SWEET HOME CHICAGO
A feature length screenplay by Terry Schwartz, Robert Birnberg and Dan Halperin

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SYNOPSIS

It's 1959. Four teenage boys just out of high school want to avoid the bleak future that surely awaits in their changing blue collar Chicago neighborhood. Our hero, Dave Lujak, is expected to inherit his family's funeral parlor, but he screams "I'm a musician, not a mortician." Dave rallies his three best friends, Deejo, Ziggy and Pepper into forming the greatest blues band, ever.

Dave tells them that if they can convince the nuns to let them perform at the church fair at the end of the summer, fame and fortune are surely just around the comer. But this is no simple task. Everyone and everything in the neighborhood conspire against them - parents; girls; the neighborhood bully Arms and his gang of toughs; and Frank Kazursky, the local butcher and weekend polka band leader. Frank is determined to prevent the boys from stealing the musical spotlight that he and his Polka Dots have enjoyed at the church fair for years and years. And he's not beyond ruthless tactics, he's a butcher.

Moreover, the boys have their own problems. Ziggy, the bass player, has recurring nightmares that an atomic bomb will drop on Chicago the night the White Sox win the pennant; Pepper, the drummer, must defend his mother from his father's increasingly abusive drunken attacks; and Deejo, the lead guitarist, is being pressured to join his father working on a factory assembly line; and Dave's parents expect him to start mortuary college in the fall. The band's success is the only thing that can help Dave and his friends escape their fate of certain lifelong misery. Along with the grim changes going on in their neighborhood as Chicago faces urban renewal, and toss in plenty of girl trouble for each of the boys - it's an adolescent nightmare.

As the summer comes to a close, and his friends, neighborhood and dreams crumble around him, Dave strives with all his might to keep the band together and "kill" on stage at the church fair.

While full of humor, in the tradition of coming-of-age classics like "Stand by Me" and "Diner," "Sweet Home Chicago" is a heartfelt homage to adolescent friendship...and to the best summer, ever.

"Sweet Home Chicago" is based on the award winning short story "Blight" by world-renowned Chicago author, Stuart Dybek.

MOVING STORYBOARDS
THE ART OF PRE-VISUALIZATION by Dan Halperin
Reprinted with permission from Produced By - the official magazine of the
Producer's Guild of America (PGA) - Spring 2007

There’s a scene in most Westerns and war movies where before leading a posse or squad into battle, the sheriff or sergeant picks up a stick from the ground and sketches the plan of attack in the sand. Stick and sand are a pretty crude medium of communication and one can imagine the various misinterpretations that might serve as the basis of a riotous set piece in a Mel Brooks comedy.

Stick and sand, light and sound, ours too is a business of communication. Our mission — to convey our vision to an audience in the most attractive and compelling fashion using the best of our intelligence and creativity — while keeping on schedule and within a budget. It stands to reason that in order to attain our goal we must first convey our plans and ideas effectively to those with whom we collaborate — our posse, our unit — or alternately, our fellow producers, production managers, directors, actors, cinematographers, designers and all their respective teams. And we must communicate up the chain as well, to studio execs and financiers.

Words are wonderful things, but they can often fail us (as they are me at this moment) and that’s where a picture can help us express ourselves more clearly. So when necessary, we pick up a stick to draw a picture in the sand. But what if now that picture in the sand could move and play out the whole chase or battle? Easily and inexpensively?

Most film or video productions today utilize some form of storyboarding to pre-visualize their story. Some directors come from an art background and are very talented at creating highly-detailed, easy-to-comprehend drawings. These storyboards can tell the actor where to stand or move, indicate where the DP is to place the camera and lights, and show the production designer what the set looks like and what props are required. For years I, like many others, did my best with simple stick figures. When I could afford it, I hired a storyboard artist to do higher-quality drawings for me.

But today, technology proves this method to be as antiquated as the old stick in the sand. Software like the newly-released Antics allows a script to be pre-visualized — not only in three dimensions, but in real time — with characters that walk and talk, and cameras that move, in sets and environments of the users’ own design. This type of 3D animation transcends language, breaks through the box of two-dimensional, single-frame drawings and allows the artist to present the image of their mind’s eye for all to see.

If a picture is said to be worth a thousand words, then a moving picture must be worth a million. Alastair Woolley, managing director of the software company Antics Technologies, says the company strongly believes that a sizable market exists for a product that can enable the average computer-literate person to generate 3D–animated scenes using a desktop application — be it a film director planning a film shoot or a lawyer reconstructing a crime scene in court.

The simultaneous increase in power and decrease in price of desktop computers means that consumers might have the capability to work with a 3D application. Although user-generated content (UGC) is still in its infancy, consumers desire wider means to express themselves creatively in their blogs, pictures and home videos, and are seeking more (and more sophisticated) tools to do so. The time seemed right for the animation market to extend itself beyond the boundaries of traditional animation as we’ve grown to know it.

Antics Technologies, based in Cambridge,England — often referred to as Silicon Fen(Cambridge is situated on the edge of a formerly marshy area of England known as the Fenlands) — set about developing a user-friendly animation software program. The first step, says Woolley, was to blend just the right mix of highly-experienced engineers from the fields of 3D design, video games and mathematics. Various large corporations with more resources than Antics had tried to develop a similar system for many years but had failed. An early prototype was produced as proof of concept, but it had many features that were difficult to use and it had no timeline. Yet based on this early product and a lot of market feedback, the team continued to develop its idea, which has reached fruition in the recentlyreleased version of Antics.

