A Polish Winter

A Polish Winter Wins Best Short at Athens Jewish Film Festival

2010-02-26T10:46:00.000-08:00

Our Holocaust-themed animated short 'A Polish Winter' has won best short film at the 2010 Athens Jewish Film Festival, Georgia, USA .

Directed by Shane Sheils & Paula Sheils, A Polish Winter tells is a moving tribute to the children murdered in Nazi death camps in Poland.

A Polish Winter showing at Geauga Film Festival

2009-05-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

Hi there!

Our short 3D animated film "A Polish Winter" is screening at the inaugural Geauga Film Festival .

Heres the press release from the festival:

"
....Geaugafilm.org, in cooperation with the Geauga Lyric Theater Guild, has selected the films for their inaugaual film festival June 9-14.

“We had over 70 films entered from all over the world” stated Greg Pribulsky, vice president of the Guild and committee chair for the festival. “It is great to see so many talent filmmakers wanting to show their work in our historic theater.”

A total of 44 films (both short and feature length) will be shown over the 6 day event starting on June 9-14. Films from as far away as Meath, Ireland, Los Angeles, California and Palm Bay, Florida were entered in this first film festival for the Geauga Lyric Theater organization.

“We had films from all over the US, Canada and even Ireland entered.” said Pribulsky. “I really am amazed at the quality of the work..."

We are delighted to have the film screen at this film festival which takes place in Ohio, USA.

A Polish Winter was written/directed/produced/animated/music composed by Shane Sheils and Paula Sheils.
It tells the story of a young boy who discovers an abandoned train cattle carriage in Eastern Europe. Upon entering inside and finding a discarded doll, memories are triggered of the Holocaust and the murder of countless children in Nazi death camps in occupied Poland.

The film was made using mostly Open Source software such as The Gimp, Blender 3d and Audacity.

For further information, you can view the making of this film on these websites:

www.apolishwinter.blogspot.com
www.dwarfedfilms.blogspot.com

A Polish Winter - Completed

2009-03-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

A Polish Winter has been completed.

The film is set in Eastern Europe just after the end of World War II and is a moving tribute to the children murdered in Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.

The 3d animated short film was written and directed by Shane Sheils and Paula Sheils.
The soundtrack was also composed by Shane and Paula.

The entire movie was created using Blender 3D, the Gimp and some other open source or freeware software programs.

We will try and upload the A Polish Winter Press Pack soon.

The Design Process of “A Polish Winter”

2009-02-06T10:05:00.000-08:00

The Design Process of “A Polish Winter”.

Character Design Influences:

The ‘Boy’:

The boy character is based on a number of influences including a short animated French film I saw called “Clik Clak”. I liked the idea that film used of giving the lead character small, charcoal-like eyes rather than the typical Disney-esque style of oversized eyes. It seemed to make the character more sympathetic for some reason.

The proportions of the boy are far from realistic what with his large, oversized head but it does contribute to making him look like a young boy and isn’t a huge exaggeration on child proportions either.

Setting the film in a snowy landscape really helped the character design process.

For one thing, it meant that I didn’t have to model fingers, as the boy would be wearing mittens. An earlier design of the boy had him wearing gloves but his fingers looked kind of strange for some reason, so that idea was scratched.

The large hat the boy wears also meant that I didn’t have to make hair. In fact, I actually didn’t need to make the top of his head at all.

The same goes for the boy’s torso, arms and legs – he doesn’t have any! His coat covers his midsection and arms while his trousers cover his legs.

The design of the boys clothing required study of the types of clothing worn by children in the 1940’s.Grey colours seemed very popular at the time. The coat and hat were very important. In earlier versions the boy’s coat was slightly shorter yet this slight deviation seemed to make the boy look older than he was supposed to be. Simply by altering the length of the coat so that it was below the knee made the boy look younger and less like he was wearing a specially tailored coat.

