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.

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.

I met with Patrick 2 nights ago and took a look at the fixes and “plus-ing” that he has done to the film and it looks amazing. Little things that have always bothered us are no longer there (the audience will never know they existed), and he was able to add some really cool extras; for example, when Wendell is creeping up behind Dirk, there is a great digitally created shadow of Wendell that ominously engulfs Dirk, motivating him to spin around in surprise.Anyway, the main reason for this blog was to include a picture of myself, Patrick, and Kevin McGuire (voice of Pupsock) taken in front of the Enzian Theatre during the Brouhaha Film and Video Showcase.

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!