This whole business is really coming to a close — though winding down is not the term I would apply to the current situation.  I’m rendering a shot right now, which claims it will take another 3 minutes.  That would mean about 6 minutes to render the shot, which would make it the shortest render of the day.  I’ve been working since noon (it’s current 8:30), with only a dinner break, and yet I have a small number of shots complete because each one has been taking around 25 minutes to do.  That’s the trouble, I suppose, of doing green screen compositing inside a large 3D environment solely created inside After Effects.

Things have been going pretty well during the last week.  I got the Dungeon Painting scene completely redone, and it looks pretty much how I envisioned it before we even shot, so I’m proud of that.  I’ll post about it next week.  It was an arduous, hair thinning process that involved me re-learning LISP, and only for step 2.

I’ve only got about 5 or so shots left to do before I can call this thing done, though  they aren’t going to be particularly simple.  Mostly having to do with morphing fog.  All needs to be done tomorrow night.  Plus, I have to get a screener off to the USA Film Festival by Tuesday, which was a poorly chosen date on their part, since Adam and I are making the final cut Tuesday night, but the DVD needs to be postmarked before then.  So, they’re going to get a hybrid cut.  I am excited about that festival, though, since Dudley won its first award there 3 years ago.

Render’s done, so I guess I better get back to it.

Today is Wednesday the 9th of January, 2008.  Tomorrow will mark one year since I first stepped into the warehouse that became ours for two weeks.  Shooting started only a few days after that, and by the 19th we were wrapped.  Here we are, one year later, two festival screenings behind us, a huge one coming up, and we’ve almost finished the film!   The end, in fact, is scheduled.

I have until Monday night (which I’m sure will become late Monday night) to finish any shots I want to enhance/clean up/invent.  Then on Tuesday the 14th — one year and one day after shooting began — the picture will be locked, and the key thrown away.  Then, it’s off to the sound designer David Wallace for his finishing touches.  I shall meet with David on Sunday the 20th — one year and one day after shooting wrapped — and finalize the sound design.  If it isn’t too late, I’ll head over to editor Adam Miller’s and marry the sound and picture.  And there we will have a film fitted.

Can’t wait for the next movie!

“It’s OK. We’ll fix it in post.”

This is the most evil thing you can utter on a set. If a director says this, the VFX artist who actually has to fix it in post will curse every pebble said director has even tread upon. This condition is worsened when you are actually both of those people. Because, you know the evil of it when you’re saying it, but you know you have to say it. And then when you’re dealing with the consequences of having said it, you know why you had to say it. But that doesn’t change the fact that now, you’re sitting in a chair, staying up a bit later than your day job would like, continuing brick walls and smoothing out wrinkly laminate flooring.

When you’re doing a high-concept film, such as this one, with no money, such as we did, one will inevitably come up against adversity. We built all of our interior sets in a warehouse. We had no money for this, but the Production Designer - Ryan C. Wolfgang - used his resources and ingenuity to build some amazing sets. I mean, we had walls that opened up to reveal a secret passage and a knocked out brick wall. But, we were renting this warehouse for two weeks, and weren’t allowed to paint the floor, or glue anything to it. Luckily, the warehouse next door was a flooring place, and Wolfgang got them to sell us some flooring at a great price, and we had a nice looking floor.

However, then I brought in the rest of the crew to actually shoot on it, and the big Chapman-Leonard dolly, the various rigs for getting the puppet to walk the length of the hallway in a single shot, and all the people running across the floor accelerated its aging process a bit. So, we ended up with shots like this (click for full size):

Which I now have to make look like this (also click for full size):

This isn’t the only shot I’ve been doing this on. However, this was the first one, and I learned a lot doing it. I spent the last year learning tons of tricks with After Effects, but whenever I get comfortable something inevitably comes along to make me realize that I’m still only making surface scratches with this amazing program. It seems each new shot I work on makes me learn a whole new art form. I’m so glad I made this movie!

(That was not sarcastic, by the way.)

Work is actually happening on the film again, so I thought I’d reinstate the weekly progress reports.  We’ve been working on what I’ve dubbed “The Professional 10%” phase of the project.  Basically, going through the movie now that it is “complete” and seeing what can be kicked up a notch.  It’s hard to describe, really, to anyone who is not intimately familiar with the film (that is to say, anyone who not me, Tom, or editor Adam Miller).  We all feel that giving it this one last pass through on seemingly little things is kind of thing that will help elevate the piece as a whole, and makes the difference between amateur quality and professional quality.  It’s also a great chance to push one’s talents a little past the comfort zone.

I’d say Jimmy Compher has the largest amount of work to do — he’s been working hard on shading Giacomo, plus drawing additional in-betweens, and even changing the performance in a few shots.  His hard work is worth it, though — Giacomo is looking even better than before!

For my part, I’ve spent quite a while working on making good video look bad.  There’s a gag in the beginning where Pupsock has a video walkie-talkie that he uses to speak with Wendell.  Before, Wendell was just represented as a little icon on the screen.  However, we felt it would be better if there was a black background behind him, and the “video” on the screen was noisy, and basically looked like a TV with a bad signal on its antenna.  It took a while getting the whole thing to stay synced on the little screen while it moved around in Pupsock’s hand and also to get the bad video look down right without interfering with Wendell’s performance.  Again, though, I feel it was worth it.

OK, I got to get back to work — adding some text to the beginning to help set the mood.  One last thing: We made it into the Internet Movie Database!

Don’t have much  time to blog, so maybe I’ll say more later.  But for now,  I just want to stand on a mountain and scream to the world:

THE SPECIAL EFFECTS ARE DONE!!

Right now I’m rendering a better version of a shot I did a few days ago.  Yesterday I worked from 11:30am to 3:30am pretty much straight through and got the entire dungeon scene done.  Today it was the shack (mostly fog shots), and a few stragglers from 9am to 4:45pm.  Last thing to do is the credits!  Of course, there are other things that could be worked on, but I’ve got everything that needs to be there.

So after I make the credits, gotta make a DVD of the FX to bring to the editor, who I’m supposed to meet up with tonight.  First, however, I need to go over to the Avalon Gallery to help set up my Dudley display for the show that opens Thursday, if I have time for everything.  Hopefully the credits won’t take more than half an hour to do.