Floorhead (Patreon)

Spoilers* (I suppose?) for Dynamo Dream:

Jumped back into this scene the past few days! I know I need to be finishing up the keying tutorial, but gosh darn I want to keep momentum up on this, too. Also figured I'd give a bit of a breakdown.

One of the characters in the upcoming Dynamo episode is The Floorhead- he's supposed to be a commanding figure situated in an imposing subterranean office, and I wanted him to feel a bit larger-than-life (or at the very least, something more interesting than just "guy in a suit who's the boss"**), but I couldn't figure out exactly how to pull it off.

We actually filmed Kaitlin's side of the conversation months before, and I had a decent edit, but I still didn't know what/who the floorhead actually was. I knew his personality, and what he said, but not, like, his physical form.

Originally I was going to have the curtains drawn, so you just see this shadow from the inside.

Then I was going to attach a bunch of tubes and stuff, so he was integrated into a cocoon-like life-support system.

The day Andy Dopieralski (the actor) showed up, I still didn't have it totally figured out (Andy's a good friend who lives down the street, so the stakes for "winging it" were lower than usual), but at the last second we decided to just have him be a literal inanimate friggin' head. We tried building an underwater tank, or some sort of rig (always harder than you think!), but in the end decided to fake it, and just slicked his hair back.

We wanted to make it easy on ourselves, so instead of having him talk, we just kept his head steady, and he "eye acted", flicking his left eye around, as if it's the only part of him that was still animate. In the final film, a little phoneme chart slides down and hovers in front of his eye, and he communicates that way- it's fun :D (I can make a quick tut about the bubbles, if you want- it's super simple)

I ended up using a single frame of his face overall, and just cut out the eye portion, to reveal another stabilized layer where he was doing his eye movement. That way I was able to easily paste a bunch of other rotting flesh n' junk over his face without any slippage.

Andy was super down, which is great; I was feeling bad for a bit, because I never know how something like, "hey, you know how you were going to act in my film? Can it just be a still frame of your head instead?" will come across.  

So we filmed Kaitlin one day, filmed Andy a different day, then I had him come over another day to record the audio (can't wait for you to hear it), and I have to re-record Kaitlin's audio, and there's a background character I filmed an element of on a different day, and there's a floating robot voiced by  Alan Melikdjanian, who sent me his dialogue remotely (and still have to animate).

That's 6 different days for what's effectively a two minute scene. Which is a ridiculous way to make a film, but also sometimes the way you gotta do it if you're filming a scene while broke??

And at the same time, it's really really fun to be able to take a bunch of disparate elements and wrangle them into an experience for the audience. It's especially fun in this case, because the protagonist hasn't been in this location either, so we get to experience the process of her entering this weird space with her. 

It's surprisingly hard to model tiny mechanical stuff (you have to model every single screw and detail, and the variety of textures/details/materials/evidences of manufacture are incredibly dense), so I relied really heavily on image textures. I found this weird mechanical device and took a bunch of pictures I used as the base- I'll be uploading the bits to the tier 7 folks in a while here, if you want to use them! I've found them really handy. 

Look at all those different shapes! And the times when the metal has rounded edges, or sharp 90 degree angles. And the dust/metal shavings! I love this thing.

Also made a pile of books using textures from textures.com- they have a bizarrely rich variety of book textures ready to go. I just had to import them as planes, add a couple edge loops along the bindings, and fold up the outside faces for the cover.


So yes! I'm excited to get this scene wrapped up. I think I'm only a day or so away from it. This scene constitutes the middle of the episode, so it'll be really nice to get that locked down. Lots more to follow!!


*I think it's rare that spoilers actually ruin the experience of anything? Unless if it's a big ol' twist or something, generally the more knowledge I have about something going into it, the more I can appreciate it. But I know not everything feels this way!

**A little thought about creativity! (I don't want to sound pretentious, but several of you have sent messages about creativity/brainstorming, so I wanted to give some thoughts:)

So maybe this is self-evident, but as a general rule, the first idea you come up with is always going to be the most obvious. The second one the second most obvious, and so forth. So a lot of times if you want to have an "original creative idea" you just have to do the legwork of trudging through the list of obvious ideas until you get one that's not as muchso.

A lot of times you can speed that process along by combining the idea with some other random thing, some other "random seed". There's nothing new under the sun, but that's one of the easiest ways to get close. Like mixing genres or art mediums or concepts- it's also the reason why everything you've ever learned can be useful creatively.

Creativity isn't necessarily something you're "born with"- it's a thing you can generate mechanically by mixing ideas until one appeals to your sensibilities.

That said, I have no idea how to generate good sensibilities :/