I'm Lucas Martell, an animation director and creator of "The OceanMaker" AMA!

Which of the Martell family are you directly related too? Will we see you in an upcoming episode by chance? Either way, I'm rooting for them!

Go House MARTELL!

Did you know coming in that half the questions would be about Game of Thrones?

Either way, you're doing a great job of rolling with it. No sense getting a splitting headache like your brother...

I honestly did not... alas I live in the shadow of my forebears... :)

It's cool. GoT is so popular, with that last name you never really had a chance.

By the way, thanks for putting your video on YouTube instead of just coming here to pitch something that we have to buy tickets or go through a paywall to see. In fact I can't see one call to action for people to spend money, anywhere in this AMA. We need more people like you.

Thanks! Honestly, the most important thing we need is for as many people to see it as possible. We want to make a feature, but need to prove there's an audience that's interested. Watching the film and (hopefully) telling your friends is payment enough!

Remember how difficult it was to watch Game of Thrones in Belize, Lucas? We must have used half the island's yearly bandwidth...

Oh yeah... as a side note, the internet on the island was stable, but clocked in at a whopping 38k... and that's a little k.

Do you know why all the world hates a Lannister?

Because their gold and their lions and their golden lions make them think they're better than everyone.

Nice weather in Dorne?

Little cloudy...

Do you wear your helmet when you battle?

Only when it's raining.

You should wear it every time. Also do invest in a better armour. Sorry about your brother and sister.

Thank you for your concern and condolences.

whats the most time consuming part of making an animated movie?

It's usually a pretty even split between animation (actually creating the character movements/performances) and lighting/rendering.

Building all of the models/sets/characters is also up there, but all of that can vary from project to project.

Any tips for someone wanting to become an animator? How important is college (it's SO expensive in Canada)?

Honestly, a degree means absolutely nothing in the animation world. All that matters is your reel, and to a lesser extent, the projects you've worked on and how easy you are to work with.

That said, it's a very competitive industry and you need to know your stuff. For some people, college is a great way to develop those skillsets. Off the top of my head, VFS is probably the top school in canada ATM, but you could also look into online programs like animation mentor, animschool, or if you're a self-learner, try taking one-off classes through FXPhD or Digital Tutors and try to get an internship somewhere.

Oh, and it's worth mentioning that there's a lot of sub-disciplines in animation. Animation itself (moving the characters to create performances) is one of the most difficult to get into, but anything more technical (rigging, pipeline development, lighting/rendering, etc.) tend to be a little more accessible.

I'm not too sure of who you are, it's the first time I've heard your name. But I am thankful for the opportunity to ask an Animation Director a question!

What's the toughest part about animation direction and what is it exactly that you do?

No worries... yeah I've mainly done my own independent films and lots of commercials/VFX projects.

Just about every part of animation is hard. I've done pretty much everything, and the old but still relevant behind the scenes videos for Pigeon Impossible are still a good resource for an overview of the entire process.

Directing animation isn't much different than directing live action, probably the toughest thing is endurance. My first film was only 6 minutes and took 5 years to make. OceanMaker took a year and a half from start to finish. We're getting much faster, and able to expand our team, but we're still less than ten people. At a big studio they'd have dozens of people working on a project like these at least.

Just out of curiosity how much time in those 5 years it took to make your first short were dedicated to working on the film? Are we talking a steady 24/7 or every so often you'd spend some time working on it..

Hard to be exact, but I'd estimate 40 hours a week for 5 years. Some weeks I didn't have much time, but it wasn't uncommon for me to put in 100+ hour weeks when I had more time.

Are any plans in place for you to collaborate further with Rooster Teeth? Slightly unrelated: if you haven't watched their show RWBY I highly recommend it (although I have zero animation knowledge).

Yeah RWBY is great! We're chatting about possibly teaming up on something, but there's no plan in place, and we don't have a specific project yet. It's all just early stages.

I'd love to work with Rooster Teeth again on the right project, and I know Lucas already is.

