Archive for February, 2007

As anyone that lives in the San Francisco area knows, it has been raining nonstop for a while now. That means snow in the mountains. I will be playing hooky for a trip to Kirkwood for some skiing. I believe they’ve gotten 10 feet or more in the last 5 days with several feet waiting for me tomorrow morning. What started out as a mild winter is certainly looking to end strong!

I worked over the weekend on the short to try and make myself feel less guilty about having a little fun. This has been a year where I have done very little skiing compared to my usual 25+ trips to the mountains of previous years. What I’m trying to say is… I’m due for some powder!

UPDATE: Skiing has been postponed due to all the highways into the mountains being closed. I guess Caltrans couldn’t keep up with Mother Nature. Try it all over again for Wednesday.

Just so everyone is aware, I redid the Toonstruck and short-film homepage’s. There are a couple of renders that you probably haven’t seen yet. Nothing mind blowing. I just wanted to change things up a little bit. If you’re curious, the short film page has a preliminary mockup of the “one-sheet”.

Over the weekend I decided to thumb through all my comps that I’ve done. After spending a half hour doing this, I realized it may not of been a very good idea. I discovered 15 shots that I wasn’t happy with the lighting. I decided to go back and revisit them and make them stronger. The good news is, I can do several in one day, since I’m mostly tweaking light values and fiddling with the comp scripts. The bad news, it is still time that is taking me away from pushing forward with the last remaining shots.

All in all, it was a good idea. The point is to have this thing look as good as possible without going crazy. And in the whole scheme of things, making these shots look a little better is just fine.

It may be hard to believe, but I only have 7 more shots to light. That probably sounds like a lot, however, when you consider there are 111 shots, it is more impressive. I’m averaging around a shot a day, and if I can keep that up, I should be finished with lighting/comping in a week or so!

I can’t believe I am about to wrap this short up. It has been a long road and I am very excited to see it finished and perhaps in a few film festivals this Spring. I still have quite a bit of rendering to do, and frankly, it is going to take a pretty good chunk of time. I’m still debating a few options to get it done, more on that later.

After rendering, the only thing left to do is assemble all the shots (remember, the editing was finished long ago), create the credits, and oh yeah, do the sound effects! Yes, I’m doing that myself. A couple of people volunteered, but dropped out without doing much of anything. It was disappointing, but I guess I can’t blame anyone when they were volunteering their time.

I’m getting dangerously close to the March 15th Siggraph deadline. There is a **SLIGHT** chance I can make it. They do allow you to submit work that is 80% complete. However, unless I can get everything rendered in time, I wont be sending it in. I don’t mind leaving off the sound effects, but I don’t want to submit it without final render/comps. I don’t think that would be in my best interest to do so.

Anyhow. I’m real excited to be this close. Wow, what a long road.

The whole world is blogging, so I guess I should take a shot at it. Actually, I’ve already been keeping somewhat of a blog while creating my short film “Till Death Do Us Part“. You can find it here. Unfortunately, the software I was using completely went crazy while trying to perform an upgrade and I never could recover it properly. Luckily you can see my old posts at the above link. All future TDDUP posts will be on this blog.

Besides this being the location to find the latest updates on the short film, it will also be where you can find out about all the other things I’ve been up to.