Archive for April, 2007

Just as I was sprinting towards the finish line, I slowed down to a jog. Even though I’ve been working on this thing forever now, there were a lot of short cuts made to get it done in a reasonable amount of time. Because of that, a few shots don’t look quite as good as they could. So, it was decided late last week that I would slow down just a little bit and make sure that it look just right.

What exactly does that mean? Well, first, I’m going through every shot, one by one and re-evaluating any last second comp changes and slight lighting shifts. I noticed that a few were inconsistent with others and needed to be adjusted. So, I figured this to be a good time to do a last second color correction on the whole short shot-by-shot. Just some fine-tuning. Nothing major. Along with these comp tweaks, I’ve done some very minor lighting changes on a few shots. Not a big deal now that RenderRocket is helping me out with some major horsepower.

Probably by the end of the week, I’ll be done with everything except the final assembly.

Another week has gone by since my last entry and quite a bit of progress has been made. First off, except for a few random frames that didn’t render properly, rendering is done! All files have been downloaded from RenderRocket, and I’m just making my way through all the shots doing the final comps.

This is going at a pretty good pace. I had a couple of shots give me some real headaches and I had to re-render a few layers here and there, but other than that, it is moving pretty efficiently. For those that wish to update their score cards, there are 21 shots left that need to be comped. I’m doing quite a few a day, so I imagine I’ll be done sometime this week.

Done? Yes, done! After the shots get through this stage, they are marked off my list for good! Nothing left to do on them. After those 21 finish, the final step is to assemble all 112 (111 CG, 1 for credits) shots together and scale them down to DVD resolution (and add audio) so that festival screeners can be cut and shipped off.

This last stretch is a doozy, but I will be done soon!  I swear!  I’ll keep telling myself that until its over with.  Late last week, I took a trip down to LA for a couple of meetings.  While there, I stopped by RenderRocket’s Sherman Oaks office and they loaded up most of the rendered frames onto my external HD.  Unfortunately, it was getting late at night and since I was leaving that evening, and they had other things to do themselves, we had to call it quits.  The result?  I had most of the frames placed on the hard drive, however, 14 shots will have to be downloaded.

RenderRocket automatically .zip’s and .rar’s every render job so that you can download them in nice compressed packages.  I’m poking through the FTP site and notice that the files range in size from 650megs to 6.5 gigs each.  That is a lot of downloading.  My internet connection is capable of more than 7  Mbits/Sec, however, I’m currently averaging a pace of 2.1.  That is a little disappointing.  Hopefully that is only a temporary speed and things will pick up.

On top of the downloading, I still have a little bit of rendering to do here.  Just some odds and ends as I find things that were missed.  After the rest of these renders are done, I’ll begin to comp the remaining shots.  This will hopefully be a no-brainer.  The comps have already been completed and I just need to do a final check and set each one off to do its business.  There are about 56 shots to comp.  Oh boy, now that I type that out, that looks like a lot!  It should go smoothly.  At least I hope.

And when all of that is done?  Then I need to assemble all of the shots, re-size it to video res, slap the audio on top and send them to festivals to try and get accepted.

Only one shot left to render!  I’m so close, I can just taste it.  The only other thing left to do is to run a bunch of comp scripts.  Then, I’ll compile all the shots together and have myself a finished short!  I’m readying myself for something going wrong.  Hopefully nothing will, but there is a strong possibility that there will be something that needs to be re-rendered at the last second.  Let’s hope that it is kept to a minimum.

After some adjustments to a few shot files, I can now render them remotely over at RenderRocket. These were the infamous fur shots that would probably cause problems if rendered outside of my local setup. I broke out some additional layers so that they could be rendered remotely without the fur actually in the file. All is going nicely so far. With 90 or so processors currently chewing away at those shots, they’ll be done in no time.

There are still a few items I need to do locally. However, the burden is less with the layer fiddling and I hope to be completely done with this stage sometime next week. If all goes as planned, I’ll then make my way down to LA with a hard drive and snag those image files.

I’d imagine there will be a few things missing or need a second pass after I begin to run the comp scripts for the shots. Luckily, I can download over the net to save myself another trip or the need to ship a hard drive back and forth if that indeed happens.