CHAPTER THREE: Vessel of Wrath

Vessel of Wrath stems from a tremendous amount of Biblical study that I began in early 2004 and is rooted in theological discussions in which I've had the pleasure of witnessing and participating. The animation has become the visualized culmination of thoughts and experiences I've had in coming to terms with how to properly understand theological compatibilism. The term "vessel of wrath" is a quote from a passage in Romans 9 that describes God as a potter who designs pots for judgment and pots on which to have mercy . I believe that it is plausible to argue, alongside the theologian Jonathan Edwards, that God created so that his attributes of judgment and mercy could become manifest; prior to the existence of something on which to convey these attributes they were only potential actions . This was also the case for Lucius Zimmerman, the animator character in Vessel of Wrath . The creature, or vessel, was designed in order that the animator's disgust for rebellion and opposition could be displayed: he was ultimately created for the purpose of being destroyed.

After the character traits of the creature had been defined, the animator in the cartoon granted him the capacity to think and reflect upon himself and his actions. The creature was then able to act with desires reflective of his personality and do so without direct force or coercion of his will. In Lucius' animation, the creature seeks to kill the bird because the animator gave him a temperament that desired to do so. And, while Lucius is the designer of the creature and even guides his actions by leading him through situations and personal decisions, the creature is allowed to have motives separate from those of the animator - even if the actions themselves are one in the same. Just as a coin has two sides, so does the actions that take place within an animation have two wills with separate desires.

The stages for completing the animation were similar to those used in major animated film studios. After finishing the synopsis, character profiles were written to help in defining personality traits that would later be shown via animation. I produced several character sketches and then went through a process of refinement until the final line drawings were put to graph paper. I drew the front and side views of each character and then scanned them into the computer for use as reference during the modeling phase. After the characters were modeled I began the rigging process where the geometry was assigned to a virtual skeleton that would create movement. Texturing the characters and scenes required the exploration and development of tools that were not standard to the software application I used. Besides creating procedural shading networks to color the geometry, I painted color, bump, and specular maps for the animator's face and hands.

Once the rigging and texturing was complete I animated the ten scenes, starting with the creature and bird sequences because their renders would define the motion of the animator's hand on his drawing board (an interesting consequence to say the least). A custom Maya Embedded Language (MEL) script was written to help me select and key deformable attributes of the characters. After rendering the animation frames I brought them into Adobe After Effects for editing and compositing. The sound design for Vessel of Wrath was completed using Digidesign ProTools.

Creating Vessel of Wrath using Alias' Maya software application allowed me to design two individual realities for the artist and his characters. I chose to distinguish the time-space reality planes by properties of dimension and detail with the concept of theological compatibilism in mind. Lucius Zimmerman has a three-dimensional look that is reflected in his drawings by their subtle shading, but his drawings are more properly understood as two-dimensional. The subtle three-dimensional feel that is derived from "toon-shading" allows all the characters to be united by a dimensional property yet remain separate in qualities such as detail and environment. If I had decided to portray the creature and bird using hand-drawn line instead of simulating a sketch the two realities would be understood as entirely different rather than somewhat tied to one another. I felt it to be more natural for a digital animator (speaking of Lucius) to make creations similar to himself at the most fundamental level, so while the creature is different than his creator they are still linked and the audience understands them to be similar yet independent.

