The Prey Alone interviews: part 3 of 3

Welcome to part 3 of our 3 part Prey Alone interviews.  That’s right: the grand finale.  Today we have lead 3D animator Jonny Ridge. He will demystify the mystery of taking Prey Alone from a “green world” into a real world.

If you aren’t familiar with the Irish-made US-set action short film drop by the official site to learn about it.  But if reading bores you you can watch the whole Prey Alone right now. Originally you could view the movie at preyalone3d.com, but traffic from this site and others seems to have broken that site.  So Jonny Ridge came to the rescue and is now hosting the full movie on his personal site. Click on the mpegs section and you can download Prey Alone right now.  Excellent!

First things first.  Tell us a little bit about yourself.  Where you’re from, where you went to school, what you studied, etc?

JR: Born in Manchester, England, I moved to Ireland when I was 6. Been there since. When I left school at 18. I studied a computer programming course briefly in ‘88/’89 in Wales but quit it because I couldn’t see myself doing that as a career - as a hobby, yes.

Applied to Sullivan Bluth Animation Studios (American Tail, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Thumbelina etc.) mid ‘89.

Got a position in the Bluth Animation College jointly run by Canadian Sheridan College in October ‘89. Offered a place in Sullivan Bluth Studios after 3 months.

Started working in Sullivan Bluth Animation Studios in Feb ‘90 as a Special FX inbetweener. Moved to the Layout department a year later and stayed there until the studio closed for good in October ‘95.

Worked in Germany briefly on an animated TV series - money was good but I didn’t care much for the area.

Came back and bought Lightwave 3D v 4.0 and a load of other software with the view of moving fully into the 3D arena - an area which was developing and moving quickly at the time and which still is.  With my animation background and knowledge of computers / programming etc, this was a fitting career for me to take on.

I’ve been working in commercials since but would dearly love to move to the US and take on the feature film world.

What were you doing before Prey Alone?

Working in commercials for Irish Television.

Had you worked with the directors before?

I’ve worked with Steve previously on many commercials prior to Prey Alone. This is one driven, no-nonsense guy - a real pleasure to work with. Exactly the same can be said of James too.  The drive and fervour we all had going was immense.  This was the only way this movie was going to get done on time!

What was your position on Prey Alone?

JR:  Lead 3D Animator and Lead Compositor.  Animation is a very tough thing to do well.  Anyone can animate if they know 3D but the top animations you will see are done by those that have a superb understanding of the weight, timing and posing of what it is they’re animating.  In this case, the animation was of cars, jets and choppers - different from character animation.  The drama that we created was driven primarily by the camera animation/action.  We set out to mimic how a real camera being held by someone would behave when thrown around at the cornering, accelerating and braking velocities these cars were undergoing.  3D is inherently ‘sterile’.  In other words, one has to ‘dirty’ up every aspect of 3D production to make it more believable.

When did your work begin on the project?

JR:  Can’t remember exactly, sometime in June or July of ‘04

In your opinion what was the single most difficult shot in terms of animating and compositing.

JR: I found all the animation pretty straightforward actually.  It was quite easy to do - easy when you know how!

All the compositing was tough for several reasons:

There were 2 key passes we had to do on each green screen shot - remove the green, then the blue - our keyers weren’t the best but we pushed them to the absolute limits.  When the second key (blue) was applied, it tended to ‘compromise’ the integrity of the first key (green), causing the subtlety of the initial green key to be lost - most noticeably where there was motion blur or where the blue tracking crosses went behind hair and beards!  When the footage was shot, thousands of blue tracking crosses were stuck on the green walls - a little over zealous at the time but you live and learn!

Our resolution was at 1920 x 819 - too big to display full size and at full res on our ‘humble’ PCs.  So most of the time we worked at quarter res to have some semblance of interactivity with the compositing software.  Certain unwanted artefacts didn’t show up at the lower resolutions we were
previewing in so a full res render had to be done and scrutinised in the high-def flame system - a slow but necessary process.  (High-Def flames are quick, but we had to put the shots on disk and Steven St Leger would drive over and check them out for us.)

I suppose one of the trickiest shots in the movie was when Cain punched Ellis in the face - the camera moved like a f***er resulting in loads of motion blur - the tracking crosses became a total blur - very hard to follow and track. One of the other guys initially tried tracking it in 3D but the 3D track wasn’t working.  I tracked it by hand - took almost 2 days, but at least we got it working.

What equipment did you use to animate and composite?

JR:  3ds Max v 5.0 was the 3D software and Adobe After Effects v 6.5 was the compositing software - both pretty modest packages (in the scheme of things) but very effective.  My 3D background was Lightwave, Softimage 3D and XSI, so I had to learn the finer ins and outs of Max before I could start.  By the end of day one I’d animated my first few shots.

