AnimWatch - The Art and Philosophy of Kaze, Ghost Warrior - feature

There was an article in the January 2004 issue of 3D World magazine about Kaze, Ghost Warrior and Timothy Albee's extreme quest to make the film. In the article, Albee spoke at length about his microstudio approach to developing films, an approach characterized by eschewing full-time employment in favour austerity, focus, and full-time dedication to making a film using hyper-efficient techniques.

His comments resonated strongly with me. One of the founding principles of AnimWatch is the assertion that the tools for making films have fallen within the reach of pretty much anyone with a computer. Our ability to bring our films to life is for the first time limited mainly by our talents, time, imagination, and devotion to the stories we desire to tell, rather than being limited by access to the tools of the trade. I wrote a letter to the editor regarding that article, praising Albee's assertions and wondering publicly if we weren't all witnessing the advent of the Animation Microstudio. 3D World ran my letter the following month.

In response I got an angry note from a reader who seemed to fear the spread of Albee's process would lead to the devaluation of artists in the eyes of distributors (if artists are willing to live and work so cheaply in the name of their art, why pay them for their films when they complete them?) He said Albee's ideas were dangerous, and for agreeing with them, I was "a dangerous man".

Well, as much as I like the notion of myself as a dangerous man, I am aware that most people are unable or unwilling to take the drastic measures Albee took, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to everyone. Still, his point remains: you can make your film if you are willing to make some sacrifices, and the greater the sacrifice, the faster you reach your goal.

Timothy Albee made a lot of sacrifices for Kaze, but I don't think even he would recommend such a lifestyle for everybody. (Oh, did I neglect to mention the part about Timothy living in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness with no running water?) I have always suspected that Albee did what he did partly to make a point. And in fact, he has turned his experience into a book on the subject of independent microstudio production, (CGI Filmmaking: The Creation of Ghost Warrior) which I would recommend to anyone who wants to know more about just what it took for one man to make a 23 minute film by himself in 6 months on two computers with a budget of $5,000.

Meanwhile, the DVD is out and you can judge for yourself the fruits of his labour. The feelings of this ex-Disney animator toward the bloated Hollywood / Big Studio way of doing things are obvious: there are pages of credits at the end of the film, including "Assistant to Mr. Albee", and pretty much every role aside from Mac Reiter's programming, is credited to Timothy Albee. It's almost as if he's screaming back at the establishment, "LOOK what can be done by fewer -- for less!" Assistant to Mr. Albee, indeed.

Recently, Timothy waxed philosophic on the subject with us. His typically thorough and spiritual answers to our questions are featured below.

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OGDEN: What informed the film's Asian look?

ALBEE: I've always felt a strong pull to things Asian. The ideals of Honor, and Duty are things I hold close and dear to my own heart. (The best any filmmaker can hope to achieve is done through adhering to the things of deep importance to him/her; by making the film that s/he her/himself has always wanted to see.)

OGDEN: As a one-man operation, it's possible to do a lot less preproduction than larger studios with armies of people. How much preproduction work did you put in -- like design of characters and environments, and so on?

ALBEE: After the script was locked in place, I did about four months worth of pre-production on "Kaze, Ghost Warrior." These four months encompassed doing the designs for the characters, dialogue recording, the storyboards, the Animatic (the storyboards after being scanned, timed and edited on video), character modeling, environmental modeling, surfacing/shading, preliminary lighting, software development and Pipeline Test (the trailer).

There were many things that made the process much easier because the way the 3D and 2D tools I chose allowed me to be an artist, and not force me to be a programmer/technician.

I field a lot of questions about why, after having used all the major software packages in production environments, I choose to use LightWave 3D. In short, it doesn't get in my way when I'm working.

I've got a very short fuse for things that promise the sun, the moon and the stars and then fall short when it comes time to deliver. The only package that has come through for me under the intensity to which I subject my tools has been LightWave.

Not only does it hold together under intense pressure, but it also has some streamlining built into it that without, I'd never have been able to do "KGW." For instance, the way in which LW stores both its Point Weighting and Morph Targets (as "Deltas" from the Point's original position), I was able to "take my time" and get Itsua, the innkeeper, completely built and Rigged in 1.5 weeks, and then use his points to create all 16 other characters in a matter of half-a-week!

The secret is to remember the things you've always wished for, whether it be in stories to be told, or tools to create those stories. We're all very similar when it comes down to it, and a tool that one person has always wished existed will quite often be exactly what another has also wished for - even if they, themselves, haven't thought enough about it to put it into precise terms! (The same holds true for stories as well.)

