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World Building


For people that are seeing this for the first time, these are weekly looks at progress, as we develop a system for fast, low cost production of an animation product. All WIP footage with many errors as usual.

I thought that this video would be a good opportunity to talk a bit about world building, something that is important in creating a movie experience that feels larger. It's something that's almost universally absent in indie film, because of the budget typically involved in implementing it.

World building has different meanings to different people, but the way I would describe it is expanding the attenuation radius of your audiences perception of the fictional world. It may sound like a new concept to some, but once you understand it, you'll remember seeing directors do this back to the 1920s. I'll break it down into very practical terms.

level 0 - Clerks, The Blair Witch Project, Saw, sitcoms

Only the main characters are ever really in focus, we never get any information about the world in which the story takes place. These stories are unframed.

level 1 - True Blood, Dexter, Star Trek TNG, The Sopranos, and most mainstream tv shows

The story has a defined world and setting, with some random interactions with auxiliary characters in the world external to the primary clique of central characters. Occasionally a fictional news broadcast is shown on a tv screen to establish in the viewers mind that there is a world of people within the fiction that are reacting to the events of the plot. "KTLA is live at the scene where Batman has just announced that he will be partnering with the X men after last weeks purchase of Dc Comics, Ticketmaster, and the interstate highway system by Disney/Pixar/Marvel/Lucasfilm Inc."

level 2 - Falling Down, Robocop, Rocky, Casino, Boardwalk Empire, A Time to Kill, The Dark Knight Rises, mostly movies and high budget television

Events in the outside world of the fiction are commonly shown full screen. The larger world in which the plot exists becomes part of the plot, repercussions of plot events frequently impact this larger world, and those repercussions are shown and sometimes feed back into the main plot.

Level 3 - Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Cinematic Universes

These stories have built worlds so large that full plotlines form in orbit around the central plot. The wider world is so fully established that independent fictions can spawn within the context of the periphery of what the central plot showed us. Rouge One is an entire AAA movie that occurs as a footnote to events we've already seen. Prequels, sequels, and spinoffs are often evidence that a franchise has succeeded at world building.

So how do you get started, just sitting in front of a blank screen, trying to do some world building?

1. Show on screen that life is happening outside the events of your story
2. Allow events in your story to affect this outside world
3. Add camera shots that show people outside the story reacting to the events in the story

In the video above, just some daily reels, the protagonist is simply driving home, but there are many instances of normal life going on in the surrounding street. While this doesn't have a direct impact on the events of the plot, it's significant. To give a concrete example, later in the film this same city is destroyed by a nuclear missile. While the same plot point could be delivered by only showing the nuke scene, it becomes more effective via world building, since we have previously established the existence of many people in the city.
 
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i did some research on unreal engine the last couple of weeks...
Figured i could just use a cgi model instead of a real actress and then I would have the freedom to tell any story i wanted instead of an actress telling me no or asking for too much money.

But ultimately what I came to conclude was... the 3D models and metahumans just aren't movie stars.
Most of the time they have dead eyes, all the videos that are good? -- they have huge masks and helmets over the characters faces to try to hide it.

The one thing that really impresses me though is car chases.. this scene that you posted.. stuff like in the matrix awakens
Instead of hiring 80 stunt drivers and shuting down 5 miles of city road, spending days and days practice stunts and taking risk.

You can just show your actor get into a car and then cut to a scene of the car in cgi.
Really opens up the world of car chases. This is the most appealing part of unreal to me.. something that can create massive cost savings and be used seamlessly inside a live action movie.
 
That's what people with funding have been using it for for years. Hybrid workflow gives the best results, but full CGI gives you the most control and the lowest cost. For my purposes, I really need to be able to do a lot on a low budget. Also, there's travel expenses that make any live action work prohibitive when you are drawing a crew from an international pool. Some disadvantages, some advantages.

