The WorkBook Project is for those who want to be creative in the digital age. An open creative network that provides insight into the process of funding, creating, distributing and sustaining from one's creative efforts.
WBP is growing by leaps and bounds. We just celebrated 3 years this past November. What started as a blog has grown to into a network both online and offline. 2010 promises even more growth as we expand our list of contributors, redesign our sites, and host a number of events here in the US and in Europe. WBP is an open creative network that is centered on assisting those working in film, music, gaming, design and software with resources and networking to fund, create, distribute and sustain from their creative work. We welcome your suggestions and if you’re working on interesting and cutting edge projects please let us know as we’re always looking for contributors. And finally we’d like to thank ALL the volunteers who help to make WBP possible. Many people share their time and talents and as a result we can do much with little. If you’d like to volunteer we’d love to hear from you work [@] workbookproject dot com
a roving conference for those who create – This past year DIY DAYS made two stops. DIY DAYS Philadelphia was our largest event to date with over 40 speakers and 22 sessions! Last month DIY DAYS traveled to LA for an evening of talks and networking. The videos for the LA event are now available online.
The world of discovery and distribution is changing by the moment. DIY and hybrid distribution is becoming the A option for many filmmakers. But how do you find the strategy that’s going to work best for you? How do you reach and engage audiences while achieving a degree of sustainability? Join Jon Reiss, award winning filmmaker and DIY distribution expert as he shares stories from the frontlines, much of which can be applied to those wishing to connect their creative efforts with an audience in meaningfully ways.
a look at the cutting edge of storytelling and creativity – WBP Labs an agency / think thank / project producer launched its first project this year. RADAR a mobile / online series and offline experience which centers on interesting and unique creative and storytelling projects. Within the last year WBP Labs has produced 24 episodes of RADAR and staged offline RADAR experiences. Season 2 is now airing on Babelgum and Season 3 is in the works.
Illustrator Sophie Blackall has read thousands of missed connections posts. A self confessed addict of these intimate, fleeting moments described in haste and posted in public, she trawls through them daily to find the most visual, humorous, lyrical or wierd confessions or pleas, before creating a similarly spontaneous illustration she then posts to her blog. We talk to Sophie about the significance of shared moments between strangers, and create the moments that might have been.
– Zak Forsman oversees a number of working filmmakers as they document their journey from script to screen. The contributors of the New Breed share their process, resources, and knowledge.
After tweeting, facebooking and e-mailing everyone on my contact list I successfully reached my $10,000 goal on kickstarter that I needed to finish up post production and to manufacture our first run of DVD’s. (which we pre-sold 250 copies of)
Once the film was completed we uploaded the film onto The Pirate Bay and a few other torrent sites and in its first year had been downloaded over half a million times. These downloads also had the VODO icon at the end of the film that links to our online store and provides fans an easy way to donate or support us by buying DVD’s, tee-shirts etc. You can also stream the film for free from our website, youtube, vimeo and a host of other channels which has resulted in additional exposure which helped get our film into over 200 film festivals and even helped us pick up some rewards. READ MORE
We’ve all heard from Hope, Weiler, Broderick, and many other sources exclaiming that indie filmmakers now-a-days need to sell things, besides their films, to sustain themselves. Filmmakers sell posters, soundtracks, t-shirts, etc. at screenings and off their websites to make a couple of bucks. I’ve been doing this for over ten years. My peers always looked at me strangely, why was I selling merchandise for my little indie film? I was making money! If I have a captive audience why not sell them as much as I can? Remember I grew up in an amusement park. READ MORE
– Nick Braccia oversees a number of game designers and transmedia practitioners who document interesting projects and share thoughts about the design of stories and entertainment experiences that move beyond a single screen or medium.
