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.

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.

Getting close to the end of the FX now.  I’ve only got two really difficult shots left, and those are both partially done.  Figured out how to do the fog pretty well, and spent most of the week working on the shot where Giacomo first changes from fog into his big, creepy cartoon self.  It came out pretty well.

Right now, I’m in the middle rotoscoping the Princess running down the hall wearing a large, swishy skirt in a shot that constantly changes perspective.  It’s a nightmare.   Maybe halfway done with it.  I should be able to finish that, and make good progress on the other tricky shot tonight.

However, we’re doing ADR in a couple of hours, so that may slow me down a bit.  Though, it’ll be awesome to finally watch the movie without annoying dialog problems.  Like trying to hear the Princess while we’re blasting her with a fan and three leaf blowers.

It was a landmark week this week, but not quite as productive as I would have hoped.  The good news is that I finished the Wendell compositing!  That means that the creepy little guy is completely done.  It was kinda weird moving on.  I’m sure I’ll wanna tweak some stuff later, but I at least have good versions of all the shots.

My original plan was to go from Wendell straight into the Giacomo fog shots, of which there are ten to do.  However, I dawned on me that those shots won’t really affect the pace of the edit, whereas the flying carpet stuff will.  So, I decided to work on the flying carpet shots in the Mushroom Painting scene, since I had already built that environment.  It’s been interesting trying to get everything to fit in the limited space of that painting, but I think it’s coming along nicely.  Unfortunately, I got sick this week, so I lost a couple of days of productivity.  Hopefully I can catch up next week.

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.