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Credo is the first of a slate of low-budget horror feature films to be produced by Alto Films. Shooting began in London on 21 August 2006, with Toni Harman directing and Alex Wakeford as DP. The film was a Panasonic Varicam supplied by Axis Films and posted on Quantel’s iQ at Axis Post, both part of the Axis Group.

As a director/DP partnership, we’ve been using FrameForge for the past year to create 3D sets and storyboard sequences in preparation for shooting. We loved the fact that it was so simple and easy to use. Within minutes, we had built sets, designed characters, put in camera angles to create shots, and assembled the shots into an – albeit primitive – storyboard. As neither of us can draw and we couldn’t afford to pay for a storyboard artist, we were blown away by what a $200 piece of software could do.

As we became more experienced, so we became more ambitious, building elaborate sets and creating complex storyboard sequences that we could print out as individual frames or use to create animatics. The only problem with FrameForge is that the characters don’t move, the cameras don’t move, in fact nothing moves. It’s just the same as traditional storyboards in that everything appears as static frames, so if you want to storyboard a camera move, you laboriously have to create a start frame, then an end frame, and then draw an arrow between the shots to suggest movement. Simple, relatively effective, yet a little frustrating.

So we rubbed our hands together in excitement at the idea of trialling an early adopter version of Antics v2.0, a pre-visualization software package in which characters and cameras can move in real time (the full version is available in the Autumn). You can set complex actions, such as having the characters walk through doors, climb stairs, pick up or put down objects, have them drink, argue, scratch or perform any of the hundreds of pre-programmed human actions, including having your characters drive cars around your sets, all in real time. Not only that, but you can set complex camera moves using the correct 35mm or video lenses, change the lighting, add dialog and sound effects. Once you’ve programmed it all in, you can render it as an .AVI file, then sit back and watch your whole movie play out as it would be on the big screen. Fantastic!

The basics

The first issue we encountered was that Antics doesn’t work on Macs – only on PCs – and then only on Windows 2000 (sp4) or XP (sp2) 1.5 GHz (recommended 3 GHz), with 1GB hard disk space (recommended 3GB) and needing 512 RAM (recommended 1GB RAM). This meant we couldn’t run it on our super-powerful dual processing G5 Mac; instead we could only run it on our far less powerful PC (unlike FrameForge, which we can run on both).

We started with the tutorial disk, spending several hours watching the numerous tutorial demos, which started relatively slow and easy to follow. How to build a set. How to build walls. How to import props and characters. How to make characters move. We felt confident that we had grasped the basics.

But then very quickly the tutorials became really complicated until we were completely lost by the time it came to how to create a timeline of actions and camera movements. The voiceover descriptions unfortunately weren’t giving much help: “the timeline will begin recording the new animation, which is the secondary command and is folded underneath the primary track as indicated by the icon to the left of the tracks’ title”.

Lost in tutorial hell and starting to lose hope that we’d ever be able to use this software, we thought the best thing would be to dive straight in and pick it up as we go along. We thought we’re both relatively computer literate, we’ve done hours of tutorial training, just how hard can it be? Building sets was remarkably easy. After you’ve set your preferences, to build a room you merely click on the ‘Create Room’ icon to draw out your set floorplan. To build walls you click on the ‘build wall’ icon, then click on where you want the walls to be, and hey presto, walls appear. You can add additional rooms, ceilings and stairs all relatively easily. To add architectural features such as doors and windows, or furniture and props, you simply scroll through the comprehensive content lists and drag and drop them into your set.

Within minutes, we had built multiple rooms on different levels, with stairs going up between the floors (with FrameForge you can only really work on one level). We put in doors, windows, furniture, and installed some lights. We made a garden, created next-door houses, then a whole street with cars. We made it sunset, giving the whole scene a warm ambient glow. We even experimented with fog. We found it very easy to adjust the view on the set, to move the view up, down, zoom in, out, pan left and right or vertically rotate the view to see the set in 3D or as a 2D aerial shot.

Next came the characters. Although there isn’t a wide choice of characters, we selected a couple and very quickly we set paths for them to walk and gave them actions. We had great fun watching them walk through doorways, climb stairs, pick up bags and of course drink bottles of beer. It was all going great, but then we hit a wall: trying to work out exactly how to set cameras and record scenes with the primary and secondary actions and create a timeline that we could export as an .AVI file. It seemed that as we fiddled between camera angles, and jostled with the character moves and layered in secondary commands, we found that suddenly characters had jumped to positions where they weren’t supposed to be, or the camera angles had changed. We’re both used to creating timelines, as we’re both proficient at using various NLEs such as Avid, FCP and Premiere, and we’re both very used to FrameForge. So we couldn’t understand why we were unable to get to grip with the Antics timeline.

We went back to the tutorial for a few more hours’ training, and with some phone support from Antics (which comes free when you purchase the software) we realized where we had been going wrong. We had mistakenly named one of the cameras ‘master’, which is the same name as the main view used to navigate around the set.

Problem solved, we tried again. We created a relatively simple sequence of a character exiting a room to join four others, then of the whole group filing along a corridor and up two flights of stairs. Once we were happy with the timings of the characters’ actions, we set various camera angles, putting in moves and tracks to cover the action. Although fiddly at first, we soon got the hang of synchronizing the timings of the actions with the camera moves.

The next step was to cut the shots into a sequence. For this, we rendered each shot as an .AVI file then used Premiere to edit the shots together. For us, this was the most exciting part. Choosing the shots, changing things around, adjusting timings to bring in tension. It was just like editing the actual movie. Finally, we sat back and watched the whole sequence play in real time, and it was fantastic seeing the exact shots we’ll be filming in a few weeks play out frame by frame.

Antics is so packed with features that it opens up a wealth of opportunities. It would be extremely useful to present an Antics previz in a pitch meeting to show financiers what a movie will look like on the big screen. Or it would be great to try out a risky camera move before committing to an elaborate set-build.

The potential of Antics is so great, and the possibilities so endless, that the only downside is that it takes quite a long time to master. With us, it could easily take several months to storyboard the whole film exactly frame by frame and we simply don’t have that sort of time as we start shooting in four weeks. Saying that, someone familiar with animation software will pick it up much quicker than we did and it would probably be more intuitive for them than for us.

There is one more slight niggle. For such a feature-packed program, it is a little disappointing that Antics v2.0 doesn’t allow you to export single frames as jpegs that you can print out and use as a storyboard reference during the shoot. But little niggles aside, Antics is phenomenal software. It produces amazing pre-visualizations that will no doubt be incredibly invaluable to directors, DPs, animators, storyboard artists and productions designers.

For us, it’s great to be able to try things out and make mistakes before we shoot, without it costing any money. Then when it comes to the shoot, we know what we’re doing, we know where the cameras are going to be, we know the blocking of the actors and we feel confident the shots will cut together, and, for us, that’s the real beauty and genius of the Antics software.

Get to see it first

Toni Harman/Alex Wakeford