I think it breaks down to sacrificing demographics, and balancing quality vs possibility. For one thing, I doubt anyone over 35 will watch Save Point. It's basically an animated show for marketing purposes, regardless of how realistic I'm able to make some parts. I would love to make "Casino" but obviously 120 million dollars is out of my price range ATM. With time and effort, I can soon create any story I want to tell within this system. It may not ever equal the results I could get with the backing of a major studio, but I've seen people pay for their entire lives with products at 10% of this level. Ultimately, I'm choosing between a high level of quality with hundreds of roadblocks and impossible frustration, and something where I can put out a finished product and start creating fans of the fiction. The worst part of directing for me was always knowing the correct answers, and not being able to afford to impliment them. I could see from the beginning that great films were made by people that were free to create their vision. If Scorcese needed a parade in shot, they gave him a parade. When you start trying to create a world on screen and you find that every single part of your vision has to be compromised, you start feeling a bit more tolerant about making a few compromises, and then being free in all other respects. That's how I percieve UE5.

About the Character models, metahuman and others, that's a complex topic. I'm not sure exactly which videos you've seen, but I know what you're talking about. This is essentially an uncanny valley conversation. I'd put it like this, you're both right and wrong. You know how people say "it's more about the artist than the brush" or " more about the player than the instrument" Not only can you see vast differences in the quality of digital characters from one creator to another, but you can develop techniques and experience over time to hide the weaknesses of this format, and highlight the strengths. Have you noticed how some directors can get incredible performances out of 7 year olds and some can't? Google the first episode of the Simpsons, Family guy, South Park, in every instance of a long running animated show the quality of the animation improved over time. It starts off crude, and the more time and money the creators are given, the better it gets. I'll show you a clip of a metahuman used correctly, and it's not that bad. If you go around youtube, you'll find a lot of kids trying it out for the first time, and it's not too impressive. The potential is there to be developed though, and people who start moving early in the game will have an advantage. This is the first year of real time GI lighting, the first program that does it with an integrated marketplace. I still don't have a good character animator, and I do those tests myself, with no mocap gear available, but it can absolutely get better with work and additional staff.


That's a custom metahuman of Keanu there. When he looks in the mirror, it's the real one. It's not 100%, but this digital actor, with a good voice actor (the real Keanu in this case) is good enough to tell a story that would appeal to millions if not 10s of million of people. Factor in that improvement over time is practically guaranteed in these situations, I think it's a viable option for creating content for younger viewers.


Here's one of the videos you might have seen. Highly detailed faces with dead lifeless eyes and robotic expressions. Here's what you might be missing. This is what they look like before you animate them properly, not after. It's a dense skill, and is simply not shown in this video. You can change facial expressions with a lot of detail and control, it's just a skill that you can't pick up in a few days. I've been working at it for a while, and I'm still not even at baseline competence with custom character animation. Still, I learn something new each session, and it is starting to add up.

As far as them being movie stars, that's a semantics thing, but I'd say for the demographic I'm targeting, the life that's breathed into these characters will be more significant on the screen than the models themselves. I could literally die waiting for an opportunity to make film the way extremely wealthy people do, so I'm plunging ahead with this.

Lastly, you're not making a decision between a 3d character and a movie star at our financial level. You're making a decision between unknown local actors and 3d characters. Gary Oldman for a million dollars or a metahuman for free? Gary Oldman all the way. I'll sell my car, whatever, having him attached would make all the difference. But cousin Bob from down the street who "used to be part of an improv group" or a metahuman? That's definitely a different question. Also, I can set the metahuman on fire or make it fly at no additional charge.
 
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like i said i spent a couple weeks looking around, so i've seen all that stuff and more.
even in the very best animations they have dead eyes the moment they hold still and look at something.

As soon they stop danciong around the illusion is broken. for human characters anyway
I think it works great for animal characters like if you want to do zootopia, its much more forgiving if it isn't human faces.

and in that matrix demo you posted above? when the woman walks around the city its so awful. the way she walks.
It's straight up the way a video game character walks, its not human at all. so that video defintely isn't going to change anyones mind lol.

surely these will be addressed more over time - but i maintain there are certain kinds of storys that won't work with this technology.
like for example a love story... am i really supposed to care about two dead eyed cgi-s kissing each other ? i will probably laugh if i see it.

if you do really cool visuals like two supermen flighting through NYC destroying buildings and fighting off alien invasion.. yeah that could be very cool and worth watching!

anything that is a spectacle can work. cause it's not about the movie star.
personally if i played a videogame i would skip the cut scenes a lot of times lol so i am not your target market anyway.

but for this to be mainstream for human based story? needs advancement.
 