Yeah Mike was on RvB for a while... season 11? Mighty Coconut is helping with VFX for Lazer Team.

Has anyone ever called you Marcus Latrell?

More than once! That's my evil alter-ego.

Hello ,

What's your favourite ocean creature ? ☺

Definitely Octopus.

Hmm. If all the oceans are gone in this world, does that mean they'll never see another whale, octopus, tuna etc? What happened to the ocean creatures?

Not to be get too morbid, but this probably sums it up best.

And will they make a comeback if the story continues?

Well as you guessed, we're definitely hoping to continue the story. I've got a feature treatment written, but honestly it would take a series of movies to get to the point where that question would come into play. In other words, I frankly don't know yet. :)

I'm curious about all the festival screenings. Is there a submission process (probably with an entry fee), or do the festival organizers seek you out? Is there a "catalog" that they shop from? Please feel free to brag about the number of festival screenings, number of awards received, which one is your favorite, etc. Thanks!

Yeah there's usually a submission process and an entry fee (typically $20-$60 for a short). Once you get into some bigger festivals it's not uncommon to start getting invited by the programmers. In particular, SXSW and Clermont-Ferrand were the big festivals that were huge door-openers for us. We've since stopped submitting ourselves, but we get invited about once a week.

That is extremely cool. Congratulations!

Thanks!

[deleted]

Thanks so much! Yes a feature is exactly what we want to do next, help us spread the word!

• For your next short film production, would you structure it as another "vacation destination" production environment?

• Could you see the sustainability of running a feature film production using the same destination production model?

Just to keep people in the loop, Tyrant2 is talking about the new production model we used on OceanMaker.

Yeah that's definitely how I would do another short. It was just so fast and so much more collaborative to have everyone in the same place and totally committed to the project.

We've got some ideas on how to do it as a longer production... maybe working in sprints, with just a core team staying on full time. We're figuring out how that might work, and also trying to raise the money because we couldn't self-finance something that large like we did this production.

What are the responsibilities of an eQ assistant as you were on "Sin City?"

That's a bit of a misnomer. It should really say DI Assistant (as in digital intermediate) The Quantel eQ was the name of DI system we were using. Essentially, it meant that I was helping with the online edit and color correction.

Thanks for the clarification. I appreciate your response. Would you be interested in an interview for my movie-based podcast? We watch a movie, provide commentary/trivia, and interview a guest that connects with the film we're watching. We just interviewed VFX artist Peter Kuran. We've had Jamie Kennedy, the director/writer of Blair Witch, and a lot more. It'd be an honor to add you to our list of incredible guests.

Sounds like fun! If you email me through the contact page at Mighty Coconut we can chat privately.

What advice can you give anyone trying to get into the film Industry? I feel it is extremely difficult to get a name for yourself. What has your experience been like?

It is indeed very hard to get in, and once you're in you've got to keep hustling to stay in.

I was lucky that my first project landed me a great manager and agent, which opened a lot of doors. Off the success of that I pitched several feature animation projects and got a couple projects either bought or optioned, but even that isn't the end-all, because you still need to get the film green lit which can take years if it ever happens at all. Don't want to scare anyone, I just wanted to offset the "overnight success stories" people like to tell, because even making a film with a proper budget and a studio behind you can be just as hard if not harder than doing your own scrappy independent project.

The one bit of advice for aspiring filmmakers, is that the entire industry is becoming increasingly stratified... you've got big budget blockbusters, and you've got indie features being made for typically less than 1 million. The middle ground is disappearing so if you want to make it, you either need to go the route that we take, of making one short film every couple of years, but hopefully it blows everyone's mind. Or you've got to make lots of content quickly and cheaply. There's no right or wrong, and you can still do good stuff fast and cheap, it just tends to be more about the writing and less about the execution.

Sorry that was a long winded answer... feel free to keep asking if I didn't hit on what you were looking for.

How do I make a dirty banana?

1.5 bananas, a shot of gold rum, a shot of Kahlua, a little chocolate syrup and milk to get the consistency right. Some people add coconut creme but that's too rich for me.

It's basically a banana smoothie with alcohol. Oh, and it looks nothing like the drink we showed in our behind the scenes video. We just didn't have any footage of an actual dirty banana.

Looks like you have nailed the production triangle. if you were doing an indie feature, what would be the ideal budget and how many people working on it and time frame?

That depends a lot on the project. Some are inherently more complex. We've gotten a couple feature projects as low as 10 million. We're also thinking about scaling up this "Destination Production" model to something that would work on a feature. That might be able to get us in the 5 million range... animation is just a really expensive thing, because it requires so many people working for typically 18 months. I think our 10M budget scaled up to around 80 or 90 people.

Where did the idea for this short come from?

Will you make a feature length movie at some point?

What animation software did you use?

We used Softimage XSI for the most part, with a little help from Maya and Max for certain tasks.

Cool!

Did you guys use any mo-cap or was it mostly hand animated?

Everything was hand animated... oh hey michaelcawood is here! He was our head of story and did some animation. I'll mention him in the lead comment.

For this film we mainly used Softimage, but also some Maya, 3DSMax, Houdini and Blender. We're built around an Alembic pipeline which makes it really easy to use whichever tool fits the job best.

Yes a feature is definitely the goal. I've got a feature treatment written, and with this short we'll be trying to get that off the ground ASAP.

Spoiler Alert The idea came from that shot of the two planes flying straight at each other with the cloud in the middle. I'd had that image in my head for years but never knew what the rest of the story was. It wasn't until I thought that maybe the cloud was the thing they were fighting over, and the whole world sort of evolved around that idea.

Lucas, I hope you're still here. Before I ask my questions I absolutely have to congratulate you in one of the most beautiful stories i've ever had the pleasure to watch.

As a HUGE fan of dystopic future fiction, your film hooked me in very beginning to then complete involve me in less than a full minute. It's beautifully executed and has an absolutely fantastic soundtrack. Anyway, I don't even know how to congratulate you even more than I already did. It's just got me speechless so good it was.

Now for my questions:

1) What was your inspiration in creating the story?

2) What is your favorite dystopic future story?

Thanks for giving us this amazing movie and the oportunity to ask you questions about it!

Thanks! I've touched on a few of the inspirations, so I'll answer the second part, although that's a tough one. I think I'm going to have to go with Brazil.

I'm really looking forward to Fury Road in a couple of weeks. I'll be honest that Mad Max is a little violent for my taste... I've always liked the idea of a post-apocalyptic film about hope which is what I tried to do with this one, and hope to do with the feature. It's not so much about the fall of society, but rising from the ashes.

What is your favorite animation studio?

You mean besides shameless plug [Mighty Coconut](www.mightycoconut.com)?

I've been a Pixar fan for years, really excited about the new original stuff they've got coming out. Looks like a return to form.

How to Train your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda from Dreamworks are both awesome.

Anything Lord / Miller do (Lego, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, etc.)

Very excited about ReelFX doing original stuff and taking some risks... going outside the super-conventional stuff. Honestly that's what interests me most... I really want to see more movies that don't just cop the Pixar style/tone.

Out of curiousity, which small Carribbean Island did you move production to?

We were on Caye Caulker. It's pretty small. About 1300 people. No resorts or anything, just a couple of houses that we set up shop in. The really nice thing was that it was small enough that you could walk or ride bikes everywhere, but it still had some restaurants, other things to do and that basic infrastructure you need... relatively stable power, slow but steady internet.

Hi Lucas, big fan! OceanMaker was very good!

Are you planning to keep doing projects like it in the future? I know the crowdfunding wasn't very successful, but you managed to pull it off anyway. Would you try crowdfunding again, or go a different route?

Also, how did you do the landscapes in OceanMaker? Sculpted and painted, or generated in something like World Machine?

Bonus bonus question: If you had to do OceanMaker over again, what would you do differently?

Yeah we definitely want to do another destination production.

As for crowd funding... we're so thankful to the people who backed us, but to be completely honest, yeah it was a bit of a disappointment and I can't see doing another crowd funding like that again. We ended up self-funding the project and using what we did raise to cover music and post-production, but everything on the island was out of our own pockets.

Yeah Tray Duncan our CG Supervisor did the landscapes with World Machine, which was great because it tiled everything and allowed us to break it apart and only load in what we needed for a shot. The materials were all procedural, so we had a lot of detail and could adjust the sea level for composition.

What is one thing you wish someone told you before getting into the industry?

You know, I've actually been pretty fortunate that the biggest "mistakes" I've made turned out to be really fortunate in hindsight. I think the best advice I can give is "Keep making your own stuff," whether it's films, art, music... Sometimes what pays the bills isn't the most creatively rewarding, and you need an outlet for your creativity. Even people who work at the big studios like Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks try to keep working on their own side projects because day-to-day studio stuff can be a grind, no matter how cool the end product looks.

What would you say the pros and cons are to working in the animation field? And what animation programs would you suggest to learn for someone trying to get into the field?

A big pro is that you can work from just about anywhere, and there's more and more people working remotely. However I prefer to be in the same place with the people I'm working with.

Con would be that animation is inherently time consuming (and therefore expensive). Actually... I suppose I should qualify that by saying the type of animation we do (high-end 3D) is very time consuming... there are other forms like cutout animation that go much faster, but we've carved out a niche for ourselves and want to keep doing what we do best.

As for programs, learn them all. Maya is the industry standard, but we're starting to use Blender more and more.

how did you keep track of production?

Click here for the link to the google doc that we used for OceanMaker. On larger projects you need a more robust system, but since the team was just 8 people at the height of production, this was sufficient.

Oh, and note that there's 2 tabs, one for shots, the other for assets.

1) as an animator, would you consider yourself a masochists because of the amount of work that goes into it

2) is 2-d animation on its way out?

1) Absolutely.

2) If anything, I think 2D is coming back in a big way... not necessarily in the Disney "Full Animation" sense where every frame is a brand new drawing, but there's tons of 2D stuff being done for TV and the web, not to mention anime and some of the european stuff (Secret of Kells, Ernest and Celestine, Song of the Sea, etc.)

Interesting, I've been using flash for around 10 years and it's a lot of fun and a great hobby. But I also feel like the industry in America is non-existent or nearly impossible to get in :\

Seems like kickstarters are the way to go these days, which isn't a bad thing

Again, that probably depends on your definition of 2D and where you're looking. The biggest animation studio in Austin is Powerhouse and they've made quite a name for themselves by doing exclusively 2D.

Although the one other thing, is that most games are 3D, so that opens up quite a few opportunities.

Er..... I have a lot of questions.

How do you get yourself to sit down an animate? I can get myself to draw without problem, but I constantly procrastinate animating and lose focus very easily.

How long did it take you to do that one video? How many people worked on it and were they working on it full time?

How did you find people to work for you? Do you depend on word of mouth by people you already know or do you put up a notice?

OceanMaker took a year and half. A little under half of the film was done during a production sprint in Belize. There were 8 of us for almost 7 weeks. After that, it was mostly me and one other person working on it whenever we could.

If you haven't seen them yet, definitely check out the behind the scenes videos which talks more about the production process.

Oh, and caffeine is how I focus. Whenever I have to dive into something I curl up in a coffee shop. I've gotten to the point where even smelling coffee gets me in the mindset of working. YMMV

As for collaborators, we have relationships with lots of artists and occasionally interview for new positions. Word of mouth is a big one though, so don't piss off someone who hires you!

What are your thoughts on Mountains?

Mine has a cinder block and dice stuck in it. It's feeling awestruck at the moment.