Recent posts include:
Haley Moore – Ten Interactive Story Ideas for Layar
Layar, the augmented reality browser that has been creeping up on Android phone users since May, hit the iPhone App Store last month. And yet, the Layar web site lists a big fat goose egg under the heading “Games.” I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I have dreams that start this way. Surely, someone out there has to be looking into Layar as a way to expand an ARG experience. While not as ubiquitous as phone or email, Layar is free to Android and iPhone users. The API is straightforward, and getting signed up to develop content for the system is as easy as submitting a good idea. READ MORE
November 5-6 I covered the Independent Game Conference where game designers peddled their wares to buyers inside the halls of the Marriott Hotel in Marina del Rey. In between all this networking my friend Don Le filmed (later edited) my interviews with notable professionals and panels that explored subjects as diverse as building personal relationships through video games to new ways to purchase digital goods with micropayments. READ MORE
– We’re excited to announce that the WBP discovery and distribution Award will be expanding beyond a single run in LA and to multiple screens here in the US and oversees. More details will be announced soon. For full details on how the Award will help films reach screens in theaters, living rooms, online and via mobile devices visit the WBP award site.
Lance Weiler is the founder of the WorkBook Project and also a story architect of film, tv and games. He's written and directed two feature films THE LAST BROADCAST and HEAD TRAUMA. He's currently developing a number of transmedia projects.
WBP an update As WBP continues to grow we are working to find interesting ways to benefit the creative community that surrounds WBP. Here are some of the… read more
New additions There are two new additions to the Workbook Project.
The first is a new group blog for participants of the IFP rough cut lab. The… read more
It was a year ago today A year ago today we started the Workbook Project. Here’s a quick look at some of the stats over the course of 2007.
45… read more
As WBP continues to grow we are working to find interesting ways to benefit the creative community that surrounds WBP. Here are some of the things that we’ve been working on.
RADAR NOW LIVE ON BABELGUM RADAR is a weekly, 3-minute series produced by WBP LABS – a division of the Workbook Project. The series is a timely, insiders view into the cutting edge of storytelling and creativity, and the attendant tools, tech, models and community. (Tech note the series is shot with the Nikon D90. For more detailed info on working with the D90 read Zak Forsman’s workflow post on NEW BREED)
RADAR highlights innovative projects and events across different creative disciplines, hangs with creators and founders, and digs deep into process, method and participation.
From what is means to ideate on the fly with musical improv due I Eat Pandas, to the curation of confessional storytelling in Cassette From My Ex and the importance of community in the Next-Door Neighbor all-star webcomix project, RADAR provides a cultural compass for audiences, in order to both inform and inspire.
RADAR is not traditional web content. The series is stylish with high production values, mini documentaries that get to the heart of the subject matter, shot with a commercial and music video mentality by award winning filmmakers from the WBP network. For more info visit www.radar.workbookproject.com
DIY DAYS GROWS
This summer DIY DAYS kicks off in Philadelphia with a large event that brings together those working in film, music, gaming, software, and design. Throughout the summer and into the fall DIY DAYS will be making stops in LA, NYC, Chicago, and London.
THE CREATION OF WBP LABS
WBP LABS is a division of the Workbook Project (WBP). Acting as agency meets think-tank meets project producer, WBP LABS utilizes the WBP community by providing the experiences, content and delivery the network strives for, and pulling talent from its pool to make it happen. WBP LABS also has a strong focus on the research, data collection and analysis that surrounds these original projects, monitoring audience reaction in order to further inform highly relevant breakthrough work, and return the information to the community itself. WBP LABS’ first project is the RADAR series.
CULTURE HACKER and NEW BREED
We’ve been testing the waters with some new WBP blogs.
NEW BREED focuses on what it takes to get a film from script to screen and beyond. Zak Forsman is heading up the editorial for NEW BREED and over the next few months the blog will be expanding in some exciting ways.
CULTURE HACKER focuses on how new forms of storytelling are making use of a collision of gaming, music, film and technology. Nick Braccia is the editor of CULTURE HACKER and together with a number of game designers CH will cover this emerging category known as transmedia / cross-media.
