29 Dec 05
Last entry for this year?  I never thought there would be so many entries in the first place... oh well.

Working on the big ambulance accident scene.  I should have it mostly completed by the end of next week.  Ran into the most peculiar bug I've ever seen in the renderer.  For some reason the walk cycle of the cat and a particle emitter on the ambulance (exhaust) caused ther eto be these HUGE black, smeary artifacts in the render.  Turns out AM can't accurately calculate particles when you jump to them without rendering all the frames before; so when I rendered out the entire scene: OK; but if I skipped to frame 200 and rendered it: BLACK SMEAR... ugh...  Two days wasted to discover this.

Yeah, per usual school is intervening big time with my dreams of finishing this film, but this is it, the final year for school- do or die.  Do = Master's Degree, Die = yeah whatever, I'll still be kicking it.

17 Sep 05
62% finished with animation!  Wow.  I have the storyboards in two bound books.  I just finished animating all the shots in the first of them.  The second book is much slimmer, and with my skills growing, as long as I can fit time to work in front of the computer, this puppy is gonna actually get finished!  I'm having my first twinges of excitement at the prospect afeter all this time, though every day worked on it is a joy and just plain fun.

I'm sad a little too- because my favorite character (the girl's mother who wears the blue dress) is now all finished with her parts inthe film.  Sort of like saying good bye to a friend.  I won't be animating her in the film anymore.  I really liked the way her styleized design turned out- off all the adult characters I'm proudest of her.

I've animated a total of 70 shots to date!  Wow... looking up from the grindstone is sort of amazing.  Enough of that., though, it's sort of scary too. :o/

Just finished reworking a lot of little details in previous shots where I'd made some lighting errors and bad choices.  Also reworked some of the models to improve them a bit, added DG's eyelash shading and reshaped her hair (thanks to some critiques I got)- added in some more smartskin settings to many characters- I even resplined the main Ravel's back as it had some artifacting,.  Things keep improving, I think.

Next scene promises to be a fun one to animate, it involves another near death experience for Ravel as he crashes his ambulance yet again.  This time he rolls it! :o)  Almost kills someone too...  And it's at night, so dramtic lighting is in order.

15 Sep 05
Unbelievable to me, but over the last 8 days, I've averaged a little over 10 second per day!  And while there aren't a lot of characters on screen at once- there's always at least one, so this hasn't been just landscape footage- some of the shots involved some tricky acting, too, such as the the scene 07a01 which I posted in the sweatbox a few days ago.  So wow.  That's rather fast animating for me.

Made some very nice improvements to the lighting in one set, thanks to some helpful critiques I got.  Also improved some of the materials used on the models.  Overall this has been a hugley productive week.

11 Sep 05
Latest scene involved DG's mother- I love this character.  She has a beautiful spirit, and from a technique standpoint is just fun to animate.  I love her hair, her slinky figure (very s-curvey in design), and getting her into a good pose with dramatic strength is relatively easy.

The scene is posted in its soundless, quick-render, small resolution version in the sweatbox, so check it out if you like.  Took two days to get her "acting" right.  She goes through an emotional transition in the scene that was tough to make look right, but I think it's close enough to move on now.  For you on tight bandwidth budgets, you can check out a new still of this scene in the stills section.


9 Sep 05
Feel guilty for so few updates, but things got BUSY, sorta NASTY, and sorta ROUGH since the last post.  And none of it had anything to do, of course, with this film... -sigh-.  Anyway, Back at it.  Completed a long shot  (587 frames) in one day on wednesday- speed was possible due to AM's ability to reuse and let me modify previously created animation data- non-linear animation rocks.

Relocated my webhost to a company that gives me nice bandwidth, is cheap, and lots of other good stuff.  Sorry if you tried to log into the site last week while it was down.   Ok, back to working on the most ridiculously involved project I've ever set myself on outside of getting a Master's degree, which I'm trying to do at the same time... stupid huh.... just call me bulldog.

Oh, last June I went to visit my parents down in Oregon and took a DVD with me of everythng completed in the film- a VERY rough cut with some sound... all quickrendered.  I included a slideshow of finished rendered stills so my folks could see what the final look was and match that up in their heads with the quick-rendered animation they were seeing.   Neither of them had seen the film at all, to this point, after YEARS of me working on it.