The standard cartoon rendering method found in all 3d modeling applications creates a hard outline around the geometry and fills in those lines with bold colors. This is used to mimic the modern, vector-line aesthetic created in 2d applications such as Macromedia's Flash, thus, it was not suitable for less refined, hand-drawn animation cel frames. Because I wanted Lucius' drawings to maintain a rough animation look, I decided to create a Maya Paint Effects brush that had a pencil sketch line quality and then utilized TomCat's Maya Shader plug-in to apply the brush to the geometry. The light, watercolor shading techniques within the outline from the brush were made using customizable attributes available with the plug-in. This surface shading is a series of ramp color nodes that allowed for a variation in the amount of color blending with the white base. It was important to change the amounts of color on a per-object basis depending on the detail and contrast needed for the objects to display on screen correctly. For instance, on the creature's head I used two shaders . His skull used a base color, but for his eyes I applied a different ramp node and raised the amount of hue because the eyes would otherwise blend into the head and lose detail in the eyelids making emotions from his eyes difficult to portray. This is similar to on-stage and black & white movie actors applying eye-liner to pronounce emotion because lights cause facial features to lose distinction. Varied amount of hue were applied to objects depending on their detail. The wooden sign that the bird perches on needed more hue to help portray the geometry as being a wooden material, but objects like the creature, which I wanted to be smoother in appearance, used less hue overall and relied more on the Paint Effects outline.

Defining two planes of existence was the fundamental requirement to begin discussing theological compatibilism. The role played by the animator as the designer, creator, sustainer, and ultimately enjoyer of his creation is a direct parallel to the Christian understanding of God over our reality. And man, who is portrayed by the human-like creature in Lucius' animation, is wholly part of the material creation except for the presence of a will that happens to be separate from his Creator's. Lucius is omnipotent over the "reality" of his animation - he decides what events occur, when they happen, and why they transpire. Also, it is important to note, he is not bound or obligated in any way to his creation and we as an audience would not expect him to be. Rather, because of his role as creator, he has the inherent right over the narrative he develops just as novelists and other storytelling artists create characters for purposes that they desire. The compatibilist believes the will is bound to its nature and is therefore not free to make choices contrary to its inherent convictions. Thus, when an animator develops a character to fill a specific role in a narrative, that character is given a nature and all choices produced by that nature flow from their origin, or character design. However, all of this development springs from the perspective of the animator, and changes dramatically when understood from the creature's mind, which is confined to his own time-space reality. The creature is entirely dependant upon his animator for everything he is and has - the creature originally controls nothing of his being, but simply understands himself to be an originator of thought and action.

The creature was modeled with polygons and is a continuous mesh except for the head and eyes, which are separate objects. The model was initially created with a conservative polygon count that made it easier to rig and animate because there were less vertices involved. However, once the rigging and animation was completed, I applied a mesh-smooth that multiplied the amount of geometry by two so the edges would be less aliased in the final render. Although the geometry was increased after the rigging, Maya compensates for this by averaging the amount of per-bone weighting on the new vertices according to their parent vertex that was present in the initial, low-poly mesh. For the artist's sequences I wanted to focus on the emotion of his face so most of the camera angles were close-ups. It was important to have higher resolution geometry and smoother animation for those shots, so instead of a normal polygon object, I modeled the artist using Subdivision surfaces (sub-d) for smoother geometry and cleaner deformations.

The anatomical structure of the creature references the ability of the human mind to associate basic forms with their own self-image. Although this idea is widely discussed in psychology, I discovered the most intuitive explanation of the phenomenon in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics several years ago and have applied it in many of my artworks. Although I could have effectively used a stick-figure to represent a human will within the creature, it would have lightened the importance of the topic I am addressing. Instead, I chose to approach the design of the creature at a halfway mark between live-action and the stick figure. By having the head float above his body without a neck and using a simplistic, puppet-like face construction, the viewer establishes an adequate separation between themselves and the animated creature. When discussing theological compatibilism and my character designs with a friend I noted that he was able to laugh hysterically at the destruction of stick-figures in Don Hertzfeldt's animated short film Rejected , but when shown the storyboard for Vessel of Wrath he winced at what occurs to the creature. If it were a live-action film viewers would be scandalized, but by portraying the creature with a mostly-human form I make it possible for the audience to only begin relating to what is occurring and maybe develop sympathy for the creature.