Clothing design references included “Shindler’s List”, “The Pianist” and “Enemy at the Gates”. The clothing of the young boy in Enemy at the Gates in particular provided plenty of inspiration.

Textures for both the boy and his clothes were kept simple.

A simple texture map for his face was painted directly onto the model using Blender’s internal paint system. Subtle tones of pink, red, blue and cream were blended and softened to produce his skin texture. Freckles were applied by a few dabs of brown paint across the boy’s cheeks and nose.

His lips and the inside of his mouth were painted a stronger shade of red and then blended and softened at the edges.

A number of simple textures were applied to the clothing including two types of cloth texture and various dirt and frost textures to simulate the appearance of ice and grime.

The ‘Doll’:

The doll’s design was based on an image I’d seen of one of the characters from the video game Little Big Planet.

We didn’t want the doll to be gender specific and to also come across as something that is tattered and torn and has been through hell. The rough stitching that holds the character together is an idea I intended to use on another discarded short film we were making.

There are also some design influences in there from Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. The dolls hollow eyes are based on Jack Skelengtons eye socket design.

A cloth sack texture was applied to the doll along with numerous other textures for dirt and grime.

The “Train Carriage”:

The train carriage provides the central location of the film.

I studied the design of real life German cattle wagons from the time period and sourced lots of images on the Internet from various angles of this infamous transport system.

I was surprised by the variety of different carriage designs I found. Some had wheels that were like those on a stagecoach but I found that they looked odd.

Some had diagonal crossbeams.

The eventual design we went for was based on a cattle car that is on display in Israel (I think) as a monument to the Holocaust.

One carriage was modelled completely in 3D. For shots involving up to 40 carriages, baked projection map snapshots taken from various angles were assembled to form simple textured UV planes – much like the assembly of a cardboard box. From a distance, these ‘cardboard cut-outs’ integrated seamlessly with the real 3D train.

The interior of the carriage was a separate model. The floor and walls were very large baked texture maps of about 8000x3000 pixels in size.

The light rays shining through the carriage windows were non-shadow casting lamps with emitting halo’s.

The General Location:

The location for the majority of the film is a snowy landscape, which meant that, as far as modelling was concerned, I had very little to do other than create a large, subdivided plane and sculpt a natural, hilly shape.

A very large baked UV map was applied to the modelled hills and ground. This baked map had shadows baked into it to assist the rendering process.

The barbed wire fencing surrounding the scene was based on images I’d found of various extermination and concentration camps but mostly Auschwitz.

I actually modelled a strand of barbed wire in 3D then rendered a single frame using orthographic projection. This image formed the basis for all the barbed wire in the film as it was edited using The Gimp photo editing program to add a light dusting of snow sitting on the wire and altered in other ways to enhance it’s bumpy texture.

This pre-baked image was then applied to flat planes with an alpha channel to create rows and rows of barbed wire fencing. Subtle changes to each plane meant that the wire didn’t appear too ‘samey’ as the camera moved throughout the scene.

The watchtowers were loosely based on those used at the extermination camps in Poland and elsewhere. They all had pre-baked textures applied to them – including the snow gathered on their roofs.

The sky was a large semi-dome with a sky image texture applied.

Snow and Smoke FX:

Snow plays an important role in A Polish Winter as it really creates the atmosphere of the film visually.

Even though Blender version 2.47 was used for modelling, animation and texturing, it was the much earlier Blender 2.42a that was used for all the particle effects in the film such as snow and smoke.

Why?

Well, whilst the enhanced particle system used in the more recent Blender releases is great for things like hair strands, I found that it was impractical to use for things like snow. The reason is mostly down to a number of factors:

A: The updated versions of Blender do not allow particles be emitted from a negative number. In practice, this means that, say, if I wanted snow to begin falling before the start of my animation the updated Blender versions wouldn’t be able to do this.

B: The updated blender ‘bakes’ the particle data much like the way fluid simulations are baked. This can often create huge files of gigabytes in size when dealing with large amounts of particles such as snow.

