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.