The musically charged love story of an electric guitar and a violin, brought to life through imaginative animation, underlies this creative collaboration project devised by Yair Landau, former president of Sony Pictures Digital and founder of Mass Animation. The social networking glue came in the form of an application constructed on Facebook* by Mass Animation. The animators’ tool of choice was a specially licensed version of Autodesk® Maya®. Reel FX Entertainment created the character assets for the animators and then finalized the piece.

Onboard from the early stages of the project, Intel served as the primary sponsor and a key contributor, committed to this approach as a way to help aspiring animators gain recognition and appreciation for their work. The initiative also illuminates the possibilities and promise of computer-enabled, worldwide collaboration.

Target: Theatrical Release

Launched in November 2008, the Mass Animation Project is nearing its ultimate goal: the release of an animated five-minute short, Live Music, which will receive theatrical screening in the fall of 2009. A preview release is slated for SIGGRAPH in New Orleans the first week of August. The ideas, enabling technologies, and ambitions of contributors, organizers, and supporters of this unique collaborative work represent something of a proof of concept for what seemed to some as an impossibly ambitious project when originally conceived.

Nobody had ever attempted to stage the creation of a professional-caliber, crowdsourced animated film using a social networking platform like Facebook as a collaboration platform. The process, as Yair Landau freely concedes, was fraught with uncertainty—a journey into unknown territory.

The Idea Takes Shape

The storyline for Live Music emerged during a conversation with a couple of Yair’s writer friends, who paused their work on American Dad to bat some ideas around. Yair told them, “Look, I want to develop something that is universally accessible that I can tell in a short period of time and no matter where I tell it in the world, I want people to be able to relate to it.”

Given that music is often considered the universal language, the notion of minimizing dialogue and communicating the entire storyline with music seemed a natural step. And the Romeo and Juliet aspects of an electric guitar falling in love with a violin also emerged as an engaging hook. Yair made the choice of a particular piece of music—Smoke on the Water—to serve as the central musical theme (and later managed to enlist the services of rock guitar legend Steve Vai to supply scorching licks to the soundtrack). By the time the impromptu brainstorm session ended, Yair had the key elements of Live Music firmly fixed in his mind. Within a few days, he was pulling together supporters and participants, setting up meetings with contacts at Facebook, Autodesk, and Intel, and moving a number of steps closer to one of the most ambitious collaborative projects in the history of animated film.

Yair was banking on a number of technologies maturing to a level to support the collaborative effort. “I had a specific idea,” he said, “of harkening back to early Pixar work. Part of the central idea of Mass Animation is that what you used to need a master studio to do, you can do on your desktop today. Distributed processing and broadband connectivity allow for very high-quality production on the order of what was groundbreaking when Pixar built it. Now you can do it by yourself through the network.”

Yair also wanted the collaboration based on simple animation, without a lot of complex rendering, lighting, and effects. Those could be reserved for final production. “Yes, there is a lot of lighting and rendering in the final images,” he said, “obviously much prettier than the raw animation, but I didn’t want something that was principally driven by after-the-fact rendering. I wanted something where you could clearly see how the animation flowed through into the final product.”

Momentum grew as the project evolved: the storyboards were placed online at Facebook, Autodesk made downloadable versions of Maya available for animator use, a jury of experienced film professionals was selected to help guide the process and discussion boards, and Reel FX Entertainment, the entertainment arm of Reel FX Creative Studios, was selected to produce the interim and final animations—fully textured, lighted, colored, and polished. Aniboom, a company experienced in creating platforms for collaborative work, built the underlying technology used for the Facebook application. Noise New York created the application design. Whether a quickly assembled crowd of animators could put together a film short in a matter of few weeks was still an open question.

I am trying to do with animation what people have clearly been doing on the independent film front for years now, as we have migrated away from film cameras. The migration is digital on a live-access basis. It has given people a tremendous opportunity to do a lot of very exciting things.”

—Yair Landau, President, Mass Animation

Animator’s Tool of Choice: Autodesk® Maya®

As a partner of the Mass Animation project, Autodesk made available a special downloadable version of Maya. The 60-day trial version included full program features and allowed animators to easily use the models and scenes created specifically for the project.