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By coincidence, listening to this podcast today a director (workaholics, what we do in the shadows) addresses cgi


He says they great for a lot of stuff but "they can't really act tho" maybe in 10 years
basically same thing i said "they aren't movie stars"
 
As soon they stop danciong around the illusion is broken. for human characters anyway
I think it works great for animal characters like if you want to do zootopia, its much more forgiving if it isn't human faces.

and in that matrix demo you posted above? when the woman walks around the city its so awful. the way she walks.
It's straight up the way a video game character walks, its not human at all. so that video defintely isn't going to change anyones mind lol.

surely these will be addressed more over time - but i maintain there are certain kinds of storys that won't work with this technology.
like for example a love story... am i really supposed to care about two dead eyed cgi-s kissing each other ? i will probably laugh if i see it.

if you do really cool visuals like two supermen flighting through NYC destroying buildings and fighting off alien invasion.. yeah that could be very cool and worth watching!

anything that is a spectacle can work. cause it's not about the movie star.
personally if i played a videogame i would skip the cut scenes a lot of times lol so i am not your target market anyway.

but for this to be mainstream for human based story? needs advancement.

I don't exactly disagree with this, though I think that perception depends a lot on viewer age. When I was a kid people had global audiences based on characters that were far more crude.

I've repeatedly seen people go into full blown fan mania over poorly animated characters, masked characters, and in the case of the power rangers, a group of people wearing motorcycle helmets. It's not exactly what I want to make, but once you figure out just how high that wall around Hollywood actually is, finding a way to work autonomously starts to make more sense.

An argument I sometimes make to the people that say this animation isn't good enough for marketable filmmaking references a terrible property (one amongst many I assure you) called Stiens Gate. (I'm not a fan of anime or manga, so don't get the wrong idea) (Akira, memories, and Ghibli excepted)

this is the final finished product that millions are paying for across the world for some reason.


Now here's the argument - if you read about the history of this thing, these people have produced multiple bestselling international hits over a 20 year period. In case you're not much on graphics work, this is basically a cutout pasted on top of a still picture in every scene. Untalented voice actors then recite template high school soap opera dialogue over the pictures. There is a building somewhere in which people work on Stien's gate. and in that building are dozens of people that are all gainfully employed, with families, paid off cars and houses, savings in the bank, with a small degree of global celebrity, sometimes attending fan conventions where swarms of people gather to praise their accomplishments.

So why does a designer at 1% of my skill level get paid 8x as much? it's not because the animation style I'm using isn't good enough for publication. It's certainly not from a lack of imagination. It breaks down to 2 things. Money, and connections. The groups that made childishly unskilled super low effort stuff had an investor, a company that produced many similar low effort manga adaptations. That money allowed the creators to assemble and employ a team, and instead of spending one unpaid year after another arguing about whether or not audiences would pay to see some kindergarten level art project, they just sat and worked together in peace, their bills paid, their goal clear.

Can you imagine what would have happened to the South Park creators if those two small town guys had waited until they could get movie stars to start making the first episode? I can tell you, they would be working at Taco Bell. They hit the ground running with only the most basic tools, and 20 years later they have made 4 actual movies and a hit Broadway musical. I think there is something to learn from that.

CG characters aren't perfect yet, but films like Alita Battle Angel, Avatar, The Hobbit, and others have already proven that the issue with 3d characters isn't their format, but simply the lack of effort and financing in most projects that include them. To return your serve, the Alita character was the main star of a AAA budget Hollywood film, and that film was financially successful. You would have to understand the technology a bit to understand this, but there is minimal difference between what can be accomplished with UE5 characters and what was done in that film. The big difference is time and effort, not the tech itself. They did also had a full mocap stage with hundreds of calibrated data points, whereas the UE demos you are watching are mostly rigged using a repurposed Iphone (which is what I'm using right now).

