afterworld it *dont* sucks

My name is Duane Loose...and I am the Sr. Art Director/Production Designer for the series afterworld. It's great to read your posts. You're passion and knowledge shows through!! Great comments all the way round.

As of this writing our team is working on the final 10 episodes: 121 through 130. We're scheduled to finish next Wednesday - the day before our Thanksgiving Day in the USA. And I for one will be giving thanks that we're done...believe me. The project has been challenging for many different reasons...some of the factors have been quite unexpected. The speed and pace of production for example. Our saying is that a day in 'afterworld' production is like a week or 2 on any other production we've worked on. We literally move at a speed and pace I've never experienced anywhere before. it's fun, exhilarating and very challenging. We've worked very hard to bring this show to life - and much of that time we've been inventing the process and creating the pipeline at the same time. I call it -running the race while I'm tying my shoes. You might think that as professionals we would have had it all figured out before we started. Nope. Plus it's not like anything any of us have done before. Similar - but deceptively difficult and very easy to underestimate how challenging it is to tell a story visually with 4 poses, a 2 1/2 D parallax BG and some moving mist and skies. Hah! Easy. Nope. Fun and challenging? Yes!

Our rule of thumb is to keep each episode to 10-14 shots with 5 to 7 backgrounds. We found this to be a produce-able number- allowing us to currently pump out 10 episodes in 10 days or less. We have achieved an episode a day for the past 20 episodes...but we don't recommend it. Many things break at that pace - usually the artists. It may sound like an excuse but there is quite a difference between a single one-off render and the number of elements that go into a full episode. When you look at the actual time it takes in each phase - the math is never simple addition or subtraction - always multiplication and division. As in sometime orders of magnitude greater when render a 20 second shot with 4 characters - each one with 4 poses. That's 16 poses at 4 to 8 K - 30 minutes a pop and 8 CPU hours later you have your renders. Multiply that number by 12 for the average number of shots times 5 for the number of concurrent episodes being worked on and you...well you get the picture. We are happily busy and that includes running a 10 am to 8 pm and a 2pm to 12 am double shift.

We use a very basic production design process - beginning with a solid produce-able script, a beat outline, storyboards and animatics - then into background creation, character posing and rendering, shot compositing and editing. We usually iterate twice at each production step to make sure that what we make in the next step is well informed and correct.

Our team is composed of a great mix of mostly senior artists with a combined credit list and years of experience that are pretty amazing in their variety and quality. I've enjoyed this experience perhaps more than any in my career. I hope you don't mind me putting in my thoughts on your thread - I think I can shed a little light on some of the comments.

As I read your comments I found all of them to be more or less accurate in their intent and I would probably make the same assumptions if I hadn't been on the inside of the production experiencing the production pipeline first hand. So, here's some data.

Poser: By the time we are finished with afterworld we will have created over 80 characters for the show. Most of those have been created in the past 4 months. Poser is perhaps the best procedural tool for quick character creation ever created. It's enabled us to create the cast for each chunk of episodes - usually in a matter of days, a week at most for each. We have a very close relationship with the Poser folks. They've given us some fantastic support including fixes and tools for some of our needs. We use the latest version - poser 7. Poser lacks a network rendering capability - so we've written some custom scripts and utilities to allow us to batch render. While this is not ideal- it works. We will absolutely continue to work with Poser for character creation - but will probably use another package for animation and rendering in the next season. We've investigated some promising tech that would allow us to bring Poser assets into Lightwave for example.

One factor that we deal with every day is render times. We typically have multiple characters in a given scene- sometimes we have many characters. To keep the heartbeat cadence of the style we change poses approximately every 3 to 5 seconds. We also render our images very large - a minimum of 2K and usually 6 or 8K resolution. This gives us maximum flexibility when we composite - starting tight and close and pulling out wide for example in the same shot. So we work hard to set up the lighting and geo elements to get the best quality we can at that size while optimizing render times. We use a lot of image based lighting - -which speeds things up dramatically.

Another factor in our look is that we are not trying to be a movie or animated TV show. Because of the speed of production we chosen not to execute cloth or hair simulation - yes it would be beautiful but ultimately those things don't help or hinder the story telling and always slow us down on the render side. We have artists that are experts in those areas but that's not an element we chose to focus on. In the end we chose to lean hard into color, atmosphere and animated atmospherics with good looking characters exhibiting good specularity and solid expressive acting.

In addtion to Poser we use Lightwave, After Effects, Final Cut. Maya, Premiere, Particle Illusion and several other support tools. On the database side we use a library version-ing software called perforce and a render manager for our 20 proc renderfarm - Qube. We also use Vue D'esprit 6 infinite for many of our BG plates and matte paintings. We use 2 sets of Sapphire plugins for after effects - those are awesome. We purchase models from Turbosquid, DAZ and Content Paradise as well as using free models wherever we can scavenge them. As you can see- Poser is integral but ultimately very small part of our pipeline- albeit the single greatest factor effecting our production speed as it concerns rendering.

Another factor in the pressure of production is actually related to afterworlds release in Australia. When Sony told of us of their plans we barely had a few dozen episodes 'in the can' and a similar situation on the scripts - (did I mention that the final scripts were finished a few weeks ago?) Sony, of course, asked for a commitment from us to meet the rollout plans for SciFi AU. we looke at the schedule. After our nervous laughter subsided and we all had a stiff drink or two - we hitched up our britches and went to work . That was July. Since that time a team of 15 artists and 1 to 4 writers have written and produced 100 episodes to the quality you see in all it's glory before you. Are they perfect? No. Do some of them suck? Yes. And the vast majority of the episodes continue to be a fascinating convergence of graphic novel, anime art with a great story that we all, well most of us anyway, find engaging, relevant and worthy of our devotion...not only as an audience...but worthy of our time as artists and creators as well.

That's a lot of information. I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. You can reach me at duane.loose@gmail.com.

cheers

D_

as posted on the AU forum pages