Film School Blog - Tag Archive for "3d animation school"

New York Film Academy Graduate To Screen At Tribeca Film Festival

Published on April 2, 2012

The Tribeca Film Festival was created in 2002 by Robert De Niro, in response to the declining vitality of Manhattan’s Tribeca community following the attacks of 9/11. Since its launch ten years ago, Tribeca Film Festival has established itself as one of the premier film festivals in the world for independent features, documentaries, and shorts. Their mission: “to enable the international film community and the general public to experience the power of film by redefining the film festival experience.”

This year, Tribeca recognized one of New York Film Academy’s international graduates, Martin Rosete. Martin came to New York Film Academy in 2007 thanks to a scholarship from the La Caixa Fellowship Program in Spain. “At that time I could not even dream everything that I was about to learn at NYFA and all the opportunities that this would give me in the professional world.” Now, Martin has a film, Voice Over, being screened at Tribeca and an agent at William Morris Endeavor. His future is ripe for success.

What drives you as an artist?

Outstanding stories. That is what moves me. When I fall in love with a script or story, I am able to commit myself to all the time and pressure that goes into making a movie. If the story is not amazing, it is not worth putting all your energy into. That’s what happened to me with Voice Over. When the writer, Luiso Berdejo, let me read it, I fell completely in love with it and I told him that I would die to direct it. Fifteen months later, we finished Voice Over and now we’re in Tribeca amongst many other film festivals. I also have an agent from William Morris Endeavor and I’m reading many feature scripts. It is a really exciting moment.

Can you tell us about your experience at NYFA?

NYFA is a great place to study filmmaking. It completely focuses on the hands-on experience. I was shooting almost every week on my projects – or classmates’ projects.

In addition to directing, you also gain a sense of each department (sound, photography, editing, etc.) When you leave NYFA, you have a strong understanding about what it takes to make a movie, and that puts you in a great position to enter the professional world.

Also, what I loved the most about NYFA was their advanced equipment (cameras, lighting, etc.) I was able to use the equipment all the time. So, if you go there with the idea of shooting constantly, they will provide you with the resources to shoot 24/7. That is something that no other film school is able to offer.

What is your perspective on screening at film festivals? Advice on the process?

Film Festivals are the main doors to the professional world. Being in the big ones and winning awards, gives you the visibility needed to find the right producer, agent, or investor, interested in your work. My work has been selected in more than 500 film festivals, winning over 100 awards. The only secret is to have something good to show and finding the resources to distribute your work.

With Voice Over we have been super lucky to find the support of the distribution company Marvin & Wayne, The Line Between, Mas Medios, and Genepsis Media who are taking care of the online marketing and social media.

What kind of advice would you give to the aspiring filmmaker and NYFA student dreaming to succeed?

Whatever you do, do it right. Even if you are doing a small project with no budget. Try your best. Put all of your energy and passion into it. Sometimes the result won’t be great, but you may get a good lesson that you can apply in the next shooting. I always joke with my crew, even on low budget sets, telling them that we have to face the shoot as if we were doing Ben-Hur. That kind of commitment from everyone makes the difference. And besides all of that, for me it’s very important to show respect for the profession and for the professionals involved.

NYFA 3D Animation Alum Creates Pope-Endorsed Video Game

Published on September 7, 2010

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Father Maximo Villanueva Jr. of the Philippines has found an unconventional application for the 3D animation and video game development skills he gained participating in two New York Film Academy 3D Animation Programs. In collaboration with another design artist, Father Villanueva Jr. has created a video game not about mafia violence or extraterrestrial battles but about the teachings of the Catholic church. The game’s story stars a boy named Paolo who accidentally falls down a well into a series of caves and must find his way out by answered questions about the teachings of the Catholic faith and Christian living. At the end of the game, the successful player will guide Paolo to meet Jesus. Father Villanueva Jr.’s vision can analogized as a Sunday school version of popular childrens’ math and science learning game Mathblaster. He began conceptualizing and building the story, the environment and the 3D models of the characters during his first trip to the New York Film Academy. When he introduced his developing ideas and animation to his superiors in the Church, the head of the Balanga Diocese sent him back to NYFA for a second trip in order to refine his work. The game has been translated into five languages. It is currently being distributed to Catholic schools in the Philippines and is being prepped for international distribution. A new game is already in the works; this one will tell the story of Paolo as a young adult, looking for his first girlfriend.

