So, while I’ve been finishing off Wendell animation and trying to figure out this Dungeon Painting environment, Jim’s been off working on the Giacomo animation, slowly but surely. He had over half a dozen shots of Giaco inside live-action sets, with wild, handheld camera moves and interaction with real objects. All while trying to figure out what Giacomo looks like and moves like, and getting up to speed with Toon Boom. So, understandably, it has been taking him a real long time to get out each shot. Which was starting to worry me, because we have a deadline coming up (more on that in the next post).

Then, lo and behold, he gets past all the live action stuff (which I am now behind on compositing, due to trying to get the flying carpet stuff done), and starts getting into the virtual set shots. Which means that Giacomo can pretty much stay planted, and there are no handheld shots that need to be motion tracked or anything. Which means he can just focus on animating. And BOOM, he knocks out 13 shots in 3 days — and all good stuff! That put him at 19/27 shots.

It’s back to the day job now, so productivity on the movie goes down. However, he’s aiming for 2 shots a night, which should have him finishing up by Friday. I’ll let you know how that goes.

He just turned in another shot, making his total 20/27. However, it is a shot of Giacomo running, which will probably be used multiple times in the flying carpet sequence. I’ll have to double check to be sure, but I think he may only have 4 shots left to do!

Way to go, Jim!

Spent most of the evening working on finalizing the Dungeon Painting environment. Did the final model and lighting tweaks, though some individual shots will undoubtedly require their own tweaks. Did some test renders, and got it to look pretty sweet. So, tomorrow I can start working on the first half of the flying carpet sequence (the second half is already done).

Spent the rest of the evening writing a dissertation on one of the Giacomo shots. The shot involves a handheld camera tilt from floor to ceiling, with Giacomo (a 2D animated character) dragging a live actor and attacking Wendell (a 3D animated character), while straight at (and ultimately into) the camera. As if this did not provide enough trouble, since we’re not a studio, it’s difficult to communicate with my animator. It would be a lot easier working out these timing issues if we were in the same building, preferably working on computers right next to each other. Then, he could see how it’s being composited, we could do test drawings and test composites real quick and get instant results. As it is, there’s usually a 24 hour turnaround from him getting me some animation, us being able to talk about it, and him being able to make the changes I ask for. Each step, though, makes it better and better. This shot should be finished by tomorrow!

It’s been a long, grueling weekend, but at long last all 47 Wendell shots are animated! Some of them still need to be composited, but the animation is complete — and believe me, that’s the hard part. Most of the composites are simple overlays — he’s not really behind anything. There are a few shots where he’s behind Pupsock, but we had a portable green screen on set for those, so there’s no rotoscope involved. There’s one kinda tricky shot that will need some roto, but not for too many frames.

Unfortunately, I can’t get started compositing today, because of my new workflow. Previously, I would animate, render (in Blender), composite, render (in After Effects) and then call a shot finished. However, I had 13 or 14 shots to do in three days, and I knew that wasn’t gonna cut it — the render times would kill me. Luckily, I had come across a similar problem doing the recomps, and thus had figured out how to write a batch script to render multiple files. So, the workflow for the weekend has been animate, animate, animate until utter exhaustion, then batch render the day’s work overnight. Then keep animating. So, now that I’m done, I’ve just kicked off the batch. There’s about 9 files to render (5 new shots, two shots I re-lit, and one shot that I’m rendering in multiple layers, so I can play with the focus in After Effects), so I don’t think it’ll be done until late tonight.

And I’ll be sleeping tonight. I’ve missed it.

It’s been a busy week, back on track with getting the movie done. Since the last weekly update, I’ve managed to get at least one shot done per night. On Friday, I had 33 shots done. Friday itself consisted of: day job until 5, poker tournament at day job until 7 (I came in 8th, unlike the last tournament where I came in 1st), finish off shot #34, then go see Jaws at a midnight screening in Melbourne.

As a side note, I must take my fedora off for Mr. Steven Spielberg. I’ve seen Jaws a dozen times, probably, but always on a small screen. I’d always heard the story about how seeing Ben Gardner’s head come out of the boat was a huge scare, but on the small screen, it never startled me. On the big screen, knowing full well it was coming, it gave me the biggest scare I’ve ever gotten from a movie. 32 years after it’s debut, and it can still fill a fairly large theatre, and it had the audience by the short hairs for the entire second half. It’s interesting, too: my study of animation has really helped me out in terms of how I see scenes unfolding, and use of screen space. It was like watching Jaws with new eyes — some of Spielberg’s compositions were astounding. He deserves all the praise he gets.

Anyway, two more shots done today, and one almost done. That leaves 8 to finish before Tuesday to make my goal of finishing Wendell by Labor Day.

Lastly, Jim finished animating the hardest Giacomo shot in the film. Still needs to be composited, but I’m holding off on that until after Wendell is done. Also, congrats to Jim for being accepted in the AnimationMentor.com program. It’s expensive, but it looks amazing. Jim’s work is already good, so I can’t wait to see how awesome he’ll be after going through that training.

I just finished re-compositing the last of the too-clean-looking Wendell shots, as mentioned in my Derailed post. It was actually an interesting experience, going back to the first few shots that I worked on, seeing how far I’ve come in just the last few months. Makes me excited to see how good I’ll be a few months from now.

I had to relight one scene (4 shots), and that gave me a chance to tweak the animation a little bit. These were shots I did maybe two weeks ago, and I’ve already grown a lot since them. It opens up the question of whether or not I should go back and redo some of the first shots, or just press on since there is so much else to do. I probably see how I feel after finishing my first pass at Wendell, the fog, and the flying carpet scene. I may have time for reanimating while it’s in audio-post with David Wallace and scoring with Philip Yon. Or I may want to sleep.