Carry a Poem

I've been blogging about making the Carry a Poem animation for the past few weeks, but I realise I haven't embedded the film itself into this blog. So, here it is!



If you're in Edinburgh or Glasgow you'll also see it in libraries and schools, on buses, and on the BBC Big Screen in Edinburgh's Festival Square during February 2010.

Carry a Poem trailer #7 - post

The last stage in making a film is post-production. For the Carry a Poem animation, post was all about putting together different layers. We "rendered" each part of the animation separately and then composited them in post. (Rendering is the last stage in creating CGI animation footage and the one stage that the computers do for us. The computers take all the information we’ve given them, and generate one or more finished images for each frame of the animation.)

So, for example, each frame where the poetry cloud is pulsing through the headphones...



...is made up of four layers: the street background, the headphones, the poetry cloud, and the Carry a Poem logo:



It's even more complex at the points where the poetry cloud is transforming the street. This image...



... has two street backgrounds, not just one: one without the poetry murals, and one with. These are combined using a mask which shows the splats where the poetry cloud has hit the walls, so identifies the areas in which the murals should be revealed:



This creates a combined background onto which we add: the poetry cloud (in two layers because the number of particles in the cloud was too high for them all to be rendered together) plus the Carry a Poem logo (tiny, but still there):



As you can imagine, the biggest challenge in all this is keeping everything organised. Until all the layers are put together it's very hard to check the renders, so it's crucial that the whole process is planned and managed carefully. This involves lots of thinking things through at the beginning plus many diagrams charting what will go where.

It's worth all the hard work, though. The moment when everything comes together to produce a finished film is brilliant!

This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #7 - post

Carry a Poem trailer #6 - music

The music for the Carry a Poem trailer was composed by Adam Brewster, the other half of Binary Fable. I'm going to ask him a few questions about how he went about writing it.

Helen: You wrote the music after the animation was complete. Why's that?

Adam: So that I knew where the significant points needed to be in the music, and I was sure they wouldn't change.

Helen: Can you tell me a little about how you got started?

Adam: The first thing was to think of a tune (this usually happens in the shower, but in this case I woke up in the middle of the night with the tune in my head. I could still remember it in the morning, so I wrote it down). Then I embellished the tune in my mind and started to think about what instruments would give the effects I wanted.

After that, I sat down at the computer and worked out the timings. I needed to make sure that all the "hit points" in the action were matched by hit points in the music.

Helen: Did you have a particular style of music in mind, or did the style develop as you worked?

Adam: I felt very strongly that a dance/electronica piece would work best with the visuals.

Helen: The music's very catchy (my favourite characterisation was from reading champion Colm who described it as an "earworm"!). Was that one of your main aims?

Adam: No.

I'm glad it turned out that way, though!

Helen: Finally, tell me about that vocoder...

Adam: If you listen very carefully, there are moments when the music seems to be saying "carry a poem". This is, in fact, me, saying "carry a poem" - modulated through the synthesiser software to give a slightly ghostly, robotic singing effect (in a way that hasn't been heard since Mr Blue Sky...!).



This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #6 - music

Carry a Poem trailer #5 - animation

Although there aren't any characters in the Carry a Poem trailer, there were plenty of things to animate. The biggie was the poetry cloud - thousands of particles that needed to be wrangled into position. Then, the camera movements had to be created, the Carry a Poem logo had to dance down the street and the poetry-carrying objects needed some spin.

The animation technique we use here at Binary Fable is 3D CGI – three dimensional computer-generated imagery. We use software called 3DS Max to build and animate computer models. It allows "particle systems" to be created, which made the poetry cloud possible. A particle system lets the animator control a large number of objects at the same time – by setting up rules and then adding a bit of randomness – rather than animating each object separately. This is what the interface looks like:



Here’s a "rough" of the short teaser film. The rough shows all the animation, but the visuals don’t yet look polished. It’s important to agree an animation freeze based on the rough so that work on the soundtrack can begin. The composer and sound designer need to know that the timings of the action aren’t going to change.



This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #5 - animation

Carry a Poem trailer #4 - storyboards

Late November 2009: we had a street design, we had poetry selections, we’d started the mural designs. Next up: we needed storyboards. We needed to work out what story we were telling, and how we were going to use the visuals to tell it.

We put together a very rough computer model of the street and used that as the basis for the storyboards. Everything apart from the buildings – the poem-carrying objects and the poetry cloud – was drawn on afterwards. We created picture tubes for the letters and paint splodges so that we could draw the cloud directly.



The storyboards are our chance to explore camera angles and get a feel for the action. They're also a great way of communicating our ideas to the rest of the team. Click on the thumbnails to see the full PDF storyboards.



This post can also be found on the Carry a Poem website: Making the animated trailer #4 - storyboards