EMAIL: zach@brewstergeisz.cjb.net NAME: Zachary Brewster-Geisz TOPIC: Escape COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze27cmr/ 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) VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: There's sound. The video may be a little dark on some players. Other than that, you're on your own. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: The escape key tries to live up to its name... 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!