Just wanted to drop in and leave an update, since it has been a while.  I’ve been busy with Animation Mentor since June, and that took up most of my time.  Life has changed, as it has a way of doing, and I decided to take a leave of absence until next Summer — maybe permanently.  We’ll see.

I took a gig helping out local artist Carl Knickerbocker, founder of the Suburban Primitive Art movement, with his first short film, A Dog Goes From Here to There.  It was a ton of fun to shoot, and I’ve met some great people too.  Doing some additional special FX for him now, and also helping to create the final version of the film.  Laying in audio tracks, making the DVD, etc.  Should be premiering in New York City first weekend in December.

With all this going on, I haven’t had too much time to work on the Pitch Reel.  Kevin McGuire and I toiled in the miniatures studio and got some shots of the triplane and the pirate ship that we like.  I’ve stabalized Pupsock’s footage, keyed him out, and got a really nice key on the triplane.  I’m pretty sure I’ve got the virtual camera move locked down, and a fairly nice sky.  Had to do digital clouds unfortunately, but they look nice enough.  I want to add some more clouds, and get the magic hour colors in the sky to be bolder.  Still need to get Pupsock locked into place on the wing of the plane, then I can start working on the pirate ship footage.  Once I get all the elements I have working, then I need to make/film/key/place propellors for the triplane and pirate ship (it’s an air ship!), film/key/place Anastasia in the pilot’s seat, and see if I can create a wake in the digital clouds as the pirate ship sails on top of them.  All this for 1 shot!  To be fair, though, we did film the footage of the triplane for all the shots in the film, and most of the pirate ship shots.

That’s all for now.  Take care!

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/

Still working on the Pitch Reel when I can, though with two kids and overtime at the day job (plus trips across the country) I still am not getting to it as much as I’d like.  However, tonight I finished painting the miniature for the triplane that Pupsock will be riding.  I’ve never done anything like this before, and it probably shows, but I think I did a pretty good job.  I spent a while studying painting techniques, and then spent a couple of days studying photos and footage of actual triplanes to see how they naturally wear as they age.  Then, I put my newly-acquired painting knowledge to work trying to imitate the same wear and tear.  It was a good feeling watching it all come together and look something like what I had in mind.  I’m sure a model expert would have several issues with it, and I’d love to hear what they are and how they’d go about fixing it.  Best way to learn.

I’ll let it dry tonight, and then hopefully I’ll get to film it before the day job sends me to Alaska on Monday.  Then I’ll really be able to tell if I did a good job or not.

As you can imagine, having a baby and a pre-schooler has been putting a serious drain on my free time.  So, not too much has gotten done since last we spoke.  I got a new version of my Demo Reel that has a couple of shots from the Pitch Reel.  I’ve been spending more time with Anastasia, our 3-year-old, and that’s been lots of fun.  She’s old enough now that she can help out with some projects, so I got her involved with what little work I’ve been able to do on the Pitch Reel.

We recorded some audio to use on the shots in my demo reel, and Anastasia went out to actor Kevin McGuire’s house with me to lay down the tracks.  I ran the camera (recorded the lines on-camera because I don’t have a fancy audio setup.  I usually go to a studio for this sort of thing, but thePitch Reel is being done on-the-cheap), and let Anastasia call “Action.”  Though, ultimately she got sick of that and refused to say “Action!” because she felt it was a bad word, and that “Stop!” would be a nicer word to use.  I convinced her that “Start!” would be more appropriate, but ended up calling the last few takes myself.  Once we got what we needed, we headed home and she sat with me and helped me pick the best take.  The one she picked really was the best, so I think I may have a new collaborator under my roof.

Lately she’s been helping me turn an old swivel-chair into a rig for shooting the miniatures.  I have a good toy pirate ship that’s fairly large that I think will work for the air ship, but I will need to paint it to give it character and figure out if I can make mechanical propellers to sit on top of the thing and spin, or if I should attempt to do them as CG elements.  I’m philosophically opposed to doing them in CG, but it may be a necessary evil.  I also need to find a good miniature biplane.  Tom lent me one of his kids’, but I don’t think it will work.  It looks a little too toy-ish in a bad way, and I couldn’t use it with the propeller it has, and it’s his kids’ toy, so I can’t very well break it off.   I found a very nice hobby shop near my day-job that has some good model planes for under $30, so I’ll probably end up getting one of those and painting it.

Also I turned 30 last week.  Disney has a promotion this year where you can go into one of the parks for free on your birthday, so I took a day off life and went to the Disney Hollywood Studios to reboot.  I think I saw Samuel L. Jackson entering the park at the same time as me, so that was a cool way to start the day.  I had a great time, and got some much-needed relaxation.  I wanted to bring a laptop so I could do some writing, but my wife put me under strict orders to just have fun and reboot.  Which was wise.

I went on Star Tours (just days after Tom shot an interview with George Lucas for a documentary about Drew Struzan), and realized ole George must have forgotten that this existed, because he hasn’t marred it with his CGI crayons.  And I noticed a big difference in the way it felt.  Everything on screen felt real.  Sure, it uses optical tricks, but everything on the screen exists (or at least existed) on the planet in tangible form, and it showed.  It made everything just feel right.  That is when I decided that I never want to use CG to emulate something real.  CG is great for cartoons (as long as it doesn’t completely replace hand-drawn animation), but not as a tangibility substitute.  Which is the root of my philosophical problems with using CG propellers.

After Star Tours, I went into the Writer’s Corner shop fully intending to obtain a bottle of Coca-Cola and indulge myself in caffeine to fuel the rest of the night.  However, they a machine with red slush swirling seductively inside its chilled chambers. I could not deafen my ears to its song, and I dashed myself upon its icy rocks.  Looking for a cozy place to consume my chilling concoction, I spied what is perhaps the most comfortable chair at Disney, stationed strategically next to a small televisor televising Goofy cartoons.  I sat.  I drank.  I shivered.  I smilied at animated shenanegians.  And then I fell asleep.  Right in the chair.  In front of the TV.  In the middle of the store.  Right across from the counter.  For about an hour. Eventually I woke up, peeled myself from the leather bed, and tried to walk out innocuously.  I was almost out the door when one of the nice old ladies working the store asked me if I had a pleasant nap.  I sure did.

So, Disney day aside, things have been really busy at my day job.  I’ve had to start working Saturdays (yay for extra income!  Boo for not having time to work on personal stuff!)  I have a fairly long commute, so when I get home it tends to be rather late.  I give Eva a bit of a break by hanging out with one of the kids for the rest of the evening.  Then we put Anastasia to bed, which usually results in Daciana (the baby) waking up and staying awake until 1 AM.  So, I hang out with her and Eva, and by the time she goes to sleep it is way too late for me to start working on stuff.  So, things are proceeding slower than I would like.  However, I am bonding with both my girls stronger than I have in a long time, so maybe having less time to myself is really a blessing after all.

Though I haven’t been working as much as I’d like, my fame does continue to grow.  GALLERY OF DOOM, without my involvement at all, has been invited to screen at the Screen4 Shorts festival in England this summer!  Also, it continues to tour with Heather Henson’s Handmade Puppet Dreams for Kids.  It will screen on April 26th at the Newport Beach Film Festival, which it looks like Kevin and I will be attending, then again at the Del Ray Beach Film Festival on May 25th.  Hope to see you there!

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.