C: Because of the newer method of baking the particles beforehand, you must allow the computer to run through a particle simulation first before you can see how it will look. With large animations, this can take some time. In the old method, adjustments are viewable in the 3D window immediately.

As outlined in the above reasons, that is why I chose to use an earlier build of Blender to create the snow.

The snow itself was basically a number of subdivided meshes with particle systems applied to them. A number of meshes were used in each scene to create a dense cloud of snow (most scenes used 4 different particle systems emitting in total approximately 120,000 particles).

The particles had either a large snow material or a small snow material applied to them to vary the size and scale of the snowflakes falling.

The Blender Node compositor was sued to output the particles with blur filters applied to create less blocky looking shapes.

The particle system in the earlier Blender 2.42a was also used to create the smoke plume coming from the chimneystack at the close of the film.

This was mainly because of the success of the snow effects and also because it rendered quickly compared to a Blender 2.47 simulation, emitting UV mapped billboards.

Because the smoke is seen in the distance, I felt that we could ‘get away’ with the quicker solution.

Music and Sound FX:

The main theme of A Polish Winter was composed relatively quickly and was created during the original design period of the film before any animation was created.

Having the music at such an early stage helped guide the direction of the films mood and keep us on track with the general style and feel of A Polish Winter.

We wanted the music to sound as if it could have come from Poland at that time. The music was composed using a midi editor and then recorded - after much experimentation with other soundfonts and VST instruments - using the freely available Cadenza soundfont. The richness of the strings suited the tone of the film perfectly.

We wanted the music to be intimate and not overly layered with multiple instruments so we carefully selected just the violin, a viola and a plucked cello as our virtual ‘orchestra’.

An exciter was added to the mix to enhance the middle tones of the arrangement before a subtle medium-sized hall effect was applied to add depth and richness.

We reused some sound effects from previous films we’ve made yet altered them slightly. These included footsteps, body movements and wooden creaking sounds from To Shoot A Rurf.

A number of different wind effects were used throughout the film.

All the weaponry and gun shot effects came from royalty free sound FX libraries.

Final Points:

A Polish Winter is probably the film that we’ve made which mostly matches the original design and feel we set out to make at the start.

Whereas in other films certain scenes or details are changed or left out altogether, in a Polish Winter the original animatic pretty much matches the final product shot for shot.

Why this is, I don’t know but I presume it could have something to do with the respect we both had for the film from the beginning. Having he backdrop of the Holocaust running through the film placed a responsibility on both of us to deliver a film that could not veer away from its central theme. There was no room for mistakes; otherwise the whole idea of the film would collapse.

It needed to be simple and direct with no frills.

Having watched Shindler’s List many times, we were both struck by the way in which that particular film awkwardly mixed humour with suffering to the detriment of the film as a whole.

Things like that are forgivable in a fictional setting but not when dealing with reality.

Although A Polish Winter is an animated cartoon, we sought to tell the story without any unneeded extras. The memory of those children murdered in the Holocaust is projected in A Polish Winter without the need for slideshows or gimmicks but is instead delivered in an implied fashion.

We hope that when you see A Polish Winter you will enjoy it as we are both extremely proud of this film.

WEB: www.dwarfedfilms.blogspot.com

www.apolishwinter.blogspot.com

A Polish Winter - January Update

2009-01-23T10:07:00.000-08:00

A Polish Winter – January Update

Here are some new images from the Holocaust-themed short animated film “A Polish Winter”.

The first shows the lead character – a young boy - walking through a snowy landscape.

The second image is a composited image that shows a previously seen image of the boy – except this time with background, lighting effects and colour grading applied

Colour Grading and Compositing

The most time consuming aspect of this film is (once again) the rendering of separate layers and passes which must then be composited together in order to achieve the final image ‘look’.