Lance Weiler is the founder of the WorkBook Project and also a story architect of film, tv and games. He's written and directed two feature films THE LAST BROADCAST and HEAD TRAUMA. He's currently developing a number of transmedia projects.
New additions There are two new additions to the Workbook Project.
The first is a new group blog for participants of the IFP rough cut lab. The blog will detail the trails and tribulations of making and taking films into the market place. IFP rough cut lab blog
The second addition is an aggregation page which focuses on film related news, tech,… read more
How to: Making a craZy 3d animated video in less than 2 weeks M dot Strange reports – So I was lucky enough to be summoned to make an animated music video for one of my favorite bands “Mindless Self Indulgence” I used Cinema 4d 9.1 w/Cactus Dans tools, and After Effects 6.5.
I thought I would out together a little thang documenting my work on the Mindless Self Indulgence music video… read more
WBP celebrates 3 years WBP is growing by leaps and bounds. We just celebrated 3 years this past November. What started as a blog has grown to into a network both online and offline. 2010 promises even more growth as we expand our list of contributors, redesign our sites, and host a number of events here in the US and in Europe. WBP is… read more
In addition to discovery and distribution, From Here to Awesome has a special FREE educational section entitled DIY DAYS that is an extension of the Workbook Project. The DIY DAYS events are a joint effort between FHTA and Current TV and will consist of workshops, case studies, panel discussions, and screenings. LA and SF are locked and we’re working on events for Boston and NYC. All the activities will be recorded and “embedding and spreading” of the materials will be encouraged. There will also be some live streaming as well.
WHAT: DIY DAYS LA WHEN: Saturday July 26th 9:30am to 7:30pm WHERE: Under Spring / Not A Cornfield
1745 North Spring #4
Los Angeles, CA 90012 www.notacornfield.com
DIY DAYS are shaping up here’s a partial list of speakers:
Tommy Pallotta – A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life Mark Pellington – Henry Poole is Here, Arlington Road, Mothman Prophecies Lance Weiler – The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma Arin Crumley – Four Eyed Monsters Ondi Timoner - DiG, Join Us and We Live in Public M dot Strange – We Are the Strange Saskia Wilson-Brown – Current TV Jon Reiss - Bomb It Alex Johnson – digital media strategist / filmmaker Christy Dena – cross-media strategist and designer Matt Hanson – filmmaker and founder of A Swarm of Angels Timo Vuorensola – director of Space Wreck and co-founder of wreckamovie.com
lance weiler is the founder of the WorkBook Project and also a story architect of film, tv and games. He's written and directed two feature films THE LAST BROADCAST and HEAD TRAUMA. He's currently developing a number of transmedia projects
POV: Is traditional theatrical dead? I’ve heard a lot of people challenging the theatrical experience – box office numbers are down from previous years, and home theater systems are… read more
fest mob – a social mobile experiment One of the missions of the Workbook Project is to create a bridge between filmmaking and technology. In an effort to identify new ways to… read more
EVENTS: DIY DAYS and FHTA head to SF This coming weekend the Workbook Project will stage two free events in San Francisco.
FHTA invades San Francisco – Screenings and DIY DAYS
Friday August… read more
M dot Strange reports – So I was lucky enough to be summoned to make an animated music video for one of my favorite bands “Mindless Self Indulgence” I used Cinema 4d 9.1 w/Cactus Dans tools, and After Effects 6.5.
I thought I would out together a little thang documenting my work on the Mindless Self Indulgence music video “Animal” There’s a ton of music video making-of’s out there but since I’m bored waiting for 3d renders to finish I’ll add one more to the mix.
So this is my process….
The sonG – The first thing I do is listen to the song over and over and just see where the sound takes you… If nothing really jumps out…if scenes don’t start building themselves in my head I’ll go read the lyrics and see if that does something for me… The title can also do thing for you… For this song I just kinda had an idea about the singer being chased around a weird city by a bunch of strange animals. So I listened to the song and drew up some totally photorealistic storyboards.