While refining the character design for Lucius I came upon an older sketch series of inventors and inventions that I had created in the past. Many qualities within Lucius and his environment reflect my own attraction to the act of inventing and designing mechanical forms. I pictured the animator as being timeless, one who is obviously skilled at what he does, and one who has a specific purpose in mind when it comes to animating. I did not want him to have a specific age, but just to appear mature and perhaps wise. I modeled him with Subdivision Surfaces to produce a smooth skin and textured that skin by painting high-resolution maps in Photoshop. To create depth in the color maps I painted a grey-scale bump map - this allowed for details such as the pores in his skin that show in the close-up shots of his face. To simulate the natural reflection properties of skin I painted a specular map for Lucius' face and then combined all three of these images using a custom shader network I designed in Maya.

By creating mechanical objects for Lucius' environment I placed him near the time period when animation was first being developed. I have an affinity for old science fiction narratives where characters utilize non-digital technology. Items such as mechanical clocks that have tremendous amounts of interlocking gears that drive complex motors, wheels, and belts have fascinated me since I was young and it was my intention to explore such precise machinery when designing the character's studio atmosphere. The elaborate chair is literally centered within the studio where the animator is creating his magnum opus, and thus provides a context of how important the act of animating is to Lucius. The chair is essentially useless for any other purpose than a setting to draw - it becomes a tool and not a mere piece of furniture.

I wanted Lucius' studio to be so unique that it becomes an extension of who he is and allow that to introduce additional character traits for him. The colors and textures of the chair show that he is affluent: highly polished wood with gold trim and velvet cushioning show that the animator is classy. The various mechanisms that control the chair each have their own texture properties, all of which were created using procedural shading methods in the Maya software. Some of the chair's moving parts were animated via mathematically driven expressions. This allowed me to sync the movement of the gears and wheels so that I could vary the speed on a central node and it would affect the amount of rotation and movement on all other objects that were associated with it. Other portions of the chair were rigged with Maya's Set-Driven-Key and were animated from a custom attribute given to another object.

The understanding that a compatibilist will exists within Lucius Zimmerman's human-like creature becomes apparent when the viewer inhabits that character's time-space reality. When Vessel of Wrath begins, the viewer automatically understands the creature to be a willful agent and only after the animator is shown drawing cel frames that constitute the creature's existence does the audience question the creature's willpower. However, because the creature starts as having a will, and appears to interact with the animator on varied levels of communication, the philosophy of compatibilism is enacted. The creature has a limited amount of knowledge and that amount is dictated by the animator. Lucius decides how much the creature will know and understand. While the creature's actions themselves are planned and come to be through Lucius' power, he does not understand it that way; the creature acts with his own intentions in mind and not the animator's. Just as I created Lucius a certain way by developing a character type for him, so did Lucius fashion his own creatures with unique dispositions. The creature, after being given a nature, will not do anything outside of or against those instilled character traits. If he did, the audience would automatically relate this "fault" to the animator and say that the creature was forced into action, but when a character is developed with a personality type and acts according to that history it is not difficult to claim that the character has developed a will of its own . When an animated being has established a personality that an audience associates with it, the writers who control that character's motives and emotions are obligated to continue reinforcing them properly for that character to seem real. By establishing the motive of the creature in Vessel of Wrath from the beginning and emphasizing that he intends to kill the bird and following through with those intentions until his demise, the audience knows him to be of a specific nature. But, if the creature had abruptly embraced the bird the viewer would be confused and would associate this change in temperament with the animator before the mind of the creature.

It was important to portray the desire of the creature to actively ignore the requests given to him by the animator. I wanted to give the feeling that when the animation started out there was a previous history between the human-like creature and the bird. The creature knew what the bird was and understood that if he killed it he could eat it. The twisting of his reality when the spear he threw at the bird is "supernaturally" altered to avoid harming the bird, the creature acknowledges that something unique has occurred and ponders the situation. Later, the animator speaks to the creature and the creature responds in disgust and continued rebellion - the voice of the animator is authoritative and the creature inherently knows that the command to not kill the bird is lawful. The summary of the internal struggle of the creature peaks when he uses a sign that states "You shall not kill the bird" to attack the bird: the "law" gave him the ability to do evil.

