Our FIRST deadline is TOMORROW

Although masochistically self imposed, theres a deadline tomorrow to finish all the animation. I think I've pretty much keyed all my stuff. Pauls still workin on his and I'm annoying him by asking to look at his previews. lookin sweet tho. some of my animation looks r o bo tic and a bit lazy but hey it can be fixed. my mentality is running along the -lets get a version of the film finished then improve what we got-.. so after 2moro we start squeezing the shite out of the footage and flush it. on the 7 days a week vibe right now. socialising is becoming tough(er) as my brain has been hijacked by the film-making process. i'm also noticing that we've got 3mins too much footage. good complaint i guess but when we start cutting things the film gets more confusing. i say -more- coz its pretty ambigiuous as it is. not everythings spelt out.

my dad was up in the studio on sat and took a look at some stuff. he seemed very surprised:
"oh thats dramatic. its a serious thing is it?"
me:"yeah, em, I guess so. its always been like that."
dad:"well isn't it supposed to entertain people?"
me:"well, no. i mean yes. its kind of, em... an experiment."
dad:"well whos it for?"
me:"whos it for? well, festivals and stuff. tv channels might buy it."
dad:"oh. okay. well its got an interesting look."
me:"next thing i make will be funny."
dad:"will it? well. just do what you want."
me:"no seriously, i want to- the next thing we're gonna do is a funny film. we've been talking about it."
dad:"ok. well its got an interesting look anyway."
me:"ok."

i think thats the conversation i have with myself everyday.


i saw 'in the soup' on sat night after getting back from a tsunami related gig (incorporating spontaneous female breakdancing (in ireland?)) and it made me cringe at its portrayal of the film-makers ego and insecurities fucking up their film. my no.1 fear. ignore these thoughts at all cost.

subvert expectations.
involve yourself in a logical process.

Update and Good video link

Its nice to see different bits and bobs come together. I composited CG sophie with a rotoscoped character yesterday- one of my main fears about the style of the film was that maybe these two very different types of animation wouldn't sit well with each other, and thankfully they do. I'd say partly because of cool performance by the actors. I'm still going through the scenes and animating sophie. Another 2 weeks and we'll be able to have a rough cut done.

I had a meeting with the sound designer and the composer on saturday and came up with some cool ideas for the hallucination scenes, and how the music will tie together certain shots. I think that most of the conversation was about where NOT to use sound and music. Too much music in a short film usually is there to hide something, and generally makes the whole thing seem like a trailer to a bad movie.

Check this out: The Grey Video

It's a video made by some very talent graphic design student to a song from Dangermouse's now infamous Grey Album and damn if it isn't mega deadly.

Bedroom Set

3 weeks to rough cut deadline

Okay, so this is how it works with film board grants.

After preparing all the necessary paperwork, and submitting contracts and signing, correcting mistakes in paperwork etc you receive 50% of your funding. The next installment is 30%, which you get when you have a rough cut of the film finished- the deadline is 1st Febuary.

Since the locked down cut of the live action footage could be considered a rough cut, I had to decide what warranted a rough-cut for this film. We have decided that all the character animation and some rough animatics of the non-character stuff would suffice. So we're working away with our CG (computer graphics) characters, making them talk and walk and crossing off our scary slug sheet (the broken down schedule of bits of animation to do). We're also working on completing the rotoscoped elements.

I agree on the idea of the rough cut deadline and installments. It really forces a deadline on your work, and when you are producing and directing something on your own with no boss breathing down your neck, its very easy to get distracted and sometimes unmotivated. Facing the prospect of not receiving funding unless a deadline is met definitly gets you motivated. We're working to meet the deadline. Especially because the animation involves a lot of annoying CG tweaking, once that deadline is met, a lot of the rest of the work is fine tuning and compositing- which is much more fun that spending hours constructing 3d morph targets of smiles and screams.

One of the things we had to build for the rough cut was the set of the bedroom- where most of the film takes place, so I did a render using radiosity in max (for anyone who wants CG to look at all any good use a good renderer using radiosity like max's in built one in max 5 or if u have max 6 learn to use mental ray properly). I've only got into decent lighting in 3D and its a revelation. The new max has a mental ray renderer that can process sub-surface scattering- the technique used to render realistic transulecent skin tones pioneered by gollum in lord of the rings... next 3d project i'm defo using it.. given that the next 3d project will happen when computers are fast and cheap enough to render it fast enough- currently it takes hours per frame on one character on an fast machine.

So heres the bedroom- plus some tweaks in after effects. Its getting close to the final look of the film.