TITLE: ESC
NAME: Zachary Brewster-Geisz
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: zach@brewstergeisz.cjb.net
WEBPAGE: http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze27cmr/
TOPIC: Escape
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: esc_zbg.mpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Animation Master, v. 10.5

TOOLS USED: 

Anzovin Studio's Setup Machine for rigging, QuickTime Pro 5 for editing, Apple
Soundtrack for music, ffmpeg and the MJPEG tools for encoding, all on Mac OS
X.

CREATION TIME: 
    Eight days from concept to final render.

HARDWARE USED: 
    iMac DV SE (400Mhz G3), iMac G4 (800Mhz)

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 
    The escape key tries to live up to its name...


VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 
    There's sound. The video may be a little dark on some
players.  Other than that, you're on your own.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


The idea dropped into my head on October 8.  Yes, I compressed three months into
eight days.  I have no excuse except that I had no idea what to do with the
topic.  Then I got to thinking, probably about a month prior to the due date,
what if I made the escape key my main character?  I still had nothing
story-wise until a late night lying awake in bed when the story as you see it
here took shape.  Okay, it's not _much_ of a story, but what do you want for
eight days?

Actually, there was supposed to be a coda wherein the escape key is thrown into
the jail cell with the Meta key ("Emacs Is My Co-Pilot"); Meta's been in jail
and that's why he's not on any keyboards, get it?  No?  Well, it's an obscure
Unix joke.

Most of the creative work was done from the 8th to the 15th.  The desk and some
of the props (everything on the desk except the keyboard and computer,
basically) were recycled from previous projects (including my first IRTC
entry); the office chair was a free model from Hash, Inc. (modeler unknown),
but everything else is mine.

I used a lot of render tricks to get stuff done quickly.  Whenever you see
depth-of-field, that's a separate layer, pre-blurred and composited under
everything else.  The desk was created with a procedural texture, but I swapped
it out with an image-mapped version for close-up shots because it rendered
quicker.  And of course, if the background wasn't moving, it was a single-frame
render turned into a flat layer.

I was lucky to be able to render on one computer while working on another.  I
suppose this violates my single-machine license.  Damn you, proprietary
software!

The weird walls in the first shot are from the office in my house.  That's my
daughter on the computer screen and my son in the picture frame.  And yes,
that's a generic PC running Mac OS X.  I would have done Linux but I don't know
how to do a screen capture in it; and I couldn't model a Mac, because
Ctrl-Alt-Delete doesn't historically do anything on Macs, and what kind of a
joke would Control-Option-Command-Eject be?

The soundtrack was added up-to-the-wire and composed (such as it is) with Apple
Soundtrack, which I just bought and was learning as I did it.  The toughest
part was deciding what kind of feel I wanted; once I did that, it fell together
pretty quickly.

I exported the video to motion JPEG, transcoded it to yuv with ffmpeg, encoded
the yuv with mpeg2enc.  (I don't like ffmpeg's straight-on MPEG encoding;
that's why the extra step.)  mp2enc, mplex, done.

Thanks for watching!