Here's another clip from this week's development, too minor to create a separate post about. So you're right, it's a lot easier to make a non human character seem legitimate. In an interesting side note, this is mainly because a huge portion of the human brain is tasked to face recognition. Ask people what kind of car was parked next to them this morning, and they'll say "I think it was blue". That same person can remember details about the eyebrows of their 3rd grade math teacher.


here is the pilot for South Park - they were invested in for producing this, and have made an estimated half billion dollars since that happened. You have to believe in ideas, and let them grow. Amazing things can happen when you ignore mental barriers and just go to work and do the best you can.


For me, it's not a choice between an animated star and a movie star, it's a choice between being a working filmmaker, and being a "chalupa creator" or worse, a middle management marketing executive (I'm actually well qualified for that, I just can't spend the rest of my life rolling my eyes in zoom meetings)

Quick note. Had you played the live demo of the Matrix awakens, you would know that the exact moment you are describing, where the character begins walking like a video game - is when the demo hands you control of the character. The rest of the demo from then on is playable with a control pad. So before that point they have unlimited animations, and after it, only 10 animations are possible, resulting in the effect you mentioned. With what we are doing over at SP, the player never has direct gamepad control, so we can always use unlimited animations, which look much more lifelike. It looks like a video game there, because it's a video game. lol.
 
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The alita one doens't have dead eyes -- i wonder if that is bc her eyes are so huge and inhuman that it circumvents the effect?
Same with gollum... not quite human, really humogous eyes.

You say time and effort but it's also the tech... the iphone stuff like you're saying just isn't as advanced as putting dots on the actors face.

I know you're putting a lot of time and effort into save point, not trying to tear it apart or comlpetely dismiss it
I guess I'm just saying it has it's weaknesses and it's strengths and once you know what those are then you can play to the strengths.

most convinving seem to be car chases, astronauts and non-humans/toys
maybe i will still put a week into attempting an unreal short

oh one final note - the most convinving human cgi actor I've seen? they put the dude in sunglass. no surprise.
 
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Remember Save Point is a video game not a movie replacement. When you play a game it has that realism of "oh shit that looks so real" but in your mind you know it's a game so you don't want it to look too real. If these were scenes in a movie, yeah, they are not even close to real. Game-wise, it hits that realism mark.
 
The alita one doens't have dead eyes -- i wonder if that is bc her eyes are so huge and inhuman that it circumvents the effect?
Same with gollum... not quite human, really humogous eyes.

You say time and effort but it's also the tech... the iphone stuff like you're saying just isn't as advanced as putting dots on the actors face.

I know you're putting a lot of time and effort into save point, not trying to tear it apart or comlpetely dismiss it
I guess I'm just saying it has it's weaknesses and it's strengths and once you know what those are then you can play to the strengths.

most convinving seem to be car chases, astronauts and non-humans/toys
maybe i will still put a week into attempting an unreal short

oh one final note - the most convinving human cgi actor I've seen? they put the dude in sunglass. no surprise.

I agree with you, I think we're mostly saying the same things using different phrases. The characters are the weak link in cg, but there is plenty that it can do well, and for a lower budget undertaking the tradeoffs skew strongly towards the positive.

I'd pick an even lower grade example, the haunted looking mansion video I made. It doesn't look photoreal, but filming in a real life gothic mansion would eat up a year of my budget for one scene. People here always say story is first priority, and I agree, so with live action filming I have to keep changing the story to fit the extremely limited availability of sets, actors, and in general, money. So I thought it would be fun to do some plotlines inside old gothic mansions, and now I can. If I want a boa constrictor, I can get one in 5 minutes. The trade is that the visuals are not nearly as marketable as "The Others" but the other side is that I'm not compromising a classic ghost story to the point that it takes place in a parking lot.

I think Indietalk is correct. These visuals are good for an interactive experience, where the viewer has the added interest of seeing how their own decisions turn out. I could certainly make them better if I had a lot of man hours to produce each minute, but this is a good balance of quality vs quantity for what I'm trying to accomplish. I think the way animation in general works is that as people become interested in the characters and story, they unconsciously become more and more comfortable with the look of the animation. King of the Hill was not a particularly attractive example of art direction, but Mike Judges brand of humor infused it with enough life that it won over a lot of audience members. Same with South Park.

