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 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!

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!

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.

Not much to report this week, besides what I already blogged about.  After finishing the Wendell animation, lots of stuff started coming my way.  A couple of groups wanting to see the business plan for The Little Dream Engine, which will be my first feature film, and some interest in the script itself.  So, it’s mostly been a paperwork week.

I did manage to start working on some of the flying carpet scene inside the Mushroom Painting environment, which I posted about a week or so ago.  This was my first completed shot of the flying carpet (I had done tests before, but nothing finalized yet), so I was a bit worried going in.  However, the worrying was all for naught - it came out great!  It’ll be some time before that whole sequence is done, especially since I need to focus on compositing Wendell, but I’m certainly looking forward to it.