I personally love the ability of being able to alter and grade each shot in this way but it does tend to get very monotonous filing away every single frame of animation in particular folders rather than having to deal only with only a few thousand fames instead!

‘Grading’ is what gives a film’s images a particular ‘look’.

That could involve a desaturation of the films colours to give a more grey-tinged hue or could involve dong the opposite and increasing the saturation of particular colours in the movie to give it a more extreme look.

I prefer the look of strong light and dark tonal qualities, which emphasises the highlights and shadows of an image. It helps create a visual unity of each still image while at the same time making the character blend better with his surroundings.

I also don’t like the ‘plastic’ look of 3D animation and try as hard as possible to avoid this. I hate surfaces looking too shiny and perfect.

Another ting is depth of field: unlike reality, in the computer world it has to be faked. Also, in the natural World, colours need to integrate as a unit, rather than stand out on their own (unless it’s a deliberate effect). I find that reducing saturation levels, and compensating for a washed out type image by upping the contrast, really helps blend a shot better and make it seem less ‘computery’ looking. It’s not about making photo-realism – and the cartoonish-styled “A Polish Winter” is never gonna have to worry about that – but an attempt to make an obviously false World seem more ‘real’ and tangible.

It’s amazing how much time is spent trying to create an ‘imperfect’ image!

It’s amazing how much you can alter a films look in the colour grading stages: a sequence that seems pretty uninteresting can be immediately given new life and excitement by simply altering the colour levels and contrast settings.

Grading is mostly used to ensure a flow of sequences blend seamlessly.

Lighting animation is similar to real world lighting in that what looks ‘right’ from one camera perspective, may not look so good (or indeed, look terrible!) from another viewpoint.

On “A Polish Winter” I would set up the lights for each particular camera view and then have to alter each one in order to ensure nothing ‘weird’ happened: for instance, the character being light with a bright light from the left hand side suddenly is lit from the right side in the following shot.

Sometimes this is done on purpose when I want to create a highlight along one side of the character’s face when in partial silhouette, so as to separate him from the background (they do this all the time in Hollywood movies and TV shows like CSI). But when I’d cut to the opposite viewpoint I’d switch the highlight to the characters other side. This wouldn’t happen in real life but it’s an age-old filmic convention going back to the early days of cinema. It just looks good!

But with animation you can’t predict what way the entire animation sequence will look until it’s been rendered, so occasionally you might find that the highlight you set up for that character doesn’t work so well because the figure moves at angles that obscure the effect.

It’s moments like these that you sometimes need to get a bit creative in the grading department!

Altering contrast on particular colours can create artificial highlights. You can also create a glowing white-coloured mask of the character that you composite with the original footage in order to separate the figure from the background.

Making Snow

Because the film takes place in a snowy setting, our software of choice Blender 3D must calculate large amounts of particle data.

In one 500-frame sequence the storage space needed just for the baking of particle data reached over 2 gigabytes!

Side Note:

Just this morning I received another external portable storage device, which is mainly to cope with archiving all the files needed to make an animated movie.

Unfortunately the Western Digital device I got didn’t see to want to work on Windows Vista so I spent a bit of time looking up solutions on the Internet and trying to locate device drivers.

Eventually I got Vista to recognise it but then I noticed that this 320 Gig portable drive was formatted to the older-style FAT32 filing system which limits the amount of individual file sizes!

It took about 5 hours (yes, 5 hours!) for Vista to reformat the drive into NTFS format.

A previous Western Digital portable drive we were using worked immediately out-of-the-box so I can’t understand the issues with this newer disc.

Using Baked UV Maps to Cheat!

I’ve tried to cut back on long render times by baking textures quite a lot.

For instance, the snowy ground plane has had its textures and shadows baked into a UV map. This allows me to apply a shadeless UV mapped material to the ground that doesn’t need to use of valuable rendering time as the textures and all-important shadows are already there.