If you want to start taking a few steps into UE, feel free to message me, and I'll help you get past the initial frustrating steps that everyone goes through early on. It's not as bad as you think, but when you first start, and you know literally nothing, it can be very frustrating. A lot of things stop your progress and you have no idea how to fix them, but it gets drastically easier once you get over some initial humps.

Also, I think once you try it out and see what's going on there, you'll understand some of the things I've been talking about since way back. SP constantly builds kind of an internal lending library of assets, and at this point its like 1400 groups of 3d assets. 4500 sound effects (curated) etc. So I'll loan you stuff that you need, and you don't need to spend 200 bucks every time you need a castle or a pine forest or whatever. This is what I was going on and on about a year ago, building a modular shared library of things that can be useful to many filmmakers but only have to be purchased once. In simple terms, we're building a virtual studio lot. I can now loan you a jungle via email.
 
I think Indietalk is correct. These visuals are good for an interactive experience, where the viewer has the added interest of seeing how their own decisions turn out. I could certainly make them better if I had a lot of man hours to produce each minute, but this is a good balance of quality vs quantity for what I'm trying to accomplish.
There's honestly no need to try to get better (in this instance). The closer you get to realism the easier it is to pick out what makes it not real. In other words when you leave yourself a decent buffer, it works.
 
Watching a movie with that scene: "OMG that's so fake!"
Playing a game with that scene: "Yo that's so realistic!"
 
I saw a realistic animation recently (can't remember where) and all the characters had big eyes. So it was like super realistic with a unique factor that was not.

That's what I was getting at. Maybe you can come up with something.

Then anything like not--so-perfect movement etc. is seen as choice instead of not looking real. It just becomes a characteristic of the animation.
 
Watching a movie with that scene: "OMG that's so fake!"
Playing a game with that scene: "Yo that's so realistic!"

You make an interesting point. I first noticed how this relative perception works when I used to play live music. People kind of enjoy things relative to their expectations. If a full orchestra plays a cool chord progression with an interesting bass counterpoint, the crowd is impressed. But they are also really impressed when an acoustic guitarist can just play a good song solo. I think good creativity can be appreciated at many levels of delivery and people unconsciously and automatically adjust. Have you ever gone to a live stage play? At first it's pretty underwhelming compared to a movie theater experience, but if it's a good play, halfway through you've completely forgotten about the delivery and you're just really enjoying the story and acting, and your brain kind of tunes out the harsh lighting, crude sets, uneven acoustics, etc.


 
I saw a realistic animation recently (can't remember where) and all the characters had big eyes. So it was like super realistic with a unique factor that was not.

That's what I was getting at. Maybe you can come up with something.

Then anything like not--so-perfect movement etc. is seen as choice instead of not looking real. It just becomes a characteristic of the animation.
If you ever remember where you saw it, I wouldn't mind checking it out, sounds interesting.
 
It occurred to me after I wrote that last big post that I didn't know who would read it in the future, so I should probably mention the limitations of the lending library system, so as to avoid building false expectations.

So licenses for modular content fall under a number of different types, but the stuff we work with is typically one of these.

Sound and Music -

We've done all the hard work already, curating the best stuff from massive collections, grabbing and organizing the files, working with musicians individually.

For the subscription services, anyone working on SP can use any of it freely, and we pay publishing licenses.

For friends of the project that are making their own projects published on separate channels, you can pay a small publishing license for the month of publication. It would come to about 65 bucks to publish a work using any or all content from our library. The advantage is that you don't have to pay fees for years while developing, which would be closer to several grand, and hundreds of hours of curation work.

For individuals and bands that contributed, we just pass on their contact info, and you have to get your own permission, but it shouldn't be a problem, since these people come to us with the goal of getting their music out there.

3d assets -

Most UE5 assets come with a 25 seat dev license, so we can loan up to 25 copies within the project. Unlimited in some cases.

If you are working on something independent, we can allow you to use any assets for internal development, but for publication on a different channel by a different corporate entity, you would have to buy the assets yourself upon publication of your film.

