“Night Fishing with Cormorants” at International Animation Festival in Hiroshima
Betsy Kopmar’s short film was inspired by a 17th-century Japanese screen painting.
A traditional painter and longtime 3D artist and Adobe instructor at Expression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, Calif., Kopmar made the film as a personal project using MAXON’s CINEMA 4D. She is honored that it is was one of the films chosen for screening at the 13th International Animation Festival in Hiroshima City, Japan, in August.
Having adapted her free-form style of traditional painting to After Effects, it seemed like a natural step for her to move into doing the same with CINEMA 4D about six years ago, Kopmar says. “When I started with CINEMA 4D I knew quickly that the modeling approach wouldn’t work for me,” she recalls. “I use CINEMA 4D's Cappuccino tool for sketching because the live key framing allows me to grab objects and draw [animation paths].” She also makes XPresso setups in order to use a “DJ-like scratcher to do anything I want.”
Though she brought some of her methodology from After Effects to her CINEMA 4D work, there was still a bit of a learning curve, Kopmar says. “But I could see right away in the first month that I was going to be able to achieve something emotional in CINEMA 4D it was just a question of finding my way around the tools, which are powerfully expressive.”
To give her film the same kind f “feeling of compressed energy,” found in some classical ink drawings, Kopmar intentionally limited herself in CINEMA 4D to five 3D cubes when creating the entire animation. She choreographed the movement between the shapes to infuse the piece with a mix of turbulence and tranquility.
The film was rendered with Module 8 VJ software, which Kopmar likes because it allows her to work in real time. Though she always listens to music when she works, she doesn’t sync visuals with audio in CINEMA 4D or VJ. “I’m trying to internalize the audio when I make things,” she explains, adding that although it seems like the film goes with the music, the soundtrack, “Winter Skies” by the Headroom Project, wasn’t chosen until the piece was nearly complete. “It’s amazing how now it seems like that music was part of the film all along.”
