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.

This has been a busy week — at home, anyway.  My daughter, Anastasia, turned 2 on Tuesday the 21st.  Coincidentally, my editor’s son, Christian Miller, was born on Tuesday.  So now they have the same birthday, though Anastasia has laid claim to it for far longer.  So, I spent a lot of time with her, and not so much on the movie.  Because of this, I’m moving my personal Wendell deadline to Labor Day.  I’ll have a 3-day weekend from the day job then, and no toddler parties planned, so I should have plenty of time to crack down.

What I did have time for, however, was this:

I created a 3D environment in After Effects, based on a painting that local artist Danny Schmidt did special for the movie.   I cut out pieces of his beautiful painting, recreated it in After Effects, and composited Pupsock & Wendell into it.  This was my first finalized shot working with green screen and virtual sets, so I was very excited about it and took the time to get things right.  I like this picture, but it doesn’t really compare to how awesome it is seeing the shot in motion.

Jim finished off another Giacomo shot, which will find its way into a new trailer I hope to have ready in September.  Then, I put him to work on the hardest Giacomo shot in the film, which I hope he will blog about soon.  Hint, hint.

Finally, I’ve gotten roughly half of the recomps done.  I hope to be finished with that annoyance by Wednesday.

I mentioned in the last couple of posts that I had spent a good bit of time last week working on figuring out a way to make Wendell be more integrated into the live-action shots. Well, I finally came up with a good look for the first scene and have gotten a couple of people to sign off on it. Ultimately, I’m the director, and so I’m the only one who really needs to sign off on the shot, but when you’re wearing many hats, it’s always a good practice to get the approval of those you trust. Especially on things you’re new at doing.

Anyway, I thought you may be interested in seeing some comparisons on the shots I’ve been working on. Here are the two main shots I’ve been working on.  For each image, original is on the top, new on the bottom.

Shot 2J

Shot 2L

Basically, it involved playing with the levels on Wendell, doing a stronger Match Grain, matching with the live-action layer, and two blurs. The first blur goes along the edge of the Alpha Channel, making his outline less harsh. The second is a lighter blur over the rest of him, just to soften him up a bit. The second blur is a little stronger in 2L than in 2J, because I wanted the focus to be more on Dirk (played by Jeff Goguen) than on Wendell.