The main exterior scene area of the film is surrounded by barbed wire fencing that was originally modelled and designed as 3 dimensional meshes.

This seriously ate up CPU, so instead I created a UV mesh of barbed wire and fences, then baked shadows and lighting onto these UV’s. Then I applied these pre-rendered UV maps to simplified meshes and planes in the scene to replace the original complex models.

The result? Faster rendering and the ability to visualise camera moves in the 3D view port more efficiently.

‘Cheats’ and ‘tricks’ like rendering baking often take up a lot of time to set up in the first instance but pay off in the end.

Mixing a combination of baked texture planes in the background with fully modelled 3D objects in the foreground works very well.

Remember that the final image will be viewed as 2D, regardless of the fact that it was once a 3D object!

Baking textures and shadows onto meshes also helps prevent horrible flickering during playback of animated frames and can also allow you to create more complex and detailed multi-layered textures (you can edit the baked textures in The Gimp/Photoshop as much as you want and then drop it back into your scene to see how it looks).

Music Composing

We’ve also scored the main theme music from the film.

Mostly performed on harsh violin and cello, the sound is then distorted with heavy reverb. Other VST effects are added to the mix to boost the low end and liven up the mid-tones.

It’s haunting and really adds to the poignancy of the themes of the film.

More images and details about “A Polish Winter” will be added to the site soon.

A polish Winter - new image

2008-12-18T10:26:00.000-08:00

Click image to view larger.

A Polish Winter - colour grading in Blender 3D

2008-12-11T10:33:00.000-08:00

Click on image to view larger.

Just a simple demonstration of the importance of colour grading images used in film production.
The image on the left is with grading while the image on the right is the unaltered original image.

Weblinks to Nazi extermination and labour camps

2008-12-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

Our film “A Polish Winter” tries to acknowledge the murder of children during this time in history but below are some links to important websites dedicated to remembering and documenting the entire timeline of atrocities of Nazi labour and extermination camps:

http://www.deathcamps.org/

One of the most thorough and informative sites available.
Deathcamps.org focuses on the Aktion Reinhard camps set up by the Nazi authorities for the specific purpose of the extermination of human life.
The site is a mine of information and is one of the very best websites we’ve ever come across.

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/aktion-reinhard/

Important website about the Holocaust. Links to many other websites.

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/aktion-reinhard/

Danish website (in English) covering all aspects of the Holocaust.

http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/

The website of the Auschwitz television documentary series.

There are many more but we’ve decided to just list a select few for now.
If you’d like to add other suggestions, please leave a comment on this site.

Please visit these sites.
Don’t restrict your knowledge of the Holocaust to just having watched ‘Shindler’s List’ on TV or simply being aware of the name ‘Auschwitz’.
Don’t let the horror of Treblinka, Sorbibor, Belzec, Majdanek, Chelmno and far less well know camps such as Janowska and Jasenovac be forgotten.

A Polish Winter - first posting

2008-12-09T11:03:00.000-08:00

This is the first posting on this blog about the making of the short 3D animated film "A Polish Winter".

About the film:
A Polish Winter is a short film about the murder of children in Nazi extermination camps in Poland during World War II.
The movie is more poetic rather than graphic as we aim to meld visuals and sounds to convey the sense of hopelessness and loss forced upon hundreds of thousands of children during the massacres of both Jewish and non-Jewish children during the most evil moment in world history.

The filmmakers:
Co-directors Shane Sheils and Paula Sheils are behind such films as The Darkside, To Shoot a Rurf, Opera B, Night Falls and more recently Mr. Humpfninkel's Sales Technique.
Shane handles animation and 3D modeling work, while they both share editing, writing, sound design, music composing duties.

Software Used on film:
Open Source and freeware software form the basis of the production pipeline on almost every Dwarfed Films picture.
For modeling,animation and compositing Blender 3D is the programme of choice.

Keep updated with the making of A Polish Winter by visiting this blog or else Dwarfed Films homepage