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!

I’m very happy to announce that Pupsock & Wendell in The Gallery of Doom has been selected to screen at the 2007 Brouhaha Film Showcase at the amazing Enzian Theatre in Maitland. This is the third film I’ve submitted to Brouhaha, and the first time I’ve gotten in. It will be screening on Sunday, December 9th, at 11:00am as part of Program #3. As of this writing, this year’s lineup has been announced on the official site (seems like they’re running out of time!). However, they have issued a press release on Greenroom Orlando.

Also, I can’t believe it has been a month since we had our test screening at the Orlando Puppet Festival! It was a great screening, and the audience really loved it. Though most of the crowd either worked on the movie, or were related to people who worked on the movie, there were several people who were not connected to it at all — even some of the other artists performing at the festival. Lots of them came up to me and told me how much they enjoyed it, and how much they loved the characters. It even inspired some people to want to make their own films, which made me feel great.

Since then, we’ve been aggregating the feedback from the crew and the audiences, and are starting work on making the film even better. Part of me wants to leave it alone and move on, but I know that’s not the right thing to do — after all, there’s point in having a test screening if you’re not going to use that feedback! Sadly we won’t have time to get any of the changes in for Brouhaha, but it’s nice to be able to work on shots again without having a seemingly insurmountable deadline rushing towards you (even though we were ultimately able to surmount said deadline). Jim’s been working on adding some shading to Giacomo, and making the animation smoother. The shots he sent me last night looked amazing! I can’t wait to see it once the whole thing is shaded.

Update (12/3/2007): Brouhaha has now updated their information page. You can see Pupsock listed under Program 3.

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.

All the pieces are coming together.  Yesterday, Jim finished off the Giacomo animation!  I thought it’d be another day, as I had notes for his last two shots, and it was getting pretty late.  But, it turned out that we were all up late, because by 11:30 he had delivered them both with the notes incorporated, and they rocked.

But the man who really surprised me was Travis Fell, who stayed up until 2am getting all the backgrounds done for the Dungeon scene.  He’d be the first to admit that he’s not really the artistic type, but he’s a good friend and wanted to help out.  I gave him the .blend file for the environment, and a low-res version of the scene, and he looked at the angles on the performers, and created backgrounds in the dungeon to match each angle.  This will save me lots of time.

As for me, I finished off the flying carpet chase just moments ago.  I can’t believe how quickly that sequence went!  There’s still some other carpet shots, but the chase was the main thing I was worried about.  In fact, compared to everything I’ve already done, I think that what’s left is fairly easy.  Famous last words, I know….

Been a good week.  Met with the editor on Tuesday, and realized that I had about 58 effects shots done!  Some of those need to be redone when its time to get to the Giacomo Fog shots, but that’s just a couple.  Once we got those laid in, we went about tightening up the Dungeon Painting scene and cut out around 20 seconds.  That was the one part of the movie that was really bugging me, as it had been really slow.  It sings now, baby.

Finally started making progress on the Dungeon Painting section of the flying carpet sequence.  I was really please with how the takeoff looked, especially considering that we weren’t sure how to shoot it.  Before the shoot, I had intricately planned out how to do all the flying carpet shots, but on the day it turned out that my plans weren’t going to work, so I had to improvise on the set, while under a time crunch.  We really had no idea how to do the takeoff, and I just wasn’t sure about how well what we did was going to work.  But now that I’ve composited it, I’m really happy with it.  I’ve since finished off a couple more shots in that sequence, and it’s looking really nice.

Other than that, I’ve been busy in my producer role.  The cut is finally ready for the audio departments (3 weeks before we screen), so I had to prep DVDs to get out to the mixer and composer.  My friend Travis Fell agreed to help me out by creating the backgrounds for most of the dungeon scene, so that all I’ll have to do is approve and composite them.  It took a little bit of time to get him the files he needed to do this, but hopefully it will save me a day or two of work.

Really getting into the crunch now.  Jim should be done with Giacomo by Monday.  Hopefully I can get the dungeon/carpet stuff done this week.