1-Year 3D Animation Class of 2010 Reel

Published on August 5, 2010

Our students from our 1-Year 3D Animation Program have had a productive two semesters. We’ve compiled a reel of some of their work from semesters 1 and 2 of the program. The next start dates to our 1-Year 3D Animation Program and our 4-Week Workshop are coming up September 8, so get your applications in! And congrats to the 3D Animation class of 2010!

3D Animation Inspiration

Published on April 28, 2009

Get inspired! Even doing such an exciting and engaging work as 3D animation one can sometimes get a little jaded and overworked so it’s important to know how to get re-energized and excited about your job again. One of the ways I get re-engaged is to look at some of the amazing work available online. Here are some of my favorites.

This is a matte painting sight with some astonishingly beautiful work. Matte paintings are usually digitally made using programs such as Photoshop and Painter and are used as backgrounds in movies and games etc. Visit MattePainting.org

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Look at the ZBrush site. This a great way to model for both games and movies. It’s quick and allows for a more artistic and intuitive approach to creating characters etc. Visit Pixlogic.com

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If you’re into lighting and shaders look no further than this mental ray site. Visit Mentalimages.com

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If you have some sites you’re enthusiastic about please feel free to let me know about them. Good hunting!

Robert Appleton, New York Film Academy 3D Animation School Chair

New York Film Academy 3D Animation Course

Published on April 21, 2009

What to expect in the first month of the New York Film Academy one-year 3D Animation program and how to plan for it.

The first month of our one-year animation program here at the NYFA will be one of the most intensive learning experiences of your life. During this time you will write a short story, create a storyboard, act out some of the scenes and create videos for reference.

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The whole purpose of creating this animation is to familiarize you with the animation pipeline and some of the major components that are required in the production of any animated movie. It’s essential that from the beginning of the course you have a practical understanding of these processes, and with that in mind we learn how to create an organic character, usually a bipedal one made from polygons (polygonal modeling is a major modeling technique used in games and movies), and we will also create some basic props to support the story.

Then we learn how to apply textures to the models, how to rig them (put bones in the character to move it), how to animate it and how to output the final animation in into a movie format such as Quicktime or AVI.

During this first month you will receive allot of support from faculty and teaching assistants in getting you through this extreme learning curve. In order for you to succeed you will need to put in a significant effort and extra hours to achieve the results we expect of you during your course. Please check out earlier blogs for more important information about coming to the NYFA one year animation intensive.

As far as required reading goes a major source of information and inspiration will be found in “The animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard Williams. Williams was the animation director for “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, and almost every animator has at some point used this book as a reference and animation bible.

Please refer to my earlier blog posts for more important information on attending the school.

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Robert Appleton, New York Film Academy 3D Animation Instructor

Are Drawing Skills Needed For 3D Animation Program?

Published on April 7, 2009

Another often asked question regarding coming to the NYFA animation program is “Do I need drawing and artistic abilities and skills in order to attend your school?”.

If you have art school and or drawing experience that is a definite plus as it indicates that you have above average ability to visualize your characters and scenes. We do have a life drawing class during our first semester as it’s very important to have a grasp of the human anatomy for modeling and animation.

For modelers drawing skills are a definite plus and if you can design a character and draw a decent turnaround, then draw him/her in an action pose and model the character accurately with correct topology then that’s a really nice thing to put on your reel. You may for instance see a job advertisement for a modeler with this addition: “Traditional art skills and ability to do draft occasional concept drawings/paintings would be a major plus”.

However I know some good modelers who are not such great draftsmen, and in allot of companies artists specialize and so one person does the drawings and another does the models.

As I said in a recent blog, artistic skills are not essential. Technical abilities are highly valued in the animation industry so you can be lacking artistically and still do well in such ares as shading and lighting, rigging, rendering and particle systems. These areas require good skills in scripting languages such as Python, Maxscript and MEL, and programing languages such as C++.

Robert Appleton, New York Film Academy 3D Animation School Instructor

Prepairing For NYFA 3D Animation Courses

Published on April 2, 2009

If you have registered for the NYFA 3D Animation School one-year intensive course, or even the one month course, advanced preparation is helpful or even essential to get the most out of the program. Because attending the animation courses entails full speed ahead from day one and warp speed thereafter, having a familiarity with computers (mac or pc) is essential.

