Rule #1: Never Intimidate the Client

AMATEUR’S ANECDOTES

Rule #1: Never Intimidate the Client
Written by Philip M. Ware

vol. I, article 2 [originally written Fall 1998/Winter 1999]

There are times where being trendy and cool aren’t always the best recourse. This is especially true when your intended viewing audience is comprised mainly of retired Air Force officers and, basically, people over 60. Why? 1) No sense of humor when it comes to things that will cost them money. 2) If they hold the purse strings, it’s unwise to honk them off.

So why the etiquette lesson? Well, it’s not so much a lesson in manners as much as a page in my history book that I am perversely proud of, but would have benefited from just following the straight path.

There was a product. It was called something that for copyright issues (and the fact that I worked on the product, there’s some wacky legal binding on what I can discuss, also) I can’t tell you, but I can tell you that it was a large-scale application that was very ambitious. It was a monumental task, and as such, required a monumental-sized effort for the task I was given: an animation to impress the board of directors, who were going to be in town the next week. So, I was to impress the men with the power. “OK, no problem,” I thought.

I sat down with the LightWave modeler and, first, created the names of each of the components within the application to be shown off. The beveled text was adequate and titanic in size. The text was also given the material of a nice, shiny color, a differing shade for each component. I wanted the lights to be the color for these, at first, but then, the rich colors and flat texturing captured my interest. I pursued this and, following the success of my previous text animations for this company, proceeded in that direction. In the layout, I had them whirling in from points unknown, swiveling in from the side, all sorts of boring text animation things. Of the compiled video, the coolest part was when the previously displayed object shattered into about 1,400 polygons when the next text slammed into it. There was something about the whole animation that I didn’t like, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I had, however, used close to 3 days on the modeling, layout, animation(which took the majority of time, even on the P6-200/128MB) and video editing. That, and we were worried that Yanni would come after us with a stick since I used one of his cooler intros as a click-track.

So, it was Thursday, and the brass were going to be in on Monday. Well…isn’t that interesting. I decided that I could still use the objects I had already created, but I went in and changed all of the materials to a fairly shine-free chrome. I also created an additional object that was the name of the application itself, and it was to be the final image these men saw. It would be titanic, colossal, immense! It would also have to happen quickly.

Now, I was monkeying with camera tracks and motion paths and such in the previous one, and after finally watching the tape of Millennium from the previous Friday, I had an idea. I started a new project in layout and the first thing I did was import all of the objects in there. So, with a polygon count reaching the number of lies told in congress in a year, I didn’t have much room for frills if I wanted this to render in under a decade. Soooo…if I wanted to give it some panache, I would have to do something with the environment – something I hadn’t messed with before. So the second thing I did was place a spotlight on every object. When they were all turned on, it was a real mess and extremely over-exposed. So, what is an animator to do? Dig into the manuals, that’s what!

I turned off all the lights in the scene and set the background to black. I then turned the colors on all the lights to either a pale yellow or a dark orange. Next, I set the visibility of all the objects to zero. That’s right, invisible. Now, the magic – envelopes. It’s a simple concept, and, really, it made the rest of the animation setup a snap. I just got the camera set on a path, ran the wireframe preview and wrote down times. From there, I went in and set the visibility envelopes for the different text object and the envelopes for the intensity of each of the lights. What this did was set up a sort of pulsating roller coaster ride through the text objects. Now, the camera path had to be adjusted so that it was coming at each of the text objects head on. Cool, huh? Well, yes, because as the camera would approach each object, the space in front of the camera would begin to fade into the object, but would then disappear after about 2 seconds as the camera got close enough for the object to overfill the screen.

Well, now you know the mood that this type of display can create, and that’s creepy. I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but it was very close to being something that you could imagine being shown by FOX around 9pm on a Friday. At any rate, I had compiled the whole animation(only 4 scenes) and crunched them down to – get this – 480MB. Now, I know this isn’t much by today’s standards, but what’s impractical about this size is that it had to be played off of a laptop machine with 32MB RAM. Yeah… Now, I didn’t realize how creepy it was until I was in the unlit conference room watching this puppy play on an 8′ screen. My first thought was, “Wow. This is…uh…dark.”

Now, remember rule #1? Well, when the 54-second animation finished and the lights were raised, I’m not sure I saw a face in the room that wasn’t a scowl. I got compliments on how well the animation was done, but I also got a stern talking to about the mood it presented. Apparently, the monolithic logo at the end didn’t make up for eerie lighting, disturbing camera angles or cello-heavy music. I don’t know if was as a direct result, but the project received very little backing and I was not asked to do a production animation for the board of directors again.

So, there you go. Thank you for reading, and check back later for new insights/stories/misguided prose.