Rob Hoffmann, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Autodesk Media & Entertainment, commented, “Intel and Autodesk have a shared goal of providing leading technologies that inspire creativity and enable greater productivity amongst digital content creators. Autodesk’s partnership in the Mass Animation project helped to achieve this goal. The project opened up new possibilities for worldwide collaboration. It gave the upcoming generation of artists and animators access to industry-standard technologies for digital content creation. Animators around the world took advantage of a specially licensed version of Autodesk Maya to quickly became contributors to the project.”

Animators at all experience levels were welcome in the competition. Scott Peterson, Digital Supervisor at Reel FX noted, “We received submissions from a wide range of abilities in terms of performance, or raw animation talent. The level of Maya experience varied from first-time users to professionals using Maya in production. Fortunately, Maya has such a large user base that artists were easily able to access help from tutorial Web sites and forums, as well as friends and professionals in their community. We were able to focus on getting the best animation performance possible—because we did not have to teach the software.”

Reel FX Animation Supervisor Tim Lannon also saw the collaborative environment as productive. “We are very excited that the production was opened to the world animation community,” he said, “not only because contestants had the opportunity to experience a professional production and sharpen their animation and Maya skills, but because we gained extremely valuable exposure to the vast animation talent that exists globally.”

“While it is always nice to work with experienced professionals who deliver high quality at a quick pace,” Tim continued, “I also found it rewarding to work with less-experienced artists who fell in love with animation during the production. Some artists got a taste of what it was like to work professionally and could not wait to pursue their career goals, while others discovered they loved animation enough to go back to school to specialize in animation and pursue it as a career.”

For a number of years, Intel and Autodesk have worked together closely to ensure that the software capabilities of Autodesk animation and modeling applications effectively take advantage of the latest processor innovations from Intel—producing stellar results within the animation pipeline. The optimization work for the Intel® Core™ i7 processor, in particular, yielded substantial performance gains for Maya, a benefit that can be experienced as improved responsiveness during every aspect of complex modeling and animation operations.

Autodesk will be a member of the panel with Mass Animation at SIGGRAPH in August.

We have built systems that allow us to interface with people creatively, all over the planet. I don’t know how many countries we have done business with over the years or how many individuals from different countries have worked with our studio, but it is dozens and dozens.”

—Kyle Clark, Chief Operating Officer, Reel FX Animation Studios

The Project Accelerates

During the first few weeks of 2009, the Live Music work progressed from roughly sketched storyboards to a rapidly growing body of animated sequences, keyed to an expressive soundtrack featuring music from violinist Ann Marie Calhoun and guitarist Steve Vai.

Every week, the animator with the most popular shot (as determined by community voting on Facebook) won a Dell Studio XPS* desktop computer powered by the Intel Core i7 processor. In a testament to the wisdom of the crowd, the shots of seven of the nine most popular winners were selected by the director to be in the film. Those who were chosen to be in the final film received a cash award and film credit.

Including a Dell computer powered by an Intel Core i7 processor as a weekly prize was not only a strong incentive for animators to participate, but also a natural fit given the nature of the project. Performance-minded digital content creators have discovered that the Intel Core i7 processor with its four cores and eight threads brings unprecedented capabilities to desktop computers. Complex data-intensive modeling, lighting, and rendering tasks can be performed in a fraction of the time required by earlier platforms. Next-generation platform capabilities of this type are creating a stir in both professional circles, and student and prosumer communities. Previously difficult or impossible tasks can now be accomplished routinely.

“The open portion of the project ran through the end of January,” Yair said. “I refined the shots with contributors through the end of February, and we did color and lighting through the middle of March. We finished the film the middle of May.”

“It was a very expedited process. Obviously, this is not a big budget Hollywood film, but it is a theatrical quality film that was essentially put together on Facebook. That was the basic intent: to show that the crowdsource model is not just capable of producing content, but it is capable of producing high-quality content.”

Arrangements are under way for a fall 2009 theatrical release, which will qualify Live Music for Academy Award* consideration.

From 4500 Cores a Movie is Born

The rendering farm for Dallas-based Reel FX Creative Studios, consisting of banks of servers, each powered by dual Intel® Xeon® E5335 (Clovertown) processors running at 2.0 GHz, stayed busy for a few days in May as the final version of Live Music was generated with full lighting, textures, and effects in place. Chief Operating Officer Kyle Clark served as executive producer of the animated short, building on the relationship established with Yair Landau during an earlier project with Sony Pictures. Kyle’s background as an animator, as well as his responsibilities overseeing the infrastructure and technologies used at Reel FX, proved useful in guiding the decision-making process throughout the project.

