Debut Film ‘Killer Bean Forever’ Coming From ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ Animator Jeff Lew

HollywoodChicago.com — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:25:34 -0700

Jeff Lew, the lead animator for “The Matrix Reloaded” and an animator for “X-Men,” is taking special effects into his own hands in his feature-length directorial debut of “Killer Bean Forever”.

Lew says on his Web site: “For the past four years, I’ve been working at my computer 14 hours a day, seven days a week. I’ve spent my entire life savings and maxed out credit cards.” Here’s the trailer.

His list of software used includes Maya, Final Render, Vegas, Photoshop, Syntheyes, Acid Pro, Audition, Particle Illusion, Vue, Renderpal and Seamless Texture Generator. Here’s some trivia:

The current length of the movie is 85 minutes.

The screenplay was written over a 1.5-year period.

Pre-visualization took nine months.

Modeling and texturing took about six months.

Animation took about 2.5 years.

Final renders are in high definition.

Rendering final shots started well over a year ago and still continues.

There are more than 1,000 shots.

The longest shot is a continuous 76 seconds.

The shortest shot is eight frames long.

The renderfarm started with three dual-core computers. They have now been replaced with four quad-core computers.

Each rendering computer is equipped with two gigabytes of memory.

The maximum amount of polygons rendered for a single shot is 1.9 million.

Every shot is rendered using a simulated physical camera using true depth of field.

Lew hasn’t yet announced when the film will release. He says the following on the difficulties posed in its creation:

The hardest part about making a feature-length movie is getting through the massive number of shots.

I set up a pipeline/method that allowed me to animate easily. Pretty much all the lighting in the movie uses similar setups (just different colors and intensities).

The difficult part was when it came time to render the shot. Some shots just had too many polygons to render and I was limited by using 32-bit software.

Some of those shots took about one to four hours of work just to get it to render. Multiply that by 1,000 shots and that’s a lot of time and headache.

Other than that, the action scenes have been really tough mostly because the amount of shots per minute becomes a lot higher than normal scenes.

There were times where I would work all day and only come out with four seconds.