animation wah!

animation and radiosity and mental rays and global illuminations with final gathering turn on maybe another iteration and it will work out oh wait i minute i guess i gotta bake that texture or it will take too long to render oh that keyframe shit it looks like shes outta the thunderbirds andy can you do the compositing i was going to do it but i've got so much else to do oh shit i gotta call the sound designer wait a minute is the music being recorded on wednesday? where? how much do you need? oh i gotta call the producer... sher's in a meeting right now did she say she was coming over tonight i gotta get that cashflow thing worked out oh fuck its crashed less iterations this time maybe how did i get that cool look the other day maybe i used that daylight plugin wait a minute how many frames have we gotta do a day? 200 or something... 1500 is a lot of money for a final grade maybe i can do it somewhere else oh i really gotta finished the animation on sophie shes so wobbly sometimes maybe wheels can do some synesthesia stuff shit i should be working instead of blogging.

Lighting tests with chars

Render Test Break

So I'm playing around with looks at the moment- taking a break from the keying mayhem of december and january. I swear, everytime you wanna do something in 3D you gotta learn a lot of shit. Especially if you havn't got a million euro rendering farm, you also gotta learn the tricks.

i've been planning to avoid all this hastle by rendering the characters 'toon style but i'm really getting into what radiosity and global illumination (calculates what happens to the photons as they bounce around a room from a light source illuminating a scene realistically).

can
do.

but who knows. i guess i got another few days of experimenting before i have to pin down a direction.

Oho, the serious amount of misinterpretation of film contracts that goes on...

We don't get anymore funds until the film is at a FINAL roughtcut stage- that means all the animation finished and rendered and composited!!! Thats 50% of the funding. I guess the film board assumes that the companies awarded this scheme have working capital. I however do not.
Luckily our bank is offering us a temporary overdraft so we can pay ourselves our meal tickets in the final couple of months of work.

i made myself sick this week. had to take yesterday off. i went for a walk and admired the sea for a while: "nature is a bitch of a renderer"(foaf)

consolidationary

Man o man. That roughcut was finished a day behind schedule.

Which is grand coz we also found out we have an extra month of production time.. this was due to mistakenly interpreting the fine print of the contract.

Very rough. A lot of the animation is finished but it isn't rendered or textured- which is a bigger job than animating. This form of production i.e. shooting live action, referencing the video for animation, modelling, rigging, texturing, lighting, shading, rendering, compositing + all the sound stuff really makes for a different kind of schedule. And a lot of files. I've already got nearly a hundred different folders containing all the junk for the film.

I learnt a new word this week : "Consolidation". Its a neat function in aftereffects that collects all your files and organisies them into a nice folder.

We're seeing that we need something called a "pipeline" too. This is a word big fancy post production houses bark on about all the time. Its a word used to describe how all the computers in a studio would be networked and set up to run as one sort of big computer with various artists plugged into it from all different sides, tied into their chairs with small pipes feeding coffee and shitty take away foods into their gut stimulated only by a small buzzing sound piped into their ears.

I've decided to insert myself into this system and upgrade to 3ds max 7 and learn how to use combustion. They work together in a 'pipeline'

oo did we meet our deadline?

no.

we're still working on the rufcut. probably be done today. i'm getting real sick of looking at these nudey computer generated twentysomethings i tell u .. i put a shirt on sophie in one scene and it felt great to give her some digital dignity back. sheesh...

heres an email i wrote to my sound designer.

"
hey paul,

that "sophie. sophie love." wav u sent me doesn't sound like theres anything done to it??

i really need that o connell st file.

i've listened to the first hallucination scene and had some thoughts. you were right about me not really giving you enough direction so here we go.

ALL of brian's dialogue in the audio i gave you should be completely fucked and unlistenable building up to an unbearablly busy high pitched electric shriek on "i annoy the shit out of you"- its this sound that makes her scream and attack brian- this scream should start off loud and shrieky as it is still part of the hallucination. and shrink down into silence after 2 seconds so its leads into a pause of silence when shes holding him down against the bed

the hallucinations come back when he says "sophie whats wrong?"- they must be the worst yet- like what the character would sound like if he was a male banshee.

i would avoid clipping the audio as well and i need it very clear with no fuzz in the background.

i really like the little sounds in the background between the lines, keep those, but try and create most of the hallucination from just the sound i gave you.

"

look at me being a director n all, directin people.
again, this is stuff i just should have told him when we met but again i assume that people know whats goin on in my head and i let em do their thing before i end up asking them to do it again with this and that in mind... but i get to see whats goin on in their mind first which is handy.


meeting today about what the hell we're gonna do when this film is finished and we all revert back to breadline life again. where did i leave my social security card...

at least we get to do all Caribou's visuals and music videos again this year (formerly known as Manitoba). which is ace coz his tunes are rad and we can make beleive we're in a band and act all london.