My dad, who's never  impressed by anything got all excited and kept demanding it be reshown- then, and this is the wierd part- he started critiquing it up and down like some old film-editor pro.  All his comments were spot on.  About 50% I'd already written down as changes I had planned to do, but the rest were insights into character/filming that took me by surprise with their insight.

The film is about mortality.  My dad is 70 years old (I was an accident).  He's fought in a war- real combat, real nasty.  He instantly identified the themes in the film of how war affects our views of mortality and the reason(s) we chose to continue to live every day as opposed to just committing suicide (when you no longer fear what you now intimately know).   He went into a long talk about how various elements of this idea can play out into people's lives (including his own, no doubt), and when I went over the full script with him (for the first time- I keep the details about my art sorta close to my chest) I could tell he was a little blown away.  I was surprised how affected he was; I hit a resonating note to something he's experienced.

My point: Maybe I hit that resonating note because it is the tone that has underlied the theme to my own life all along growing up...

See?  That's why I love art.  It sometimes can be as true as facts.


14 Jun 05
Heh.  I be animatin' so fast, I done forgot to mention in here I finished section 6, the scenes after the ballet bit.  Know what that means?  HALF THE FREAKING FILM IS ANIMATED!!!!

Bye fer now, animating section 7, want that done now too!

HALF THE FILM IS ANIMATED!!!!!!!!

11 May 05
The ballet sequence is finished.  This took a lot of work, like everything else in this film.  Had to put together all the pieces involving the girl, and then go back through all 10 sequences to animate the cat in them.  Lighting the set (a dance studio with a lot of mirrors and windows overlooking Paris) was not as easy as I thought it was going to be.  Ended up needing to light differently for various shots in the same set- which isn't unsusual I guess.

I added some posters to the set, and am really happy with how this set looks artistically.  I ended up recoloring the little girl's dress to pink with white dots- which matches the artistic look of the set much better than her original green dress with yellow dots.

20 Apr 05
Currently animating a Ballet sequence, involving the little red haired girl.  Her proportions are not much like a real woman, and I've found I had to make some serious adaptations to how she moves.  However, it looks pretty balletic.   Choreographing even a short, simple dance to a rather sophistacated piece of music (by Maurice Ravel) was not easy, and took a few days.  I'm no expert in dance.  I had assistance from my wife who is a dancer.  Of course my vision as the "film maker" and hers as a "ballet dancer," clashed nicely and led to some artistic friction, but that is to be expected.  I think things worked out very well.

26 Mar 05
So much has happened in a few months.  None of it very bad, just portentious.  Suffice it to say I'm going to try to slam out as much animation as I can in the next few months and see where that leaves things.

Last Saturday, I had a friend over who speaks french fluently.  Her husband came along too- he's a Quebecois.  So... I used 'em both to good effect in a long recording session.  Got the perfect voice recorded for the Blonde Girl's Mother (BGM); such a perfect french accent, it was cool.  Her readings were spot on.  She and her husband got totally into it- she's a natural voice actress (or I'm a great director...lol); she and her husband talked back and forth perfecting the accents, rewriting some of the french parts to better suit the mood of the scene- awesome awesome awesome.  I'm very pelased with the voices in this film right now.   Loads of  conversations recorded that occur offscreen too.  Was pretty cool to have her recorded Saturday and already have some of her lip synch done the next day- wierd to see her voice coming out of a character I made before I even met the actress who played her. :o)

In the midst of animating a scene with 3 adult characters in it who all TALK in this scene- very tough scene to animate as the "lead" in the scene switches between the actors and so I'll be animating BGM then at frame 100 switch to RAF and then at 250 switch to Ravel, etc... tough to keep track of the timing and reactions that needs to take place.  I've roughed it all out and it looks good, so I need to put final tweaks to it and then move on.

One interesting thing I've noticed is that for me lip synching is sooooooo easy to do.  It is much harder to get the body, hand and face acting to read right than it is to get the lips and jaws to move right by FAR!


5 Jan 05
Well 2004 wrapped up with the film in full animation production.  I've not much to add right now to the production diary here.  Just a note that I added a sort of funny animatic to the sweatbox for people to take a look at.  It's ascene with Ravel driving his ambulance over a very bumpy road with very weak shocks.

I'm hoping to have the animation done this year and am really shooting for a release of this film before the end of the year.  If I think it's good enough as I wrap, then I may spend the money on it required to get a print of it for certain film and animation festivals.  I figure why not let the film have a go of seeing if it can get selected.

Well, that's my New YEar hope anyway.