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.