It's All Over

That's it. She's done. The film is complete!

 

It's incredibly difficult to believe, but yes indeed it is done. Honestly, I never thought I get to say those words. Especially since it fought me to be bitter end – the very last TIF sequence had to be hand retouched in Photoshop, which was fairly easy, but Premiere refused to accept the changes. In the end I had to hand place each one of the cels.

Un-freaking believable!

Anyway, I've learned a lot from this mess. I even think I have a fairly decent piece of animation to show (if I do say so myself). Now I've got to burn DVDs and start sending copies out to film festivals. We'll see how people react to it.

Hopefully, they'll like it.

Now I can sit back a relax for a while. But only a while. I have to catch up with the real world and get a job so I can start paying for this education. Ha ha – wheeeeee!

Anyway, I'd say stay tuned, but there won't be another entry in this blog. Off to bigger and better things I supposed. Good luck, godspeed, bon chance and all that sort of stuff.

Well, maybe you should stay tuned. I may just have an idea for another animation brewing. Until then...

Nearing the End

This is it, the final week.

And as usual I have not accomplished as much as I had hoped to in the week leading up to this. I’m still struggling with relationships, possible depression, job hunt, and family. Well, at least the job search is looking brighter. I think I nailed an interview yesterday with Fisher-Price (the department I would be working for does pretty much exactly what I’ve been doing in school for the past seven years) and I have another one tomorrow. Unfortunately, that cuts into my work time on this project.

That brings us to what is left to do.

I have to finished colorizing (more specifically, gray-scaling) the Photoshop file for shot 020, and I have to colorize (actual color this time) the files for shot 021. I have a feeling that’s going to take about 12 hours. It’s boring, it’s repetitive, but it’s easy. I throw some music on and just go. As to the rest, I have about a dozen or so tweaks that run the gamut from slowing down some After Effects animation to adding a head to a reflection. With that done, I’ll be almost done.

Almost.

The final piece of the puzzle will be playing everything out as jpgs and bringing it back into the Premiere file for final output. Hopefully that will be relatively easy. We’ll see. In the meantime I really have to get back to work.

Stay tuned…

Getting There

Well, this week started out looking like it was going to be infinitely worse than the last one. In fact, it got so bad a one point that I really started to think about taking an incomplete in this class, or possibly even failing.

Yeah, things were that bad.

But, just as things seem to being going well and then bad, so to do bad things suddenly turn around and work out well. There's a great quote from “Shakespeare in Love” about this. I've used it before, but it bears repeating:

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?

Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

Hugh Fennyman: How?

Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.

So, I've been back to work with a bit of renewed vigor. I animated the proposed “revised ending” with the zoom into the the eye of the astronaut. Unfortunately, I couldn't reuse any of the previous footage, but I sat down today and cranked it out. I think it looks pretty good, but I need to check the timing – it may be a bit rushed. Also, I started working on all the innumerable little things. Things like making sure the paper runs over the the edge of the screen in the final shot, and going through all the photoshop files to make sure that all the backgrounds are cleaned up. It's those little things that will really make the film work, and it's just plain sloppy to leave them.

Also, I came up with a final list of things to do. There are eleven little things, and four big things. Of those big things, only one is intense – the animation of shot 021 (the Astronaut freaking out). However, in the recut, I have shortened that shot so it shouldn't be that bad at this point. The other big things are coloring shots 020, 021, and the new bits of 024. So, I have my work cut out for me, but it's not as overwhelming as it has been in the past.

I'm going to get through this.

It feels really good to say that. Well, I have to get back to work. Stay tuned...

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Part 2 (Electric Boogaloo)

Mother puss-bucket, I HATE sequels!!!

I feel like I haven't gotten anything important accomplished in the past several weeks. Even less so in the last week. What do I need to have done? I need to get shot 021 animated completely, shot 020 colorized, shot 021 colorized (once it's done), a dozen or so tweaks done, check all the SFX, export everything as .jpg sequences, and do a final render of the film. Meanwhile I'm struggling with my marriage, my health, and my potential career and at the same time I'm trying to get pumped up for an interview for an awesome job while I'm feeling really depressed.

I reiterate: mother puss-bucket!

I know I'm going to get through this. I know it. But somehow I keep feeling like I'm just spinning my wheels and going nowhere. I hate this. GAH!!!

By the way, the capper to all of this is what happened to my computer. I took a break from working to watch some television and relax, while leaving my computer on Sunday. I had set an alarm on it so I didn't sit on the couch too long, but realized after a while that the alarm had not gone off. I went into my office to find that the computer screens were blank. I thought, "huh, I thought I turned off the sleep function" and shook the mouse - nothing happened. So, I hit the power button to either shut down or reboot the system. Nothing happened.

