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:

http://animationmentorblog.wordpress.com/

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.

Today is one year since we wrapped principal photography. It was also my last day to tie up any loose ends. I had only 5 shots to work on since finishing the cut on Tuesday, but one of them fell into the category of “too awesome.” One thing that really bothered us in the beginning, but we’d learned to live with, was the presence of an orange princess in her cell. Well, there was also a handheld shot of her that was way too shaky, and the “last” thing I had to do was stabilize it. However, once it was stabilized, I felt the urge to remove the orange, and make her look more natural. Also, her cell is supposed to be this ethereal white room, but one could see the texture of the drywall all too well.

All that was fixed, my friends. All that was fixed. However, that was only one shot, and there were several shots in the cell. So, that took up the bulk of my day today. Well, that and Super Mario Galaxy, but we shan’t speak of that.

Color correcting is yet another art that I’ve had to learn by fire on this project. Not only is it a pain to get just one shot to look right, but you have get it to match with all the other ones. AE has this great plugin from Synthetic Aperture called Color Finesse. It has a lot of power, but it is full of features that require studying to learn. Like, what is a vectorscope really telling me? What is the difference between gain, gamma, and pedestal? What are all these other black and green scopes? Head explode!

Anyway, I went through all the shots of the princess, and stumbled my way through all the various oscilloscope, and eventually got a good group of shots that aren’t too orange, and all look like they are in the same movie. We’ll see what Adam thinks when I bring ‘em over to him tomorrow after the sound design is complete.

Yep, tomorrow the long road of actually making the movie comes to an end. Now for the long road of promoting it.

Just got back from Adam the Editor’s. It was great seeing all the shots I did since the test screening laid into the movie. The extra effort was definitely worth it, and I’m more pumped about the movie than ever before. Of the 66 shots I delivered today, only one was decided unnecessary. I can only claim partial victory, though, because 5 shots had very minor problems. Since they don’t affect the timing of the sound mix at all, I should be able to fix them all in a night (not tonight) and bring them along to Adam’s after finalizing the sound on Sunday.

Also, we did some counting and thought I’d share for the numbers geeks out there:

117 Visual Effects shots (I said 115 yesterday, but we’re adding two as part of the five fixes mentioned above)

39 Non-FX shots

Total Running Time:  12 minutes, 39 seconds (down from 13:19 from before tonight’s tweaks)

I finished off the last of the effects I had to do a while ago.  I just made a disc that contains 66 shots that have been enhanced since the test screening at puppet fest.  I’m declaring interim victory, because I still reserve the right to look over the whole movie tomorrow and see if there is anything else that needs to be done, that can be done tomorrow.  Staying home from work Tuesday remains a possibility, though I’d like to save my personal days for film festivals and such, if I can.

It seems every time I deliver an FX disc to Adam there are 65-70 shots on it — obviously with some overlap from disc-to-disc.  This got me curious, so I did a search for all the avis in my “Gallery of Doom” directory on my hard drive.  Lots of files came up.  I weeded through the ones that were actual shots, and the ones which were tests or backups.  The grand total of FX shots for this movie turns out to be 115.  It’s amazing what one can do with a year’s worth of spare time, just a few hours a night.

OK, sleep now.