Welcome! It's lonely in space. Especially when the hatch is gronked and you're stuck outside of a 340 year old space station. Welcome to the plank owner's Blog, where you'll learn about how things are going as Alexis Van Hurkman and Ryan Beckwith bring their rustpunk science fiction series to the web.
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It’s been a while since I put up an update, but it was time. Ryan and I, being the foot-loose freelancers that we are, had our day-jobs interfere with the Detritus schedule for the last couple of months. As a consequence, work on the pilot continues in fits and starts, but it does proceed as Ryan gets back to wrapping up the line art (we’re down to the single digits at this point) and our new intern is flatting the files in preparation for final texturing and shading.
Meanwhile, I await the completion of a major writing project to free me to go back into the first season scripts to examine some feedback I’ve received from Lou Pasquarelli, an aerospace engineer (and fellow sabre fencer) who gave me a terrific technical review. My objective has always been to portray the day to day grind of outer space living as accurately as I could, mining excitement, tension, and the occasional laugh from how much of a pain it would be keeping alive with systems that are a hundred years old and in need of constant repair. Lou’s notes will help me stay as plausible as I can. (Within reason—I do insist on FTL travel to keep things lively.)
I dislike vaporware as much as anybody, so blog updates will be few as we focus on getting things done. However, you can be sure we’ll chirp up more frequently when there’s more to show.
 The first action paragraph of the series. So begins episode one of Starship Detritus. Speaking with Ryan (the artist) the other day, it occurred to me that while I’ve been writing plenty on this blog about the nuts and bolts of how we’re getting started actually creating the show, specifically our pilot episode, I’ve not yet spent any time on what it’s actually about outside of the extremely brief synopsis on the About Starship Detritus page. So, how to explain it all in a nutshell?
That first paragraph sums up my goals pretty well.
It’s a rollicking adventure serial set in an antiheroic future. The heart of Starship Detritus is the coming together of a group of unemployed “naval” veterans to crew a sadly ill-maintained spaceship, the owner of which has misled them about the true nature of their job.
Detritus takes place in a dystopian future, the aftermath of a 120 year civil war that has ruined so much research and manufacturing infrastructure that the majority of space-born humanity is stranded off-planet, homeless and hopeless, on myriad decommissioned space stations amid a crushing recession with no end in sight. After three generations of total mobilization, and the cradle-to-grave military service that humanity in space had come to rely upon, the sudden and unplanned re-emergence of peace has inadvertently caused widespread unemployment and disenfranchisement.
Against this backdrop, our understaffed, overworked crew, led by Captain Corelie Meyers, must carefully navigate the fine line between keeping their jobs aboard a ship that’s likely their last opportunity, and sliding into a criminal enterprise they despise, all the while careening from one bizarre emergency to the next.
I’ve been having a huge amount of fun throwing these talented but troubled professionals and their inferior ship into increasingly tangled and misunderstood situations. The entire thirteen episode run is a continuous story arc in which they struggle with pirates, overzealous transit authorities, and a bizarre criminal organization. They must also re-learn how to work together as civilians, despite bad history, personal differences, and the stresses of their situation.
Never mind the space-mice eating away at the hull.
It’s also an opportunity to write more “hard” science fiction. There’s no artificial gravity save for centripetal force. Sublight travel is via relatively conventional means. Oxygen comes from algae tanks, power comes from nuclear reactors, spacesuits run out of battery power, and ill-maintained equipment breaks down frequently. Yes, there’s FTL (it is an adventure serial, after all) but it doesn’t always work out the way it’s supposed to. As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, living in space is hard.
So that’s the idea. I don’t want to throw out any spoilers (I hate spoilers) as there will be lots of fun surprises. However, if a dash of space opera, a teaspoon of military science-fiction (perhaps “post” military science-fiction?) and a big fat tablespoon of awkward reality sound like good seasonings for a stew of outer-space adventure, then this show might just be for you.
 Our database for managing shot handoffs among crewmembers I love FileMaker. I’ve been using it for years, and everytime I’ve got a thorny wad of information that needs organizing, I turn to this workhorse of a program.
We had gotten to the point in the creation of our pilot episode where managing 85 unique pieces of art going into 147 individually animated shots was taking me way too long. Especially considering the need for me to personally review artwork and reassign each shot among four different people (illustrator, color-artist, animator, and final camera/lighting). I was making myself crazy.
So I built a database.
When we first start out an episode, the pacing and art assets are refined by editing together an animatic rough cut in Final Cut Pro using our preliminary temp storyboard artwork, timing the thumbnails for each scene to a scratch track of all the lines being performed by a temporary cast of actors.
The initial construction of the database is, happily, created automatically using information extracted from this Final Cut Pro sequence.
 A section of the timeline from the Episode 1 rough cut, used to create the database. Once the rough cut is refined and locked, I use Cinema Tools’ ability to employ custom style sheets to generate a shot report, automatically extracting information about each shot’s number, duration, and filename into a tab delimited list. This list is easily imported into the database to populate the initial set of records for each shot we need to track.