The key challenges along the way, according to Woolley, were making the sets and characters generic enough to be applicable to nearly every user (with a near-infinite quantity of changing sets, locations,props and characters), writing software that runs in real time, a program that could work on a standard consumer PC, and lastly, ensuring that the interface was intuitive and easy to use.

In the past, traditional animation was far too time-consuming, expensive and could only be done by highly-skilled professionals. Antics’ engineers created a radical new approach: embedding intelligence within the characters and props themselves, producing animation via simple “point and click” commands where characters can interact with each other and with props — each having a large range of predefined actions. For example: you want to animate a character moving across the street and getting into a car — in Antics you only have to select the character and click on the car. Done. And you can vary the speed or path the character takes. Simple as that.

“If you have a scene set in a lounge where a character has been scripted to sit on a particular chair,” says Antics’ L.A.rep Brad Kolacinski, “Simply point and click on the chair and the character will walk across the room and sit in the chair.Then imagine you want the same character to sit on the same chair, but the chair is no longer in the lounge but now in a bedroom on the second floor. In Antics you click on the chair, move it from the lounge to the second floor, and then simply replay the take from the timeline.” Kolacinski boasts, “The character automatically knows where the chair is, navigates his way up the stairs, around other props, opening any doors that might be between the two, and then sits in the chair. The timeline automatically takes into account this new and more complex sequence of events.”

This degree of flexibility requires a range of advanced techniques including dynamic path planning, room bridging and sophisticated animation re-targeting. Antics allows you to direct the action and view the results through different cameras, lenses, angles and camera moves — pan, track,dolly or a crane shot. And if you wish, you can adjust the timing and composition as often as you need until it’s the way you want it.

To see if the program lived up to its billing, I decided to conduct a “road test.” I’m currently developing a featurefilm project called Sweet Home Chicago, a coming-of-age buddy picture in the vein of Diner or American Graffiti. I decided to shoot a ten-minute promo in order to convince investors and key talent of the project’s merits and present my vision for the project. Yet flying cast and crew to Chicago (or even setting up an L.A. shoot) was cost-prohibitive. So I chose to do it in Antics.

Using the Antics’ library, I was able to create an exterior location in the industrial portion of Chicago’s south side. Because Sweet Home Chicago is set in 1959, careful attention to detail was required — buildings, cars, characters and props had to be accurate. Fire escapes, dilapidated buildings complete with boarded-up windows, overgrown shrubs, rubble piles and chain-link fences were dragged and dropped into the scene to bring my vision to life. (Since I started this project, Antics has incorporated the amazing Google Earth program, allowing virtually any exterior location to be extrapolated on screen!)

I additionally commissioned Antics to create custom 3D characters based on several well-known actors I had in mind for the leads. These actors’ faces were actually mapped onto the character avatars and lip-sync-enabled so they could actually say their lines. The characters were configured to pick up and hold their relevant instruments (guitar, drumsticks, and saxophone) in real time at the click of a mouse. We used a pre-recorded sound mix as a reference. Each take was output as an .avi, full-frames uncompressed, 24 fps, 640 x 320. These takes were then stitched together in Adobe Premiere, syncing to the sound mix.

As I watched my movie’s world come to life in Antics, I was able to create more detail and nuance. And as I downloaded ideas from my mind onto the pre-viz screen, valuable brain disc space opened up.

Antics’ developers wanted to make sure that users were only limited by their own imaginations, not by their knowledge of sophisticated software or by time constraints. Now, via Antics, animation can be used in wide variety of situations, for example, pitching and fundraising. Fred Medina, VP Sales and Business Development at Antics, says that a number of users have reported that Antics paid for itself immediately by significantly reducing time on location, allowing the director and to crew know exactly what is to be achieved and what equipment and props are needed before even getting on set. In some instances, problems could be solved in pre-viz before they added up to serious costs during production.

Antics can play back on a monitor on-set during production — so much of what would have to be explained to keys — DP, art department and so on — will already be on the pre-viz screen, saving time and money. Moreover, doing a pre-viz with the editor could help make sure there’s ample scene coverage, that eye lines are correct and that a scene will cut together seamlessly. All this can be worked out in advance before a frame of film or tape is shot.

Current work in development at Antics will further boost flexibility by opening it up to a wide range of file formats both for input and output, increasing Antics’ ability to fit seamlessly into the production workflow of films, TV shows and commercials. According to Woolley, Antics is currently investigating arange of possibilities for expanding its ability to bring in content from external sources as well as, for example, enabling users to create their own characters and their own smart props. Antics’ designers hope to have their product eventually running on a host of other intelligent devices.

Antics 3D pre-viz runs on a standard desktop PC and costs around the price of industry-standard-photograph-editing software. At that price, this new category of software will enable ideas for countless creative projects to attract funding — even if they have a very modest initial budget. With Antics, the art of pre-visualization is nearly as simple as that old stick in the sand, yet the details are Gone With the Wind.

Soon you can see PGA member Dan Halperin’s
results at www.sweethomechicagothemovie.com or
www.epiphanypictures.com. He can be
reached via e-mail at carneydog@aol.com.