The animatic was provided to the composers along with the original aria as a starting off point for the scoring. Rob Frayne and Alvaro di Minaya were tasked with creating a score that would give the opera a contemporary feel. Unfortunately, about the time the scoring was beginning, tragedy struck the team.

Rob and Alvaro were returning from an afternoon lunch when they were involved in a traffic accident. While it didn’t seem too serious at first Rob suffered a stroke and substantial paralysis. “It was a terrible thing to have happen to someone with such an incredible amount of musical talent,” said Seck. “Judy Gladstone of Bravo!FACT was wonderfully understanding of the situation and allowed us to put the project on hold long enough to give Rob sufficient time to recover.”

While some modeling of city elements still continued, serious work on the short resumed six months later. At this stage the modeling and texturing went into high gear. “There was a lot of stuff to build. We modeled and textured all the scenes from scratch.” said Garcia. “The piece was created using a combination of Maya and Cinema 4D. The urban environments were huge; John wanted a lot of detail. We weren’t going for photorealism but even for a stylized environment there was a lot to create and texture. Every element was UV mapped.”

The garden scene turned out to be a huge technical and creative undertaking. “Every time you looked at a new step in this process it was huge,” said Garcia. “You decide the way you want something to look and then there is a ton of R&D that goes into realizing your artistic vision.”

“For the garden scenes we turned to the Bionatics plu-gin for the trees. The grass was created using Maya paint effects and some of BlackCherry’s proprietary in-house tools,” added Garcia. “John asked for a thorny vine to encompass Tosca in the first garden scene. While the spiraling vine was easy enough to create using a spiral plug-in from Lightstorm3D, the thorny texture was a whole other challenge. This was eventually achieved using an animated displacement map whose placement was controlled in real-time using MEL during the animation.”

Early on in the process the decision was made to use mo-cap as an integral part of the animation process. “It wasn’t that we couldn’t keyframe animate all of the characters, it was that I liked the style of mo-cap animation,” said Seck. “I wanted us to really get inside the process of mo-cap and how we could integrate it into our animation pipeline. We’d used mo-cap on other projects but only generally stuff we could download and adapt. This was a much bigger deal.”

“The interesting thing about mo-cap is it's human movement distilled down to its fundamental form,” said Seck. “When you are directing a mo-cap shoot you have to force yourself to ignore all the normal emotional cues you get from the face and hands and focus strictly on the body language. For the most part we were really pleased with the performances but there were a couple of scenes when we screened the raw data where we thought,' what is that?'”

© 2006 BlackCherry Digital Media Inc.

“One decision I’m really happy we made early on was to hire professional dancers as our mo-cap performers,” said Seck. “I wanted really fluid movement so dancers seemed a natural choice. It turned out to be a great decision because dancers are all about movement. They have such a keen sense of how to create emotion through their body language and they get the choreography right away. I think they (the dancers) saved us a huge amount of time in the mo-cap studio.”