of the American Digital Arts Festival 2000. Pump-Action was created using Adobe® After Effects®, Premiere®, Photoshop® and Maxon's Cinema 4D XL. Phil began his career as a 3D designer, studying for a BA at Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic, and went on to do an MA in furniture design at the Royal College of Art. "But I'd always been interested in movie-making, since filming a silent 8mm cine version of William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies for an English class at school," he says. But it wasn't until 1998, when Phil visited LEAF (the London Effects and Animation Festival) that he was bitten by the animation bug for real. "I was very excited by the idea of producing my own animated short film, and decided to take six months off work to complete it," he says. |
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| Equipping himself with a Mac G3 with 512Mb of RAM, Phil began to create a storyboard, spending several days in front of the TV watching Harold Lloyd videos for inspiration. Thinking that Pump-Action would only be a six-month project, he was keen for the storyboard to be precise: "Animation takes a long time to produce, so it's important to edit first and "shoot" only the exact frames you need to fill the story." To get an idea of some tracking shots, he experimented with a mini-DV camera, first on a model of the set filled with clay figures, then on real people: eight minutes of video footage was downloaded to the Mac via FireWire and edited down to 3.5 minutes, "with each shot exactly as it needed to be produced." Pump-Action is the story of Vic Vinyl - a character "infused with the personality of Mr Blond from Reservoir Dogs" as Phil describes him - who terrorises Balloon Boy and Balloon Dog. The characters, and many of the background objects in the empty warehouse where Pump-Action is set, were created in Cinema 4D XL using Photoshop textures. "Photoshop was the obvious choice," remarks Phil: "I spent many hours layering up dirt, scratches and paint on top of the clean base image. I also used it to extract high-contrast bump maps and reflection maps from original photos." For Vic Vinyl, Phil created wrinkles for the hands and head by using Photoshop's airbrush tool to draw white lines on a black background; in Cinema 4D, he wrapped the Photoshop file around Vic's head and used a displacement map to displace the polygons according to their greyscale value. |
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| When the animation stage was complete, Phil linked his G3 with two other Macs to set up a network rendering facility. "I needed to produce PAL and NTSC versions, and I also wanted to include motion blur to improve the final motion - so I used After Effects to frame-blend the 150fps rendered sequence of TIFF files into the 25fps PAL and 30fps NTSC movies. Frame-blending also produced the motion blur effect that I was looking for at the same time," he says. For a final push to finish the rendering, Phil splashed out and bought two 400MHz iMacs and borrowed another two G3s: networking these to the existing rendering facility for 24-hour output, he found that "there was no need to turn on the central heating through the whole of January!" During the post-production process, Phil used After Effects to create effects such as focus pulls and depth-of-field. A tracking shot which shows Balloon Boy tied to a chair, with Vic Vinyl in the background, was created using alpha channels: "The focus switches from Balloon Boy to Vic," Phil explains. "I did that by rendering the whole sequence as a single, complete image. Then I rendered an alpha channel to cut out Balloon Boy, which showed him with all the reflections from his environment. Then I rendered the background by itself with no foreground, and combined the layers in After Effects with blurring for depth-of-field." |
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| When all the rendering and After Effects work was complete, the individual clips were loaded into Premiere for the final edit, with the audio being recorded directly into Premiere via an Aurora AV card. "Each object, from cars in the background to squeaking balloons up front, had its own soundtrack. I had great fun mixing the sounds together and placing them around the scene using Premiere's audio filters such as reverb, EQ and stereo pan. I even used some Flanger to give a spooky effect during a zoom in on the fan that Vic uses to scare Balloon Dog." Phil reckons that an average frame in Pump-Action took 12 minutes to render, although this figure pales into insignificance when compared with the overall time it took to create the project: an average 18 hours of work per on-screen second, or fourteen months overall. "It took twice as long as I'd expected," he says. "But now that it's finally out in the world and being recognised at festivals, it feels like it was worth the 3,500 hours' effort!" |
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About the author: Karen Charlesworth has a useless-but-fun degree in Literature and Philosophy and is a director of Leeds, UK-based Parallel Interactive Multimedia. Email her on karen@parallel.co.uk.
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