Our render farm comprised twin 2.8Ghz PCs with 1Gb RAM - scarcely enough to get by for the volume of high-def work we had to get through.

Did you reference other films or creative visual work during post?

JR:  I suppose Panic Room was a look that certainly influenced the way we went with Prey Alone - however, we knew in our heads what we wanted before hand so neither Steve, James or I actually sat down and referenced anything during post.

Did any of your equipment fail or malfunction during the course of post-production?

JR:  One of my major concerns when I was taken on board was the ‘future well-being’ of the computers.  As Steven St. Leger is a commercial’s director and James Mather a DOP and part time 3D guy, they didn’t quite appreciate the strains and rigours of hardcore rendering on the CPUs.  These were twin Athlon machines.  Athlon CPUs had been known in the past to catch fire when they got too hot!  So I insisted that some form of A/C was brought in to keep them cool.  All we could get within the budget was a device that you had to fill with ice cubes!  But once the ice melted, it blew out warm air, so a constant supply of ice was at hand!

3 machines stopped working when additional memory was placed inside - not sure whether the motherboards were damaged by the person installing them or what.  Still didn’t work when the memory was removed - that pissed us off. Two external storage drives died - Iomega 250Gb and Maxtor 300Gb - these Maxtor drives are a bit temperamental at the best of times.  We lost a LOAD of scene data and renders when that happened - 4 days before our deadline.

How many hours a day, on average, would you work on this project during its three months in post?

JR:  Roughly 8-12 hours straight per day initially, 6/7 days a week - the drive and push was intense. We even sat there working while we ate our lunches and dinners.  We only got up to go to the bathroom!  As the deadline neared, the days became longer. Towards the very end, 18-22 hours straight were being put in per day - a real killer.

Can you walk us through how you would assemble a typical shot for this picture?

JR:  The animations were animated in 3D and different camera moves were extrapolated from them.

The green screen shots were green keyed first, then blue keyed.  Matte feathering etc was applied to ‘finish’ it off.  Blue tracking crosses were tracked concurrently.  Separate ‘larger pre-comps’ were set up to track and match flares into the shots.  3D plates were put into the bg and ‘linked’ to previously tracked comps so they matched what was shot.  Depth of field was added.  Additional ‘post lighting’ was added where there was gunfire and explosions.  Heat displacement was added for certain shots.  Keyed footage was graded along with 3D plates to ensure it looked real and ‘sat in well together’.. Final subtle overall grade then applied.

Have you worked on any project like this before (or since)?

JR: No.

If there is one thing you could have changed about this production what would it be?

JR:  There’s no one thing as such.  I would have liked a longer deadline and more cash to buy a massive render rack system.  But that’s life.  You seldom have what you really need, although this was pretty-well worse-case scenario for us!  You have to assess what you have and push it and yourselves to the f***ing limit!

What projects are you working on now?

JR:  A set of 6 x 30 second Milk commercials for Canadian Cinema and TV with a Dublin Post house.  This is a big budget with plenty of time to do it in - quite a luxury in comparison.  We beat Digital Domain and other big US post houses to get this.  I’m also tied up most evenings and some weekends doing other commercials with other companies.

Where would you like Prey Alone to take your career?

JR:  Hollywood - no doubt about it.  Failing that, anywhere in the US - that’s where I want to be.

Do you have any advice for aspiring CG animators?

JR: Work your damned butts off, for one!  Also, I can’t stress enough, the importance of having a strong artistic background/training behind you.  It’s easy to create stuff in 3D if you technically know the software, but REALLY tough to make it look real and convincing.  Most people fall down when it comes to lighting their scenes.  I’ve even seen some books about how to light in 3D and I felt the author/s hadn’t even done a particularly good job either.  Lighting can really make or break a movie/animation.  I suppose having a ‘good eye’ is what it really boils down to - and that can sometimes take years to acquire, if at all.

Good character animation is all about pose, timing and weighting of the character.  Look at real life examples of how we/animals move.  For cartoony animation, there are many great books out there to have a look at. Look at the masters in action - Disney, Dreamworks, Pixar and many others.

Now for something somewhat unrelated: what do you think of actor Colin Farrell?

JR:  I think he’s a very good actor, but he wouldn’t be one of my favourites.

Those were really good, incisive questions! Hope that answers them all! Thanks for your interest Geoff.  If I can be of any other help, let me know.

Thanks you for taking the time to answer my many questions.  Best of luck to you with Prey Alone and all of your future work.