Work on the Pitch Reel is proceeding slowly but surely.  I’ve hit a period of winter inspiration, and suddenly have a half dozen different projects I want to work on, and so am having trouble focusing on just one.  I’ve whittled it down to 2 main ones, the Pitch Reel being the most important, followed closely by writing a game engine.  I also have a couple of things I want to write, and I promised a friend I’d do some motion graphics for him.

I actually have 3 games I want to write, one of which is a Pupsock & Wendell adventure game that would flow well with the brand.  Another is fairly original while still fitting precisely into a well-established genre that I think I could make some money with.  The last is a remake of a game I did in college, and I would only do that because it would be fairly simple to do and would provide a nice framework to test out my engine, and it would allow me to see how far I’ve come as a programmer since 2001.  Looking back through my old code while developing this new engine has shown me that I’ve come a very long way.

So, with all this going on, I’ve had to schedule my time pretty precisely as far as what project I’m allowed to work on on what day.  This rotation of projects allows me to actually get things done on each project, and prevents me from getting burned out on any one thing.  Tonight is tie-up-loose-ends night, where I can work on whicever project has a step that’s really close to getting finished that I just couldn’t wrap up in the allotted time slot.  So, I’m working on Pitch Reel.

This first shot (yes, I’m still on the first shot) has so many subtle things going on in it.  I’ve had to model a CG door, sandwich it between two live-action layers who’s timing has to match up, and have Pupsock open the door.  On the other side of the door is a bunch of crazy action, and some of the puppeteers and puppet equipment ended up being visible for a few frames, so I’ve been doing a lot of painting frame-by-frame, and playing with timing, and working on making the door look right, and getting the door animation right, and adding shadows, and hand rotoing Pupsock’s white hat against the green screen, and adding lens distortion to the door, and color correcting, and so on.

Looks like the latest door render has finished, so I better get back to it.