So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye

Having more than one google account makes it hard to keep updating this blog. Juggling passwords and email addresses all the time just feels like more trouble than it's worth.

Since I last updated, I've made four films, three of which belong to the ongoing wish-fulfilment Dane Cook humiliation series, and one of which is Star Wars related and about to go up on youtube. I could have posted something here about them but they were all shot and edited fairly quickly and it just seemed like too much trouble to come on here and log in and think of something to write.

So, like everyone else in the world, I'm migrating to Twitter. If you want to find out what I'm up to, I'll most likely be saying it here. Weekdays, it'll probably mostly consist of hourly "I'm at work and bored" tweets, but I'll try to remember to fill it in when I'm filming too.

Here is the news

I probably won't get to do any more animation until next weekend now, so I've been working on sets for the last few shots. I've spent the evening building a newsroom. The set itself is fairly basic, with a couple of free-standing walls and a desk. With the application of some digital magic though, it should hopefully end up looking a little bit like this photoshopped mock-up.



Click to embiggen.

Palpable relief

I finally finished the dialogue scene. Four minutes at 15fps works out at 3600 frames. That's 3600 frames of two characters, both wearing helmets with the visors up. In the five days it took me to film all this nonsense, I only knocked one visor once. It took about ten minutes to get it back in the exact same position as before, but I only did it once.

Having done all that, I've decided I'm not happy with the last line in the scene, so I might change it and redo the final shot. Apart from that, there's a little over a minute left to shoot now. Unfortunately for me, about half of that is a complicated news report that's going to be quite tricky to pull off. Might have to wait until next weekend for that.

The definition of fun

I just filmed an 800-frame shot. That's about 54 seconds' worth of footage, or a fifth of the whole length of the film. Part of it was just static frames of two guys looking at each other, into which exciting fx will be added later. Another part had an incredibly annoying bit where I had to walk a minifig through a doorway on a set where I hadn't left myself enough room for my hands. Most of the rest was just talking animation, and it was getting pretty tense towards the end when I knew that one mistake could mean having to reshoot the whole stupid thing.

Right now, I'm going to go look at something other than a computer screen for a while.

Useful animation tip

Try not to get half way through filming a 200-frame shot before noticing that the bright orange box that you left lying around in your room is reflecting in everyone's torsos whenever they move.

I think I might be about half way through the shooting phase now. A couple of tricky bits still to do but most of the rest should be variations on talking heads.

In the can

Well, one character's side of the dialogue is. The character that doesn't talk much. Now I get to shoot the other side of the conversation. At least this other guy moves around a bit while he's talking.

Once that's done, it's off to the newsroom to shoot Edwyn's scenes, a couple of talking head news items, then it's post-production time. There's quite a lot of post in this one.

Humdrum progress report

Nothing much to report, really. Updates on this film aren't going to be as interesting as the last one. This is mainly because I've got four minutes of dialogue to shoot, and it all takes place in one room. This may not make for the most exciting film.

Anyway, I've spent the afternoon calculating frame counts and then shooting some more animation for the four minute dialogue scene. A bit of moving characters from A to B and some reaction shots. Tonight I'll either be attempting to compose a theme tune on my DS-10 or doing a quick Blender refresher so I can do a CGI establishing shot later.

Happy now

Last night I looked up how the auto white balance works on the camera, and learned that setting the camera to "manual" doesn't actually set it to manual at all. Armed with this knowledge, I managed to get everything set up right this morning and reshot yesterday's scene. It still looks a little bit flickery to me but nowhere near as bad as yesterday's shot.

This afternoon, I will be mostly animating close-ups of minifigs bending slightly at the waist and moving their arms a bit. Yay.

At the end of the day

A disappointing day. It took longer than planned to record the dialogue, clean it up, pick the best takes and string it all out along the timeline, so I didn't get to start thinking about animating until after lunch. When I finally sat down and put the set together, I couldn't light it properly, then I spent an hour animating a walk cycle that looked more like a hobble than a military march. I scrapped that and started over but, having just watched it through, the camera appears to have reset itself to automatic aperture/iris/whatever mode, so there's flicker all the way through and it looks awful.

What really annoys me is that that was probably the most tedious shot in the whole film, and I specifically chose to do it on the first day so it would be out of the way. I think I'll leave it now and come back to it at the end when I've forgotten how tiresome it is. And worked out how to use my camera.

Stupid cameras.

And so it begins... again

About to re-record some dialogue before kicking off the first day of filming on the new project. The mighty Edwyn Tiong (Frank the cop from Tough Questions) has done an awesome job of recording some parts at very short notice and now the stuff that I'd recorded before sounds a bit flat.

Not particularly looking forward to shooting four minutes of talking heads but at least there's a gun battle in there now to break things up a bit.

Or maybe not

Heh, I always get over-excited after finishing one film and start coming up with all kinds of ideas for new stuff. Then I almost always lose interest within a couple of weeks and find something else to do.

Time has passed now, though, and I'm gearing up to get back in the saddle. I'm digging out an old film that I got part way through making a couple of years ago and I'm planning to give it another try. Right now it's looking like I might need to reshoot the four minutes of footage that I already have, which is unfortunate. At least now I have an idea for how to start and end it though.

The current plan is to start shooting on January 28th, which gives me less than a week to finish writing, record the new dialogue, build the new sets, etc, etc.