Knowing the basics of Photoshop will greatly aid your progress as we use it for texture creation, and although we do teach Photoshop classes it will ease your emersion in to what is a very demanding year of study to be acquainted with it before we start.

Of less importance but a definite advantage is a familiarity with After Effects, which basically is Photoshop in motion. After Effects is a very important program, is used extensively in the film and broadcast industries for motion graphics, visual effects and compositing, and thus can be a help in getting you into a job.

The main 3D program we use at the Academy is Maya. Maya is a vast and difficult program to master and thus having even a little experience with it will be of great help to you when entering the program.

You can download a free 30 day trail of Maya from here. If you are a student you may get a copy of Maya with a substantial discount from educational software distributors such as journeyed.com or the academicsuperstore.com

There are many beginners books and DVDs on Maya and you may want to visit your local bookstore to find a book that you like. I will be sending out a reading list along with other important information to those of you that have registered for the one year course before classes start in September, so be on the lookout for that.

Happy learning!

Robert Appleton, New York Film Academy 3D Animation School Instructor

3D Animation School: Creating Convincing Images

Published on March 20, 2009

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We can only get so far by creating viable images in our animation program by using shaders and lighting. At some point we will need to take our files into a compositing package in order to finalize the look of our scene.

By employing “render passes” we can output various aspects of a scene such as the reflections, lights, and colors into separate layers and then import them into a compositor such as After Effects, Shake or Nuke to name but a few.

Once in the compositing program we are able to combine the passes in “layers” and modify each one in order to get the best result image wise. For instance the image with the bright colors is an index pass and allows the compositor to mask out specific areas of the scene in order to apply an effect to the unmasked areas.

The white image at the bottom is an occlusion pass which allows us to bring soft shadows into the scene. This is a great technique for softening and neutralizing that harsh cg look that were all familiar with.

Understanding render passes is an important and essential technique for image creation and one that we encourage our students to master.

By Robert Appleton, 3D Animation School Instructor

3D Animation School: Rendering Cars with Mental Ray

Published on March 16, 2009

car-shaders tree

When watching a car commercial one can safely assume that cg cars will be used for many of the shots. Depending of the location different kinds of lighting will be need to be represented, recreating reflections of the surrounding landscape, be it city or countryside also needs to be taken into account.

Mental ray has many different kinds of shaders (shaders determine the surface characteristics of a 3D object) for describing the look of elements in a scene. This semester we have spent 2 classes just on car shaders in mental ray! There are a set of shaders in mental ray called architectural shaders (called mia) that contain many attributes essential for creating a car surface. Although there is already a shader in the mental ray library called appropriately a “car shader” we usually create our own from mia shaders for greater options and flexibility for the look of the car paint.

In order to create the surface look we need it’s necessary to create what we call a “shader tree”, which is composed of a number of shaders, textures and utilities. Shader trees can range from simple to outrageously complex. The car shader is relatively straight forward though understanding how all of the attributes contained within the mia shader work together can be quite an endeavor. It’s not just putting all of the the “nodes” together, but also optimizing them to render in the shortest time possible. Rendering just one frame for a movie can take many hours, and as there are 24 frames per second for a movie and 30 fps for TV, rendering a 5 second shot can take allot of time and money.

Understanding how lighting and shaders work is a big part of creating convincing animation in games, commercials and movies. At the New York Film Academy we take allot of time and effort with the students in this area, ensuring that they graduate with an in depth understanding of mental ray fundamentals, lighting and their importance in the cg pipeline.

Robert Appleton, 3D Animation School Instructor

3D Animation School Student Thoughts

Published on March 10, 2009

For our 3D Animation group project, I am doing the character’s motion in a number of scenes and making it realistic.

At the beginning, it is not easy to make the character lifelike. I had to think about which part of body would be affected when the character moves such as walking.

Considering the body’s balance and weight is very necessary for the animation. For instance, I needed to consider the “bounce” when the superhero sits down on the floor. Reference motion is important as a first step, it allowed me to set the animation blocking easily (blocking is setting the initial extremes of movement).

I spent a lot of time studying the movie references for the character as well as continually acting out it out for myself, which is a process of internalizing the characters movement. In this particular scene, the character has had some bad news and slumps down against the car. This is a rough render called a “playblast” in which we can quickly see the the characters movements. These are rough (low polygon) models allowing me to animate the character in real time without the computer lagging and “distorting” the animation.

Pei-Cheng Wu, 3D Animation School Student

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