Storyboard Example
After doing the rough boards I had an idea of what I was going to have to model for the video. I had to model, texture and rig the four members of the band. Now I’m not trying to impress anyone with my modeling abilities. There’s no use in creating a multimillion polygon model if you can get the same effect with a 10,000 polygon one. When I’m designing characters for a project like this I just try to create very simple iconic figures with strong silouettes. Since my roots are with 8-bit video game graphics I approach building a 3d model like I’m creating pixel art except I use 3d primitive cubes in place of pixels. This leads to the 8-bit/lego-ish look of the models. So I always trying to use as few polys as possible with my models. I run my 3d app and render clients (cinema 4d) on Windows XP 32bit so I’m prone to out of memory errors which suCK really bad. So I try to keep the characters low poly so I have a lot of free polys to use for the ridiculous backgrounds I like using. So a simply designed cool looking character animated in a funky fashion in front of complex backgrounds.
Non textured Model
So after modeling all the characters and adding temporary textures to the them I hand them off to my old media friend Sean Boyles so he can hand paint the textures. He uses the colors and designs from my temp texturing but applies it by hand with Bodypaint 3d. This adds enough imperfection to the model to make it look less like it came off an assembly line.
Textured Model before my modifications
Once the models are textured I’m free to add joints, skin and rig them. Since all the bodies have the same geometry and only the heads are different it was a fairly quick job. I think I did it all in one sitting in the cafe before my laptop battery died. I use the excellent Cactus Dan plugins for adding joints, skinning and rigging. The Cactus Dan plugins make the process much easier and faster. So I just created a skeleton for one model and copied it over to the others. I use the joint mirroring and auto-skinning to speed up the process and the C4dIK plugin’s make rigging a snap. So once they’re all ready to animate I put them in cool poses and just make sure they look right together.
My evil 8-bit Lego MSI peeps
Since I only had less than two weeks to make this video I didn’t have time to create new sets and backgrounds so I just used some sets from my animated feature film “We are the Strange” I built an entire world in 3d for that film so I guess its like my own private backlot I’m shooting on now ^^ So once I have the time consuming modeling and rigging out of the way I revisit the storyboard. I add in new scenes that came to mind while in 3d land and then scan in my crappy drawings so I can create the animatic.
Animatic SnippeT
I use the shot times from the animatic as a guide for the 3d animation. Also by looking at my animatic I know exactly which shots and which parts of the song will require lip sync. I had a few people helping me out with this video project and since lip sync is SOOOOO fun ^^ I asked my friend DemonicBunny if he would do the honors. Like the character “Pasteur” in WATS I wanted the lip sync to be created in MAriopaint. So this would be a 2d pixel animated mouth pasted onto a 3d animated character. So I sent him the sound files for the clips that needed lip sync and a reference image for the style/shape mouth I was looking for. In a few days he sent me the adobe illustrator sequence files I needed for the mouth.
Mouth shapes made in Mariopaint for lip sync
Since I didn’t need to do any lip sync I could instead just focus on the character animation. I’m already familiar with the band and they’re performances but I went ahead and got some reference videos from youtube of the band performing the song “Animal” The singer is always the center of attention in a performance so the singer would be the focus of the character animation in this video. By looking at the animatic I figured out which shots would require synchronized animation and music. I went ahead and animated the Jimmy model synced up to the song in empty scenes for all the shots I needed. My composition contain many layers… I start with the coolest stuff first and than add on top of that. So for this video I had to make sure that the singers animation was entertaining enough on its own before worrying about anything else. I then animated all the shots that needed Jimmy to perform and slapped the lip sync animation on. So the scene’s looked like this.
Animation Test
At this point I’m already past the one week mark so I didn’t have time to keyframe animate the rest of the band for every shot. Well what does a band do anyway? They play right? So I utilized a little procedural animation to get them to play for me. Cinema 4d has an excellent Xpresso scripting module so all I had to do was parent the instruments to the models bones, set up the proper set driven/driver relationships then add use a noise generator to drive the rotation on the models spine. After tweaking with the setting for a few minutes to get they’re movments roughly synced to the music I had this.