“From Yair’s relationship with us,” Kyle said, “and his perspective on how we operate as a studio, he said, ‘OK, these are the guys I need for this project.’ We have been a Dallas company for over 15 years and geography used to be a huge factor—back when technology was much less predominant. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere, trying to compete with the guys on the west coast.”

“In order to compete,” he continued, “we had to strip away any of the traditional or standard ways of making digital imagery. And that ingenuity has been engrained into the culture and minds of our studio. How do we do it differently? We view our studio as a place without boundaries. Dallas has a good pool of creative talent, but certainly not as large a pool as a place like L.A. or S.F. We knew early on that we have to be able to tap into where the artists are, because we may have difficulty in bringing the artists to Texas. If there is a guy in New Zealand or France or Oregon or Utah, who is the right person to be on the job, then we want that person to be on the job. We have built systems that allow us to interface with people creatively, all over the planet.”

As is often the case in animated moviemaking, the prodigious amount of processing power available was directed to enhancing imagery and improving each frame for maximum effect. The final rendering of Live Music took several days. “We put a lot of effort into the complexity of the lighting and the rendering,” Kyle said. “The scenes were intense from a computational perspective. They had many layers and a lot of elements. Once we defined the look in each sequence and as the final results started coming back in, then we were able to turn the computers loose to do a lot of the processing. As it came out of the pipe, I think everybody was extremely pleased with what the community had done.”

With their unique business model, Reel FX Creative Studios has been experiencing strong growth and has plans for significant expansion over the next twelve to eighteen months. Testing is currently underway to tap into the performance benefits of the latest Intel® Core™ microprocessors within the server farm. Reel FX also has begun pre-production work on a full-length animated film that is slated for completion in 2011.

Democratizing the Power of Technology

The effective worldwide collaboration and innovative use of technology demonstrated by Mass Animation highlights possibilities that are likely to influence a wide range of creative endeavors in a variety of fields.

“Traditionally, you had to live in Hollywood and be employed at a major studio to work on an animated film,” Yair noted. “Folks in Minneapolis, Uzbekistan, and Liverpool just didn’t have access to the same kinds of projects. You no longer have to live in Los Angeles or work at a major studio to create quality content. The making of Live Music clearly demonstrates that there are lots of creative people out there who are now capable of doing so much more with so much less. And they will.”

“We certainly theorized that there would be people coming from all over the world, but the global participation also exceeded our expectations. On the broadest basis, we had about 58,000 fans on the Facebook page. Of those, I would say that roughly 17,000 people were active participants who added the Mass Animation application in Facebook and actually reviewed in some manner. Of those 17,000, roughly one quarter of those people either downloaded shots, downloaded Maya, or voted on people’s shots. We had 125 people who did the work, completed animation, and submitted shots, and we ended up with four submissions (or more) for every single shot in the film.”

“I am trying to do with animation what people have clearly been doing on the independent film front for years now, as we have migrated away from film cameras. The migration is digital on a live-access basis. It has given people a tremendous opportunity to do a lot of very exciting things. You haven’t seen that yet in animation, but you are going to. That is a large part of what I am trying to do.”

Tap Into the Power of Visual Adrenaline

As a strong supporter of the work accomplished by digital content creators and game developers, Intel provides a number of resources through Visual Adrenaline. The latest tools and technologies are discussed, community members share their visual computing expertise, and top industry luminaries offer their stories and insights. For more details, visit: www.intel.com/software/visualadrenaline .

For More Information

Learn more about the production of the Live Music project on Facebook*: www.facebook.com/massanimation

For videos of the project during production, visit: http://www.facebook.com/ massanimation?sid=9055d819b4a4d1b3f63226572d817025&ref=search#/ massanimation?v=app_2392950137&viewas=1208787266

For more details about the breakthrough performance of the Intel® Core™ i7 processor Extreme Edition, which is rapidly becoming a favorite of digital content creators, visit: www.intel.com/products/processor/corei7ee/

To learn more about the recent accomplishments of Reel FX Entertainment, go to www.reelfx.com

For more about Aniboom and its virtual animation studio, visit www.aniboom.com

For more about Noise New York, go to: http://noisenewyork.com/

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