Hi there, just wanted to say that I really loved your short, and I've spent an embarrassing amount of time poring over your production diaries and other information. You guys are pretty inspiring, awesome work.

For my question: How long have each of you been working on your specified part of production? How long did it take for you to consider yourself a "master" of your part of the trade? I know there's no set answer, but I'm just curious.

Again, awesome work. Hope to see more of you guys around.

Thanks! In general, we've all been at it for 10+ years. That's probably a pretty good estimate of the point where someone typically jumps up to a senior-level artist.

Hey Lucas! It's my dream to be an animation director or writer, and I'm wondering what path you took to get there. Where did you start?

Hah! Now that's a path you won't be able to follow. I was a music major in school (saxophone) but spent a lot of time in the recording studio engineering and producing. When I graduated I moved to Austin to get into sound for film, but someone had seen one little VFX shot I had done for a music video and hired me to do a freelance gig. Before I knew it I was a VFX artist, and then I started Pigeon: Impossible as a way to learn 3D animation.

Question: What place in Austin do you think has the best BBQ?

Side note: I got to watch The Oceanmaker at Mighty Coconut and it is an amazing short. I highly recommend it to everyone! Hi Tim and Sean!

Our lead animator /u/henningKO came down to Austin for a week to help put the finishing touches on the film. He's from New York, so all he wanted was good BBQ. We ate at 8 restaurants and had to detox the next month. Smitty's and Kreuz's in Lockhart were the winners, but we also didn't have time to go to Franklin's or La Barbecue which are amazing.

how did you learn softimage and what are the best online resources to learn it? what's your opinion that Autodesk decided to end its life.

I'm a huge Softimage fan, but I would definitely recommend NOT learning softimage. There's no market out there for it, and very few people know it. We just used it because that was what we were familiar with and had a pipeline built around.

My opinion is pretty much in line with Alastair's.

how did the idea of The OceanMaker come to you? While watching it, the Quran 67:30 came to my mind.

That's a great passage, hadn't read it before!

Spoiler Alert The idea came from that one shot of the planes flying straight at each other with the cloud in the middle. I had that image in my head for years, but didn't have the rest of the story until I started to think that maybe the cloud was the thing they were fighting over. The idea of a world without water developed to support that idea and that's where the film was born.

How do I go about getting funding for a project?

A rich uncle is a good place to start. We tried a crowd funding thing with OceanMaker, but ended up raising just enough for the music and post-production. All of the animation production was self-financed, plus a lot of sweat equity from the crew.

A couple questions.

1.From a directors stand point, how important are your script writers?

2.Would you rather adapt a story into film/short, or start fresh?

Thanks for the AMA!

You might have to ask me that again in a few years... up until now I've only written my own scripts from original ideas, so I don't have a good point of comparison.

As for the OceanMaker script, I wrote it in about 2 days, and what you see on screen was 85% true to that script. Of course, since there was no dialogue, the script was pretty basic and we had to figure out a lot of these abstract ideas with clever camera work, music and editing. The main thing that we played with was the ending. The little girl wasn't even in that 1st draft.

I've always been a big fan of post apocalyptic stories. Where did you get your ideas for the setting in The OceanMaker? I just watched it btw and it rocks.

I mentioned the origin of the story a few times, but the setting was definitely inspired by the drought. We've been in one for years here in Texas and the lake near Austin was almost totally dry at one point. Boats were sitting in the middle of the desert.

Also, images of the Aral sea are both beautiful and heartbreaking.

Who is that on the back of your card? Also, as an individual, when animating in 2D, do you prefer to draw it frame by frame or use shortcuts, such as tweening?

Also, how long does it take to render a full length film from 3DSMax/Maya?

That's the main character from our new short.

We actually do all 3D animation, so it's a combination of pose to pose and layered. Here is an old video I did on the techniques.

OceanMaker took about an hour per frame, per computer. So ~600 seconds * 24 fps = 14,400 hours of render time. But we had multiple machines rendering (about 6) which comes out to 100 days of non-stop rendering.

