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In the end, he was able to whittle the number of artists down to a dedicated core group of eight animators and effects wizards from such countries as Sweden, Canada, the UK, Lithuania, Australia, and the United States, to name a few. His technical director, Zafer Mustafa out of Boston, Massachusetts, helped Felux, among many other things, to get a handle on the diversity of artists who worked on the film.
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In many commercial filmmaking endeavors, a single animation package serves as the core tool for all the animation work, in part to help retain a unified look throughout the film. In Revelations, Felux let each animator work with the package that they worked best on.
"Each scene is done by one artist," said Felux. "I would break up the scenes according to artist." This way, he said, each scene would have a continuity with regard to the look, and the artist is using the tool they are most comfortable with, be it 3ds max, LightWave, or the other animation tools on the market. In addition,, each tool was used by the artists in situations where a particular tool was more suited. For example, Corralian was modeled in LightWave but rendered and animated in 3ds max. The principal models were built by Panic Effects, while other models such as the Tie Fighters and Destroyers were obtained from Scifi.com.
Motivation via the Internet
Because all of the animation work was done by artists in countries all over the world, keeping them motivated started out as a challenge, but in the end worked out quite well. Felux built an online forum to showcase the progress of each artist's work, making that work freely visible to the other artists who worked on the film. In addition to gauging the works in progress, it fomented competition among the artists. Building the forum raised the artists competitive spirit, Felux said. "They all started competing, and in doing so raised the bar in the competition. They really got into it when they saw each other's work, and this not only spurred competition, but created synergy in the group."
Distribution of Star Wars Revelations was also done via the Internet, on such film sites as ifilm.com and the fan site theforce.net, which blew out its bandwidth hosting the Revelations download. Felux also said that a university in Sweden, where one of the animators is a student, also hosts the download, in part to test the load on its servers.
After all the work was done, and with Revelations on the computers of nearly one million Star Wars fans, Felux detailed one of the highlights of his three year endeavor. At the recently concluded Celebration III Star Wars convention in Baltimore, Maryland, Felux was able to slip past security and personally hand a copy of the film to Rick McCallum, producer of all the Star Wars films.
Editors note: you can download Star Wars Revelations at http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/revelations.html
John Virata is senior editor of Digital Media Online. You can email him at jvirata@digitalmedianet.com
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