Crowdsourced Movie Studio Creates a Bold New Kind of Sci-Fi Series
- 6:30 AM
A new sci-fi web series teams Hollywood visual effects artists with a global scattering of up-and-coming animators, all of whom are working for free to craft CGI elements for a wigged-out futuristic saga.
The New Kind project is being spearheaded by visual effects hot shots whose resumes include Star Wars, Avatar and Hugo. These moonlighting pros are sharing their expertise with 200 anime enthusiasts to produce a crowdsourced labor of love made possible because the cost of CGI animation tools has dropped several hundred thousand dollars in the past few years.
“Somebody in Malaysia or Greece who lives in their mom’s basement can now create visual effects with a $2,000 computer and a $3,000 software license that’s on par, or even superior to, what you would have seen in Jurassic Park,” New Kind creator Peter Hyoguchi said in a phone interview with Wired. “If you know how to find them, there’s a glut of visual effects artists out there.”
Judging from concept art and an eerie teaser clip that’s already become a viral sensation, Hyoguchi may be on to something big. While risk-averse Hollywood studios increasingly rely on blockbuster brands and nine-figure budgets, Hyoguchi is experimenting with a super-cheap production model that costs nearly nothing to implement. Everybody works on spec, and creative talent will be paid for their efforts if the 80-episode adventure turns a profit, according to Hyoguchi.
Hyoguchi plans to post the series for free, but make money on merchandising and by charging viewers $1 for a sneak preview of the following week’s episode. He estimates that $1 million in assets have been created since The New Kind project launched last spring, and his Kickstarter campaign, running through Friday, aims to raise $100,000 in cash to finish the first two episodes.
The New Kind pulls in top-tier digital artists who are eager to collaborate simply because they love the genre. According to Hyoguchi, a typical New Kind contributor normally does effects for mainstream popcorn flicks, but would rather be making anime. “Everything’s about DC and Marvel superheroes, but what I’ve discovered is that people my age are not really loving it,” said the 40-year old writer-director. “There’s this entire generation of visual effects artists who grew up on anime and Robotech. Hollywood doesn’t want to make those kinds of movies, so when I present them with this story, they want to be part of it.”
That story, set 30 years in the future on the heels of a global economic meltdown, focuses on teenage protagonists Darvin, from Texas, and Yuka, from Japan. The two traverse urban wastelands dotted with self-illuminated graffitti and populated by robotic street gangs wearing mecha suits. Ruling the chaos is The Dark Order, whose members live in opulence and secretly manipulate countries, industries and religions. Darvin and Yuki have never met, but they’re psychically linked, and if they ever get together their union will lead to an evolutionary upgrade for humanity and spell doom for Dark Order villains.
The project’s visual style pays open homage to the work of anime legend Shinji Aramaki, who designed the original Transformers action figures for Hasbro in 1983, and later pioneered the mecha genre in Japan. The mid-1980s cartoon Robotech also influences New Kind characters, who routinely clamp themselves into Iron Man-like mecha suits to do battle.
The plot owes much to Japan’s “New Type” sub-genre, in which children or young adults represent the next evolutionary step for the human species. It’s a ‘bot-fueled narrative aesthetic that dangles like catnip for anime nerds and sci-fi geeks, but doesn’t do much for Hollywood execs.
Hyoguchi learned that the hard way over a decade ago. Son of an architect and a mother who animated Hanna-Barbera cartoons, the Marin County native dropped out of high school to make his first film, then lived in his car and squatted in an abandoned house in Berkley, California, for a year before moving to Los Angeles. In L.A., Hyoguchi wrote several unproduced screenplays, including a 1997 Ray Bradbury collaboration called The Waking. After directing festival circuit favorite First, Last and Deposit, he successfully pitched an early version of The New Kind to MTV in 2000, but the deal collapsed when Viacom acquired the music network.
Disheartened, Hyoguchi temporarily quit show biz and moved to Japan. “The New Kind just sat on the shelf until the world changed a couple of years ago,” says Hyoguchi. “I realized I could do it on my own without having to give up rights or anything like that because the software had become so cheap and so many artists knew how to use it.”
Last April, a freshly emboldened Hyoguchi, by now CEO of the Strike.TV webotainment site, pitched matte painting maestro Christopher Evans to volunteer as art director on The New Kind. Evans, who was neighbors with Hyoguchi growing up, is a legend in certain circles – he helped bring to life the worlds of Star Wars, Alice in Wonderland, Captain America and dozens of other movies.