A major factor which made the film possible was in working together with Mac Reiter, the programmer for "TA Facial Animation." Mac took the project in-hand and pushed my ideas far beyond what I'd hoped could exist."TA Facial Animation" blends together the best of Traditional and 3D animation techniques that even in pre-pre-alpha allowed me to do in about fifteen minutes what I would have needed two days to do by hand, (what a Disney animator on "Dinosaur" would have been given four days to do).

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The response to "TA Facial Animation" has been breathtaking. I've shown it in LA and on my tour of Germany and Poland, and crowds have just gasped when they've seen the speed and ease of complete control over every aspect of facial animation this tool facilitates. Plus, even if you've "only" been a Traditional animator up to this point, the Exposure-Sheet tools let you work without ever having to touch a Graph Editor window!

Most noteworthy, as seen in the screen-cap, we're getting over 100FPS on a real-time level 2 Sub-D with the film-version Kaze head model on a "game-quality" NVIDIA graphics card. (NOTE: TA Facial Animation will be on sale from KURV Studios around Christmas 2004. The screenshot above is from an early Alpha version.)

OGDEN: How extensively did you storyboard the film?

ALBEE: Every camera angle and change was drawn in storyboarding, every camera movement was animated in the Animatic.

You've got to do this if you want to "Never Move Backwards."

It's a problem, even (especially) with "big studios," that most want to get rolling on things before they're really ready to do so. But making sure that you've got everything all planned out beforehand, taking a few extra weeks, (or even months,) can save years and/or $M in production. (Anyone out there remember that Disney's Kingdom of the Sun was completely done in rough animation before it was re-done as The Emperor's New Groove?)

There's no excuse for having an artist do something more than once, especially when it was just fine the first time, simply because management doesn't have its act together.

This kind of mentality kills artist's spirits and results in artists not daring to put their hearts into their work, which itself results in scenes that are simply passable at best.

The great masterworks of animation are such because the artists were allowed to fall in love with their Scenes and Characters, confident that should the animation be in-character and the scenes support the carefully pre-planned vision of the film, that their work would be respected and retained.

With the skills I see in the artists I've trained, I know that my own skills as an animator and modeler will be surpassed in five to ten years. It is my goal to by then have created a studio that does for other artists, that which I always wished had been available for me.

So, I guess in response to someone asking me how extensively they should storyboard their film, I'd have to answer, "How good do you want your film to be?"

After the script was finaled, a shot-list was made depicting every camera change in the film. From the shot-list, every change in camera angle was drawn. Then, using the amazingly simple camera-movement tools within the VT[3]'s editing suite, I was able to animate all camera movements in real-time while cutting-together the animatic from the scanned storyboards.

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OGDEN: Why did you make the characters animals instead of humans?

ALBEE: Partly for the sake of Myth. (You can make a stronger connection with the audience when they don't think you're talking directly about them.) Partly for the sake of beauty and allegory (poetry). And partly because that's just what felt right. In the end, that's the most important reason - doing something because it feels right.

An artist may not be able to explain in a doctoral thesis why something needs to be the way it does, and that does not negate the importance of that being the way it is. Often times, artists discover years later, the reasoning behind certain aspects of their work that just felt right at the point of creation.

Filmmaking may involve a great many highly technical things... and at its core, it must retain the creative focus, the artistic integrity of these bits of wisdom that may be beyond the current lexical ability for the artist him/herself to explain.

OGDEN: How did you decide which characters would be which animals? What significance is there storywise which character is what kind of animal?

ALBEE: The characters decided for themselves.

I did sheets and sheets of sketches for several weeks, just getting down all permutations of ideas. Then, pulled elements that "felt right" from the sketches for each character.

There is much significance in the "Primary" and "Secondary" species for each character. Non-human animals as we know them are archetypal, even though as individuals they have vast ranges of personalities.

Kaze, being a Tiger, must deal with things that are natural or reflexive to tigers as we know them... the impulse to attack from behind, being solitary, etc. Kaze's focus for Honor and reaching beyond these building-blocks sets up the opportunity for great allegorical stories for us all to reach beyond what is innate within our own personalities, but that which may not be what we would wish to be.

OGDEN: Did the story come from the characters or vice versa?

ALBEE: One creates the other.

The stories have been with me since adolescence, existing in many different forms and against many different "backdrops."

I believe that the best work comes through us, not from us. And so, I've let these and other stories play through me, making notes of the things that I feel are successful to my sense of storytelling.

Eventually, the stories are concise enough to be written down as their evolution begins to solidify into a story worthy of the commitment of what it takes to make a film.