Half-Dead: '23 Summer Production Update

What a wonderful summer! I have some work from my students that I’m happy to share as we work on our short-film. This is a lot of the design work, not showcased are a lot of the technical tests, models, animations, and story that we’re continuing to work on. We don’t want to spoil everything, but I also want to share the tremendous work this team is doing.

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Character Designs

The main character of this short has come a long way from my personal early look dev. We shifted our design goals from heavily stylized proportions to these more standard proportions. This better fits in trying to achieve a cohesive look across the various characters designed by various students. The facial features and clothing is still quite stylized, but nothing like the large shapes that I was using previously.

Two supporting characters were also created and went through a LOT of changes! These were the final designs we landed on and modeling is underway for them.

What is “fantasy sci-fi” without villains?! Mysticism and robots!! The students responsible for their designs went above and beyond. The opposing forces in our short are shrouded in mystery, but have a sinister and slightly goofy design to them.

Lastly for this update, we have environmental work! Not only do we have wonderful designs and tests for the tiny settlement this takes place in, but we have one heck of a spaceship too!

I’m so proud of the wonderful work being put into this shortfilm. Production is well underway as we’re currently focused on modeling & rigging. Also, what would an animation WIP be without some actual animation?! Sneak peak to our love letter to animated sci-fi violence!

URECA Grant Funding - They're letting us cook!

It was always my goal, if not the core reason, to bring students onto this short-film. When I first started talking about this story with my classes I had a couple of interested students. That couple quickly turned into fourteen. The only motivation I had for them was to create a good looking action-adventure shortfilm that would be taken to festivals. I had no cash incentive for them.

After talking with some of my fellow faculty members at MTSU, it was suggested by Kevin McNulty (who had received grant funding on a short before) to have those interested students apply for grant funding. 14 of our students wrote proposals dictating timelines, goals, workflows, and budgets. We went through MTSU’s office of Undergraduate Research Center and Creative Activity.

I am elated to say that 13 students were granted funding from URECA grants! I’m so thankful to Jamie Burriss and the URECA office who decided our project was worthy to award our students with funding.

The next step for Half-Dead is a crew meeting where we will do a script read-through and assign early assignments such as story boarding & designs. We’re meeting on May the 4th and potentially also screening some of the new Star Wars Visions season 2 episodes afterwards.

EmberGen Test Run

EmberGen is a real-time fluid simulation tool for creating fire, smoke, and explosions. Using node based parameters you can tweak, animate, and embellish those listed aspects. I find it very user friendly with exceptional results.

After watching some of their training videos I was able to create the below explosion test. Moving forward, I want to tweak the parameters for a more stylized look. This test was done with a Kuwahara filter. I plan to test more with Kuwahara filters in Unreal Engine 5, but that’s for another post.

The intent is to not render with the EmberGen software for a sprite animation, but instead export out the volumetric data as a VDM. With this method, lighting on the smoke would match with the active scene within UE5.

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Early Uther Look Dev

A first pass of topology for the protagonist’s head. Wanting to go in the direction of “Retro-Futurism” with the overall look of the short. Some concepts I don’t think read well that I want to revise at the design step:

1. Doesn’t look old and haggered enough. Grey hair with scars and actual texture will help I believe.

2. The “king” motif doesn’t come across at all, the helmet could be more of a crown perhaps.

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Action-Adventure Short: Half-Dead

This is my private production blog for my short film currently under the working title of “Half-Dead” and is subject to change. It is a sci-fi retelling of how King Arthur’s sword was thrust into a rock. The story focuses on the Half-Dead King, Uther Pendragon, as he persists through constant ambush and betrayal.

Inspirations for this short come largely from the Arthurian Chronicles, Star Wars, Warhammer, Halo, Samurai Jack, Love Death & Robots and many other pieces that shaped my brain when I was a youngin. My ultimate goal is to work on this with MTSU students who are interested and, once finished, submit to festivals.

Below is an early & incomplete animatic of 3D Storyboards. This is the opening sequence introducing the character and establishing their capabilities. I prefer this method when storyboarding as it allows me to think about composition, cinematography, timing, and other film-making techniques(albiet, with goofy draw-overs to show emotional intent.) All assets are stock with the intent of allowing any student I allow on the project to bring up to a higher-production method. Any aspect untouched by a student I will personally finish.

This is the majority of the first Act of the short. The protagonist arrives in a city to meet a contact but is ambushed by rebellious locals.

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Certain production workflows will include the following:

• Character, Prop, & Environmental Design

• 3D Modeling of Characters & Props (Maya or other)

• 3D Building Generation with Blender Geometry Nodes

• Character & prop rigging in Maya

• Alembic exports of animation to Unreal Engine 5 for rendering

• EmberGen for explosions & fire simulations

• Unreal Engine: Chaos Destruction for environmental destruction

There are a lot of opportunities for any students who are interested in working with me on this production. If you’re an MTSU student and are interested in working on this with me, please reach out.