Miniature Success
I got the Arri Light Kit from my partners at Blue Juice Films, Inc. and was finally able to find some time last night to film the miniatures. I shot a bunch of different versions of the triplane turnaround, and ended up using the last one. I turned it slowly, so that I could just speed it up as need in After Effects, and that plan worked well. I’ll have to actually work out the right timing when we film Anastasia as the pilot, but that’s still a ways off. I managed to line up the timing of the actual camera move around Pupsock, the faked camera move (achieved by having the triplane on a turntable), and the virtual camera move across the clouds to reveal the pirate ship. After chugging through a shuttled preview, I finally feel confident that this shot is going to work! There’s still a LONG way to go, though. Here’s an incomplete list of things left to do for this one shot:
- Stabilize the footage of Pupsock
- Lock Pupsock in place on the wing of the triplane
- Get a perfect chroma key on Pupsock, rotoscoping as necessary
- Get a perfect chroma key on the triplane, rotoscoping as necessary
- Find just the right shot of the pirate ship
- Get a perfect chroma key on the pirate ship, rotoscoping as necessary
- Finalize the virtual camera move
- Figure out how to create wake in clouds generated by Trapcode Form
- Film Anastasia in pilot costume (need to get pilot costume)
- Lock Anastasia in place on the triplane
- Get a perfect chroma key on Anastasia, rotoscoping as necessary
- Color correct everything
- Put light spill on everything
- Final color correction
So, yeah, everything is coming along nicely…….
In other news, Adam finished editing a first pass of the non-pirate-ship scenes, and it looks pretty OK. First cuts always are a bit weak, especially when one of your main characters doesn’t exist yet. Very cool to see it together, though!
Also, I started a new blog. I was accepted to Animation Mentor, the Online Animation School, and am very excited about it. I start on June 29th, and would say that I can’t wait, except that I have a pitch reel to get finished before then. So I can wait. Though, maybe if I overlap the start of school with the finish of the pitch reel I can get feedback on my Wendell shots from my mentor. Hmmm…. Anyway, AM encourages its students to keep blogs of their progress, so I went ahead and started mine. It’s a bit frustrating being in the nebulous phase, post-acceptance, pre-class 1. I wanted to know everything that was supposed to be happening between now and then, and unfortunately not too many blogs had any information about this. So I started mine, and am trying to keep detailed information about the waiting period on it. It can be found here, if you’re interested: