Production Diary - 20.03.12

Yet again it's been quite a while since my last post. Progress is in quite lareg chunks at the moment so we haven't had much to report in between posts.

So current progress on the film is looking good. We're a week or so behind schedule at the moment, but things are far from dire so far. The gargantuan task that was texturing is now, at last, behind me, and it's purely animating that needs doing now (for this project at least).

I finished making all of the character and set textures now, and Rob is in the process of applying them. So far so good. The characters are textured without any hitches that we can see:

He's onto rigging them now, so it's a pretty big step. I'll have images up as soon as the set textures are applied. I could upload the UV images, but they don't look like anything coherent before they're applied.

So for now, and the foreseeable few weeks, I'm animating. So far I'm concentrating on key-framing, as it is in my opinion the most difficult part. You get the flavour of the animation in key-frames, the in-betweens just make it look smoother. With time being a constant issue, I think it's best to get a full film of clicky footage and make it smoother, than to polish up every frame and risk coming short... Not that I'm worried about that just yet, but I'm a cautious guy!

Yesterday I went back to the animatic and added the shot numbers, shot lengths and total elapsed time onto the footage. We'll be using that animatic as our check-list of shots to animate etc, it's just much easier to scroll through a film and see what shots are where. It's also rendered out nice and small (only 100mb, which is TINY compared to most of our exports).

I tried to upload it to Youtube to link it here, but Youtube decided to be a truly colossal pain in the ass. So I'll try again another day, when the upload window doesn't constantly refresh with a notification of some damn competition. Someone needs a slap in the face for that annoying piece of code.

Animation-wise, 4 shots are pretty much key-framed now. I'll start adding inbetweens when I'm closer to having all of my footage key-framed. I'd rather have to tweak key-framed footage than fully animated 12fps footage.

10 weeks and counting! Back to work I go.