This is when I really started to freak out.

After several minutes of frantic searching I discovered that the plug had been pulled out from the wall (the cats did this? I can only assume...). I plugged it back in and hit the power button. At this point I was horrified to find a DOS screen come up on my monitor asking to be directed to a boot drive or to insert a boot disk into the CD ROM. You don't want to know the language that came out of my mouth at that point - it was concentrated evil. In a panic I rebooted the machine and was greeted my the normal boot screen, but it immediately went back to the DOS screen. Try again. This time I hit F8 and found that both hard drives were still there, so I pointed it at the other drive and continued to boot into safe mode. It worked. Restart. Back to the DOS screen again. Reboot and point to the right drive. It works! Reboot. Back to DOS screen. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU...!!!! Reboot to the Bios screen. Hmmmmmm.... only one hard drive showing up. That explains a lot. Panic starting to fade. Reboot, set the drive, finish booting and get back to work.

So, that's been my week. Oh, and I've got an interview for a job at Fisher Price AND got a call from a headhunter for another job at Fisher Price. I guess you have to take the good with the bad. Time to stress eat and get back to work. Stay tuned...

Downs and Ups

Spring Break is over, and I am SO glad it is.

Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of Spring Break. It's a point in the semester where the sun is supposed to shine, giving us a hint of summer to come. We call get to relax and sleep in for a week or so, catch up with friends, go to a party or to, and generally recharge our batteries - ready to return to school refreshed and prepared the the last month of hard work.

It never works out that way though.

I started off by getting sick for a week. Then my wife used my computer, and just like the last two times when she used my computer, my primary hard drive failed taking just about everything with it. So, while coughing my lungs out, I had the incredibly enjoyable experience of spending two and a half days rebuilding my computer and reinstalling all the programs I needed to get back to work on this animation.

I bet you were wondering when I was going to get to talking about Fleeting, weren't you?

Yes, by Thursday of last week I was once again back up and running and trying to animate. I say "trying" because I spent the next four days screaming at Maya because I couldn't get these ndynamics and dynamics to work in the three scenes I needed to get done (with being sick and the computer crash I had long forgot about getting shot 021 animated - that will happen this weekend).

By Monday morning I was fit to be tied.

Fortunately, Sarah came through. She introduced me to preset materials in ncloth, and worked out the bugs that had been vexing me. Also, for unknown reasons, the dynamics component of the shots mysteriously started to work. By late afternoon on Monday, I had most of the shots ready to render, and Tuesday I did just that I also completed and hand drawn animation of a glass of wine spilling to complete shot 015.

Bloody hell I'm tired.

Oh, and I'm Valedictorian of my graduating class. Did I mention that? So, downs turn into ups and hopefully the trend will continue. Must hard work lies ahead, but I'm fairly certain I can get it all done on time. Until next time, stay tuned...

Little Bits Of Paper

I’m back to animating.

Not much else in my life has been resolve, but I am back to animating. Well, that’s something at least.

So, this week I have started to work on the secondary animation for sequence one and five – the void. Somehow that seems apropos, but I digress. What I’m doing is filling the space with all the floating pages of the script, and honestly it looks really good (if I do say so myself).

What this entails is a lot of tedious work. I have to draw all the paper (with writing on it and without), scan all the images, clean them up, bring them into After Effects and animate them in multiple compositions (for length). If that sounds like a lot, you are correct. Every piece of paper has to move and rotate, and it needs to be the right length for the shot it goes into. Some of these shots are incredibly long as well.

It’s dull, boring, and tedious work. But, it looks beautiful when it’s done.

I think that’s the metaphor for this film. Well, stay tuned…

Triple Witching Hour

I accomplished nothing this week.

Nothing. Zip. Nada.

Why? Well, because of Murphy’s Law. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Oh, and it did go wrong. In the financial world there is a thing called “Triple Witching Hour” in which three very important reports all come due on the same day and that can lead to either a massive amount of new capital or – and this is how I am referring to it – it can lead to the market crashing.

In my case, I have had to deal with a crisis in my marriage, a crisis of debt, and a crisis of employment. I’m not going to go into detail here, but if you really want to know the particulars, please ask me in person. What these things have caused is a crash in me. I have been so stressed out that I have not been the least bit creative, the least bit focused, nor have I been the least bit interested in life in general. I’ve been lost, alone, frustrated, and very, very upset.

On top of that, I have a cold. So, I’ve crashed physically as well as mentally and emotionally.

Here’s hoping next week will be better. Stay tuned…