The advantage to this is that assets are expensive, and many of them don't work out perfectly, or simply get cut from the final film, so this way you can work with tens of thousands in assets, find out what works for you, and then license only the ones that you actually end up using. It's way cheaper than buying things and then discarding them later when you figure out that you won't actually use that one.

Anima assets - There is a hard 3 seat limit on these, but only one can be active simultaneously, so these are very limited in availability.

Custom SP Environments and designs - I probably won't loan these outside the project. A lot of work goes into creating stuff that is unique, and that value would be diluted if we allowed our proprietary designs to get out into the wild. Internal use only.

Lastly we have archived a lot of free assets, and organized them for easy use and download. Those assets have no strings attached. You might wonder what advantage that has. Many assets are given away for free for a short period, say a month, and then return to full price. We always collect all free assets weekly, so if something you need is 200 dollars today, and was free a year ago in January, we got the license when it was free, and can now let you use it for free.

Boring post I know, but I didn't want people to get the wrong idea. We are not copying and distributing commercial assets, just using the leeway of the licenses to their full extent. We don't collect any money from anyone, and people who need to relicense certain assets just pay the original creator directly. This system was built for internal SP use, but I don't mind using it to help out friends of the project when that's legally possible.
 
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If you create your own world with constants, realism will be easily dismissed. It could be a different time, a different place, but have 90% of realism from the real world. Small things like, traffic lights are not red, yellow , green. This is different, that is the same, it looks like New York... but... like Gotham in Batman but not that extreme, more subtle. And you can have reasons for all your choices. Then, you have your own Save Point world instead of shooting for 100% realism, where, things can more easily be criticized.
 
I agree. What realism I do try to infuse is really for a more subtle purpose. The concept is that fantastic events only "pop" from within a banal setting. Look at how GOT sold dragons. If there had been a dragon in every other scene, that would become the baseline, and when you showed a dragon, it would be no big deal, par for the course. When you establish a much more normal world, then have something unusual happen it feels far more dramatic. Ultimately I'm trying to set the stage for contrast and impact.

Save Point does sort of occur in the real world, but it's kind of a parallel reality, like most fictions I think, and no effort is made to interlace events from the real world. My only goal with pseudo realism is to establish a relatable baseline, just enough that viewers can feel like they know what will happen next, so that I can effectively subvert those expectations in interesting ways. That's why the opening scene is just a guy working at his job, driving home, and eating dinner in front of a tv. Later on, he travels across time and space, and encounters amazing things. That's a surprising turn of events for a factory worker. If I made this like an anime, and it was called, "dragon fighter space captain Excalibur" I think I would have a harder time making some of these plot developments surprising. From boring to exciting is a dramatic arc of sorts, from exciting to exciting is more of a lateral move.

I think that a mistake that many sci fi and fantasy creators make is leaning too far into their own fiction, like those cartoons where everyone can fly and shoot laser beams out of their eyes. I really liked the way the original Superman movies handled this. The whole world was normal, and then one person changed, and that single change had repercussions across the entire world. A classic example of world building working the way it's supposed to. The original Ghostbusters was a masterclass in world building as well. In terms of the plot arc aspect, the ghostbusters began as university researchers that were getting fired, and ended up saving NY city amongst a hail of nuclear proton fire and interdimensional demon invasions.

I know that wasn't exactly your point, but I do agree with what you are saying, that pushing too hard for realism would likely just backfire. 1 step forward, two steps back.
 
I agree with you but when you post some of your tests, I think people are thinking they are supposed to be looking at it for how real it is. Like the commercial car on the street and the kids playing. If this was set in the SP world the feedback received may be very different. Because what you posted was more of an exercise vs. a scene from the SP world.

Maybe I am not helping but it all looks good to me. Good stuff.
 
Personally i wasn't discussing realism. It's more about making an emotional connection with the character.

Sometimes I'll watch family guy, the simpsons, rick and morty - the thing is the characters faces are always really expressive and they never have dead eyes. But when I played rick and morty video game in vr? With 3d charaters? terrible eyes terrible faces, so much worse than the animation... they weren't nearly as expressive. really big eyes do seem to help a lot.

if the character cant really act.. or the lights are on but nobodys home? you dont form any real connection.
i know you said save point is a video game but some people do use assets to make videos
 
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