INTO THE BLUE

Work Explanation

This work was an attempt at creating a video with a narrative. It wasn’t just a technical demonstration video; as a “story CG animation,” it was the first of its kind in Japan to be independently produced at an individual level, and possibly even the first in the world when compared to other known works.

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The previous year’s “PHASE I” was positioned as a technical demo of ray tracing plus 8mm frame-by-frame shooting using homemade software, so there was a strong desire among the members to create an animation with a story this time. Nakagawa was in charge of the scenario and storyboards, but due to technical and computational resource constraints, significant changes to the scenario and objects were necessary.

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After several rejections, the final story became “The Dream Seen by a Tabletop Mobile,” which is based on the Chinese parable “The Dream of the Butterfly.” Whiteouts are frequently used for scene changes to suggest events occurring within a dream. Fade-ins/outs were difficult to process during the editing of the 8mm film, so they were handled by software during the rendering stage.

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The mobile airplane appears translucent, but this is due to the reflection of its silver body’s mirror attributes. The production actively utilized the features of ray tracing, using the expression of “shadows” cast by objects for effects such as the sneak peek of the second plane and the zoom into the shadow of the mobile at the end.

Initially, “Rouge Au Soir, Blanc Au Matin” (TPO) was used as the BGM, but it has been replaced with a new original piece of music for internet release.

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Music: Ishii’s Music Production Office, https://www.ishiimusicweb.com/

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Trivia

To create an atmosphere reminiscent of old movies, the titles and credits were photographed on paper materials. Instant lettering was transferred onto PPC manuscript paper to create layout materials, and Nakagawa’s experience in creating fanzines at the Sci-Fi research group (Tohoku Univ. SF Society) at the time was invaluable in adjusting the spacing between characters. Shooting the materials on 8mm film gave it a retro feel, and it still looks quite good today.

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Image Data

The CG part consists of approximately 900 frames rendered at 76 sec x 12 fps (shot at 24 fps). The resolution was 640x400 with each RGB at 8 bits (16.77 million colors).

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Rendering Calculation

Five PC-9801F2 computers owned by friends (equipped with a 5MHz i8087 floating-point coprocessor (*) were gathered in a member’s (Mori’s) apartment for round-the-clock rendering. The process took about three weeks, including the summer vacation period.

The task of constantly exchanging 5-inch floppy disks was the same as before (PHASE I). Even with acceleration by the i8087, rendering time was about one hour per frame.

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(*) We received several evaluation i8087s and an MS-C compiler from ASCII Corporation, which we used for production. We are grateful to the people involved at the time.

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Software

The ray tracing software was completely rewritten from N88-BASIC language to Microsoft C language, making the source code capable of calling the i8087. Textures continued to be generated by function description. The software for animation was also self-developed in C language.

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Photography

A Fujitsu personal computer FM77AV (capable of displaying 4096 colors simultaneously) was borrowed from a friend and connected to the PC-9801 via parallel I/F to display the rendered images in 4096 colors one by one (I/F card and communication processing were created by Nakagawa). As in the previous year, the monitor screen was shot frame by frame with an 8mm film camera “ZC1000” day and night. At the time, floppy disks were expensive, so not enough could be prepared at once to save all the images, and I remember having to split the shooting into two sessions and reuse the floppy disks.

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