That's for 10 minutes of animations. How highpoly do your models get? As a student studying game development, I've made a couple of low poly humanoids/inanimate objects (1-4k polys), and they never took more than a minute to render a still. Makes me wonder if I should stick to 2d animation and work with 3d after I get multiple rigs built for rendering.

I think our scenes averaged around 10 million polys. Low poly stuff works for games, but you can't put that up on a big theater screen without it falling apart. Our character was probably around the 300,000 range, but part of that is also smoothing. The other big thing is the lighting. We were using a single key light and final gather. In games you would pre-bake that lighting, but we had to calculate it every frame. All those ray trace calls add up fast when light bounces around a scene.

Oh, and I do think the rendering problem will be solved before long... it's already possible to get some great stuff out of game engines, the problem is that it requires massive amounts of manual labor to make a 2k poly character look good. We just offload that optimization to the renderer and let it crank for longer if necessary.

Do you plan to release ultra-high-quality versions of The OceanMaker or your other films?

Ideally, 2160p HEVC at like 50 mbps. You could put it on an FTP server or a torrent or something.

Loved the film, by the way!

Yeah we did an early access through Vimeo On Demand and made it available to download through there, but they won't let you download the source file, just the converted files. As soon as they figure it out we'll make it happen.

BTW, the final film was 2k scope (2048 x 858).

What's your favourite type of sandwich?

Catfish Po'Boy

What's your ringtone?

It WAS Ping Island/Lighting Strike from Life aquatic until Apple made it impossible to use your own ringtones... sorry... I'm still bitter about that.

How long did it take your team to render one frame of the animation? Did you have a render farm? I'm studying CG and after watching the your short, that looked like it took a long time to render with just a regular PC.

About an hour per frame for both OceanMaker and Pigeon. Actually, OceanMaker was rendered entirely on the laptops we brought with us to Belize. (6 machines) They were quad core i7's, but still nothing like you'd expect in a regular workstation.

Also, 1 hour / frame is pretty normal. Bigger studios sometimes get into the tens of hours, but that's usually for crowd shots and really complex simulations.

What is a food that you can eat, at any time, any place, with anybody?

If necessary, I could subsist on a diet of nothing but ceviche.

The crew at Rooster Teeth put The OceanMaker up a day early for their sponsors (it is breathtaking).

My question is, what lead to that? Does Mighty Coconut have a working relationship with Rooster Teeth that we may see something out of in the future? Or was it just some cool cross marketing that happened?

Thanks so much. I look forward to what MC do next.

Austin is a small town, and the animation community here is tiny, so we've known each other for years. Plus we're helping out with Lazer Team. RT loved the film and wanted to help us get the word out. We have been talking about teaming up on something, but there's nothing specific at the moment. It's just a "let's keep chatting and see what happens" sort of thing.

Do you do internships, Also any advice for students? (obviously in animation but can be just general advice too)

We occasionally do internships. Ping us through the contact page at Mighty Coconut

I've given a few pieces of general advice, so I'll try to mix it up: You don't have to specialize yet. Most schools listen to what the big studios say, about how they want someone who does one thing REALLY well. The problem, is that most of the industry is made up of smaller shops like ours who rely a lot on generalists and people who can wear a few different hats. If you only do one thing and you can't get into a big studio, you're screwed. If you have a more broad skill set, you can always specialize later and you'll have a much better understanding of how the whole production functions.

Hey so I've got a 10-minute no-dialog animated short I've been trying to get made for a couple years now. I drew a simple animatic and wrote a MIDI score but keep losing funding on it. Is there any way I can show it to you?

Contact me through Mighty Coconut and I'll do my best to respond. It'll probably take at least a few days though.

How much money do you have sitting in the bank?

What's your retirement outlook?

Ah yes, classic AMA question. Unfortunately my wife made me sign an NDA about our finances before doing this. :(