Simple Xpresso setup for procedural animation
So now all I had to do was drop my band in a scene and they doing they’re thang. Once I had the singers and the bands performance animations down I could focus on the other character animation in the video. This includes the singer running around getting captured by giant monsters and flying around with his fiery fairy wings. Once all the 3d was animated I set it off to render and waited. Well thats what I’m doing now…waiting for 3d renders. I never do any of my skies in 3d, I prefer to composite them in After Effects. Since Cinema 4d generates After Effects project files with 3d light and camera information it makes this really easy as well. So once all the 3d is rendered I’ll drop in the skies and proceed to color correct and stylize the shots to my liking.
FINISHED CLIP
Then once all the shots are rendered out of After Effects all I have to do is replace the animatic shots with the final ones and hand the 1080p version of the video over to the band ^^ I don’t know when the band will make the video available online but be sure to check it out when it is. Here’s a little teaser video I put up for the music video.
Music Video TeaseR
And two other video that are pertinent to this making-of post…
MAking of Part 1
Making-of Part 2
M dot Strange is a mixed media animator from San Jose, Ca. He recently singlehandedly completed an 88 minute animated film entitled “We are the Strange” which made its world premiere in January of this year at the Sundance Film Festival. A reviewer that saw the film M dot made in his bedroom with 9 PC’s over the course of 3 years said “it looked like something Hollywood would make for 70 million” He has recently been featured in the NY Times, ABC World News , Wired.com and his youtube videos have been viewed over a million times.
lance weiler is the founder of the WorkBook Project and also a story architect of film, tv and games. He's written and directed two feature films THE LAST BROADCAST and HEAD TRAUMA. He's currently developing a number of transmedia projects
TCIBR Podcast – Don Argott This edition of TCIBR is brought to you by IndieFlix and Breakthrough Distribution – Our guest today is doc filmmaker Don Argott. Don exploded onto the scene with his feature debut Rock School, an entertaining doc about the Paul Green School of Rock. Rock School was acquired by Picture House for a low seven figure advance out of the… read more
TCIBR podcast – Lost Zombies & Skot Leach This edition of TCIBR is brought to you by IndieFlix and Breakthrough Distribution – Skot Leach and his brother Ryan are on a mission to warn the world about a secret zombie outbreak. Their Lost Zombies project is a crowdsourced zombie flick that has user-gen sightings coming in from all over the world. Community members submit video, audio, photos, and… read more
BTS – A look inside the IFP rough cut lab In a special multi-part series along with live updates from the IFP Film Market, filmmaker Tom Quinn (The New Year Parade) will document his journey as part of the IFP’s narrative rough cut lab. Selected out of hundreds of submissions Tom’s film joins 10 other projects as the IFP helps to pull back the curtain on post, festivals and… read more
A year ago today we started the Workbook Project. Here’s a quick look at some of the stats over the course of 2007.
45 podcasts
13 contributors from 6 countries
over 100 posts
over 2 million hits
over 170k unique visitors
over 2,000 email list and feed subscribers
The following are some plans for the 2008.
- more contributors and posts
- expanded theatrical mapping project
- content partnerships to extend the reach of the project
- introduction of an open database project called “info swap”
- collection of sample contracts
- and some other exciting online and offline projects
What features or services would you like to see added to the project? If you have suggestions, comments, questions or if you’d like to contribute to the project – drop us an email at work [@] workbookproject.com
lance weiler is the founder of the WorkBook Project and also a story architect of film, tv and games. He's written and directed two feature films THE LAST BROADCAST and HEAD TRAUMA. He's currently developing a number of transmedia projects
fest mob – a social mobile experiment One of the missions of the Workbook Project is to create a bridge between filmmaking and technology. In an effort to identify new ways to… read more
WBP celebrates 3 years WBP is growing by leaps and bounds. We just celebrated 3 years this past November. What started as a blog has grown to into a… read more