The different "supernatural" animation sequences required real-world simulation and geometry deformation tools. To animate the spear I used a series of five different spear geometry meshes and keyed the visibility on each one according to the desired frame of action . The animation of the sign as it popped out of the ground was animated with a lattice deformer and the grass surrounding the base of the sign was animated with bend deformers. For the particle animation sequence where the creature burst into dust I duplicated the original mesh at the desired key location, used the mesh copy as a particle emitter, and then gave those particles attributes such as color, gravity, and turbulence.

In considering the sound design for Lucius' voice I wanted to emphasize a soft and yet authoritative tone. Because the animator is in full control of the occurrences in the animation he is producing, it would not make sense for him to sound frustrated or surprised by the creature's actions. However, I also didn't want the voice to be monotone - his confidence should not override his personality as a person doing work he enjoys. When Lucius is speaking in his own environment, I wanted to have a slight reverberation that reflected the atmosphere of the storyboard room. Also, because of the mechanical chair that Lucius had designed to help him post his storyboard pages on the enormous cylindrical wall, I wanted to hint that there was something different about where the animator was working. Early in the piece Lucius' shots focus on his mouth and then his eyes, but the background is dark overall. I needed to use sound to give Lucius an environment because it enhanced the reality of his presence. He's not floating in a black void - he has his own context and this is brought to the audience's attention through off-screen sound design. The difference between his time-space reality is distinguished from the animation's by changing the sound of his voice when he speaks within the animation's world.

Within the world of the creature and the bird I wanted to form an outdoor environment that would further distinguish it from the animator's interior space. Giving the creature's world texture and depth through the use of sound was a concept I decided on early in the project to give them an environmental context that was developed enough for them to be placed outdoors rather than in a plastic box.

The creature and Lucius were animated using Maya's Wrap Deformer. When geometry is very dense in the number of vertices present it is helpful to use a mesh of a lower polygon count for animating because today's computer systems are unable to calculate the motion of high-polygon geometry very quickly. By rigging and animating a wrap deformer that will later drive separate geometry I was able to create and preview animation much faster than if I had directly manipulated the high-resolution character meshes. Also, because the meshes that would be in the final render output were not directly rigged, I was able to change the UV coordinates and edit textures as desired while in the later stages of production. I especially needed this when I decided to change the texturing on the artist's head just two weeks before final render, and because of this work method I did so without any problems arising .

Because the creature was going to be involved in a large number of situations throughout the short, namely interacting with different objects such as the spear, wooden sign, and ground plane, it was necessary to create a skeleton rig that allowed the arms to be controlled by either Forward Kinematics (FK) or Inverse Kinematics (IK) depending on circumstances of the scene. For the control arm, the arm that the mesh would be weighted to, I used a total of four bones; shoulder, elbow, forearm, and wrist. The hand bones were created separately and attached after the FK/IK rig was complete for the upper arm because the hand itself did not require any special rigging.

In order to make the animation process easier and faster, I scripted a small tool using MEL called the Animation Controller that allowed me to select key types and specific attributes on the characters which I animated. Normally, to change the key types for animation the user is required to open up the preferences and select them from a drop down menu, save, and then return to the work window. By using a floating window animators can click-select which types of keys they need at that moment and continue animating, thus bypassing the need to spend time in the preferences menu. The second function of the script is the ability to change character sets for setting animation keys. Again, using the window speeds up workflow because the user does not need to spend time digging through a list of character attributes to be animated - they can be click-selected and then modified as required.

Rendering and completing Vessel of Wrath was an arduous task because of the number of cameras involved. Ten separate scenes were used to create the short animation, but these scenes used up to five cameras each. I rendered each camera at Digital Video resolution as a JPEG image-sequence and then imported those files into Adobe After Effects for compositing and post production. During production I would use draft-quality renders as reference for creating the soundtrack to the animation, which was finalized only after the visual portion of the animation had been completed.