The database next automatically generates a directory hierarchy consisting of an asset folder for each shot using AppleScript (another tried and true tool I use for these kinds of things), and a series of “work stage” folders corresponding to each task (illustration, review, animation, etc.) and each crewmember responsible for each task. Mundane tasks like populating the database with thumbnails of each shot are easily scripted as well.
 The hierarchy of directories that organize the shot asset directories. Now that the database and working directories are set up, each shot’s asset folder (containing the artwork and animation files) makes its way through the directory hierarchy based on what’s happening to that shot, and this is tracked via another AppleScript which auto-magically updates that shot’s corresponding entry in the database.
With these automated tools, endless tedious hours of file management and wading through spreadsheets of notes and tracking information have been reduced to a mere 20 minutes of file perusal and database entry, and with the click of a single button I can keep every single record in the database updated. This makes me a very happy director, and opens the door to faster management of a larger crew.
Now if only I could speed up those pesky FTP uploads!
One of the things we’ve been working on is how to undertake a “feature length” project (117 total minutes counting all the episodes) with our small team. A big part of the answer is being as efficient as possible with everything we do. From the very beginning, Ryan and I have planned the order of our tasks to minimize the amount of back-and-forth that revisions can entail, beginning with drawing and editing together an animatic of the entire show.
After our storyboarding sessions for episode 1, Ryan drew up roughly-sketched panels for each shot in the episode, and I edited them together timed to a scratch track in order to work out how they all play together, what we’re missing, and what artwork might be superfluous to the episode. Dropping a shot is a lot easier when it’s just a black-and-white thumbnail…
With that accomplished, the edit is locked, and the process of replacing the rough sketches with Ryan’s final, beautifully rendered artwork begins, safe in the knowledge that every frame we’ve approved for the rough cut is honestly necessary, and nothing will be wasted by being cut out later on. Of course, we’re not the only ones doing things this way – there’s a great article in daily variety about how influential the editor’s role can be in feature animation. In our case, there’s additional efficiency in my wearing both the directing and editing hats.
AND, it’s been working well. Having finished the rough cut of the first episode pilot over the summer of 2009, we’re now in the process of watching the rough cut blossom from a series of grayscale sketches to a sequence of final artwork, ready for animating using After Effects.
Like what you see? Would you like to help out? Do you live in New York? (Or do you have fast broadband access?) Ryan and I are looking for an intern to help with texturing and organizing the panels he’s illustrating in preparation for animation in After Effects.
This position will be right in the middle of our production pipeline, working on real shots and getting great production experience. You must know Photoshop, enjoy noodling around with graphics, and above all be organized. If you’re interested, visit the contact page and send us an email, we’d love to hear from you!
 Early test image of Captain Meyers by Ryan Beckwith. In the process of testing the WordPress gallery functions, I’ve posted four test renders of the titular ship of the series, formally designated RT-7411 (so that’s what the Twitter name is all about…) on the Gallery page.
Ryan Beckwith designed the original (with occasional nagging from me). Ryan’s draftsmanship is terrific, by the way; most of my comments were along the lines of “make it look crappier!” It is supposed to be the junkiest ship in space, after all.
With the designs in hand, animator Steve Rein (you’ll be hearing his name much more in the coming months) modeled the ship in Maya, and produced the ‘toon shaded examples you can now see. It’s bound to look much different once Ryan and Steve get a chance to texture the craft, but for now it’s pretty cool.
I’ve also added some excerpts from the final panels that’ll be appearing in episode 1.
I’m not sure if Ryan has thought of it, but as I was working on the new blog, it occurred to me that this marks the one-year anniversary of when we first embarked upon this journey. One year ago this month we decided to move forward with what was until then just a harebrained idea I’d been nursing for 10 years; a story of a jobless naval veterans, stranded from birth to death in a space-based society living on dilapidated space-stations and stuck using obsolete spacecraft.
Fast forward one year later, and we’ve made huge progress. I just wrapped up writing the 170-odd pages that comprise the entire 13 episode first season. Ryan is hard at work illustrating our pilot episode. And we’re reaching out to some talented folks to help with processing the graphics and animating the results. Not bad for a couple of guys working in-between freelance gigs.
Of course, it’s not all beer and skittles. The scope of this project has been steadily growing, and it looks like our small production will gestate until 2011, which is probably the soonest we’ll be able to release the first episodes based on our varied work schedules. It’s a big commitment.
But for now we’re focused on creating the best pilot we can. Hopefully the end result will spark some enthusiasm, and pave the way for greater opportunities to get more help.
For now, though, happy 1st birthday. I’m looking forward to the terrible twos…
Just got the blog for Starship Detritus going, and am playing around with different templates and designs. Everything is going to change eventually, but at least this is a start.
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