“I thought it was an intriguing idea,” Evans recalled. “I said, ‘Sure I’ll be happy to do some concept sketches of the opening shots.’” Evans adds, “Of course you have to make a living, but people in this business who are good love to work, whether it’s for a famous director like Steven Spielberg or David Fincher, or someone who’s unknown. Peter has a great imagination and that’s what I responded to.”
Getting Evans on board proved to be a turning point for Hyoguchi’s fortune. With concept art to show off, Hyoguchi got Industrial Light & Magic model maker Fon Davis to send an e-mail blast to industry colleagues urging them to jump on the New Kind bandwagon. Soon, a Who’s Who of virtual effects artists were on board: Hugo effects artist M. Alexendar Weller, Ice Age visual effects supervisor Stephen Jenkins, Coraline editor Margaret Andres, The Matrix texture artist Devorah Petty, The Simpsons director David Silverman, Avatar motion capture producer Reuben Langdon and others.
“I’d tell somebody like David Wolgemuth II, who worked as a compositor on the last Harry Potter movie, ‘I don’t have any money, but I will give you a team of 20 people who will do all the heavy lifting,” Hyoguchi recalls. “All you have to do is supervise and make sure they’re hitting the quality.’”
To leverage New Kind‘s traction with the Hollywood VFX community, Hyoguchi posted Evans’ art on a Facebook page, then trawled forums and YouTube pages for talented unknowns. “You tell them, ‘Would you like to be part of this? I’ve got the texture designer who worked on The Matrix,’ and they start jumping up and down,” said Hyoguchi.
The collaboration works like this: volunteer digital artists, working from concept art approved by Hyoguchi, sculpt 3-d digital environments, objects and characters. They upload the files to a central FTP server in San Francisco. Next, riggers access the files and embed each object with motion controllers. Five supervisors sort the contributions into folders, and dole them out to the specific animators, texture artists and lighting techies tasked with different pieces of the project. Those volunteers add motion capture data, texture, color and lighting effects to each element. Compositing teams then blend all the pieces into a video file. In Portland, Oregon, editor Margaret Andres downloads these .mov files and cuts scenes with Final Cut Pro, consulting via Skype with Hyoguchi and sound designer Chris Thomas to craft the final product.
That’s the same kind of production pipeline you’d find at places like Industrial Light & Magic, Digital Domain and other big CGI outfits. But unlike secretive studios, The New Kind Facebook page posts hundreds of elements-in-progress and invites strangers to weigh in. ”It’s like having an open-door discussion at ILM,” laughed Hyoguchi. “Anybody can walk in and say, “I think that’s too blue!”
For Martin Lindgren, a 28-year old freelance graphic artist working on the project from Sweden, New Kind’s web-powered production chain provided all the assets needed to assemble a killer trailer piece. “We created the city behind the wall using matte-paintings,” he said proudly. “Then we added atmospheric layers and created the final look.”
The far-flung artists working from home in their spare time see The New Kind as a way to buff up their demo reels while getting an opportunity to work with high-powered mentors. “I loved just knowing that Chris Evans was involved,” said 25-year old Turkish modeler Kerem Açıkgöz. By day, he churns out 3-D elements for Japanese TV commercials and videogames. By night, Açıkgöz obsesses over fantastical pistols for evil Dark Order cops using off-the-shelf Maya software “I get a lot of Facebook or e-mail messages from people who want me to do projects but they’re very amateur and don’t have much future,” Açıkgöz said in an e-mail interview. “I don’t have time for that. But when Peter saw another mech model I did on my YouTube page and sent me a message about this New Kind project, I really liked the story.”
It remains to be seen if Hyoguchi’s dream translates into commercial success, but at the very least, The New Kind makes its mark as an entirely new kind of filmmaking. Part open source project, part artistic incubator, the project exerts a powerful spell on its participants.
“For the teaser clip I was tasked with creating and animating the cloud drifting in front of the moon,” Lindgren said. “It looked real for a second or two but then the clouds all fell apart and I had no idea how to nail it. I asked Chris what to do. He gave me great advice about adding small whispery edges to the cloud and described how the light from the moon should interact with the cloud. Chris taught me about stuff thats going to be useful my whole career.”