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Plywood Pictures

Lead Designer:
Adam Browne
adam@plywoodpictures.com
150 Ocean Parkway, 4A Brooklyn, NY 11218 		Plywood Pictures put together an animated short based off the arcade game Tetris. The storyline, cinematography and unique use of animations make this picture a hit at any level.
 
  Case Study  
 
Blake Henry
Blake Henry 		Adam Browne
Adam Browne

Case Study URL
Animated Short

So tell us a little about yourself?
Adam: I like to think of myself as a filmmaker and musician. I graduated from New York University with a degree in film and television production, but since middle school, I’ve always been fascinated with using technology to tell stories. Now, I’ve teamed up with fellow NYU grad, Brendan Choisnet, to start our own production company. Blake Henry, who came up with the Tetris story, is sort of our resident storyboard and concept artist. I’ve also always loved music. I’m not good enough to make a living at it, but I like to score any of the short little projects we do for fun, like this one.
Blake: I have strong roots in comics and animation (particularly 2D and more particularly Japanese animation). I appreciate comics for their ability to quickly present raw ideas, animation for being comics fully realized. I am currently enrolled in the traditional animation program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Most of the 3D art I enjoy is in video games, the Final Fantasy series, Metal Gear Solid games and animated intros to Mario games like Mario Tennis (my favorite games are still made by Nintendo).
 
How did you get your start with Swift 3D?
Adam: I started with swift 3D about a year ago. I had lofty ideas of creating a killer website for our company, and somehow I found swift 3D. It was my first true 3D software experience. I had so much fun with the demo that I bought it right away. It was only then that I realized I didn’t know anything about Flash or HTML, basically web design in general, and so I gave up on the website and put Swift 3D to the side. I didn’t really pick it up again until last summer, when I discovered the shiny world of raster rendering.
 
What Swift 3D projects have you done in the past?
Adam: Honestly, not much. I used it to do a quick CG insert in a short film called La Busquéda ( www.plywoodpictures.com/BusquedaReel.htm ), for which Blake also did the storyboards. Later, to learn the Advanced Modeler, I started a very ambitious project. It was going to be a Steam Punk style flying machine, but it started to bog down my old laptop and then crashed in the middle of saving. I lost everything. This link shows the only remains www.plywoodpictures.com/flyer.html. I definitely learned to back-up my projects.
 
Your featured work is just awesome! What was your inspiration for this project?
Blake: I drew the storyboards for the film in my storyboarding class at the School of Visual Arts. My assignment was to storyboard a 30 second film about a simple personified object or shape. I love video games so I instantly thought of Tetris shapes and what I could do with them. I also have to admit that there was a Pokemon Pinball commercial that I took a lot from.
 
Give us a little insight to the texturing techniques you used for this project.
Adam: What makes the movie most unique is the apparent mesh animation. We would all love to animate at the mesh level and still have the ease of Swift 3D, but at least for now, it’s just not possible. However, there is a lot that can be done with Lathe and Extrusion animations. I wanted the Tetris pieces to look like groups of blocks (like the game) instead of just shapes. The best way to do this, I thought, would be to have each block beveled on every edge. I began with the following extrusion with a bevel.

Pic 01

Note that the bevel extends the edges of the four cubes, so they merge together. This looked okay, but it was very flat-looking on the sides, and I had several shots from the side. So, I created a “bevel” within the extrusion editor. This solved the problem.

Pic 02

The above image shows the square piece at rest and the next image shows in mid jump. All of the distortion was done using keyframes in the extrusion editor.

Pic 03

All of the actual movement of the pieces, up and down, forward and back, was done in the scene editor.  For example, when the square character jumps, all he does in the extrusion editor is stretch up.  The pivot point basically stays put relative to the character, but with animation added in the scene editor, he appears to move naturally (I hope). Because it’s a story about Tetris pieces, I was able to keep the textures very simple, just solid colors with a little reflection.  Lighting took some time however.  The hallway and the “game shaft” had to feel very different.  It was difficult to keep the bright lights of the hall from spilling into dark shaft, and the blue lights of the shaft from coloring the hallway.  I ended up removing walls for several shots to let light in, and building other walls in the middle of nowhere to block other lights.  I bet there are much better techniques for lighting.  I admit I still have a lot to learn about lighting, and the way lights work in Swift 3D.

What was the most challenging aspect of this project?
Adam: Well, as I said, the lighting was constantly a challenge. When I started, I thought I would be able to set the lights for the scene and then just worry about animation. My filmmaking experience should have warned me that this would not be the case. The lighting had to be re-thought for every shot. Also, this project was a test of patience. All of the modeling and half the animation were done on a four year-old Powerbook. I lost a lot of enthusiasm after it took five solid days to render the third shot. I blame that mostly on my inability to be economic with the lighting. The render time seems to be directly proportional to the number of lights. That being said, it took more than 2 months to complete. Of course, I was only working on it for a few hours here and there each week, but it’s a long time to wait for what is ultimately a one-minute film. I guess folks who have been animating longer than I are probably used to that time-line.

Any additional comments you’d like to share with the community?
Adam: I am so impressed with Swift 3D. It’s just amazing to me that I can come to it with no 3D experience and within a few months create something worth showing to people. I still have a lot to learn, but it is so easy to use that I am never daunted. Some people will complain about its limitations, but I think that limitations inspire innovation. I encourage people to continue trying to do things with Swift 3D that they might first think impossible.