Posts Tagged ‘short’

For quite a while now I haven’t been submitting Till Death Do Us Part to festivals.  As unfortunate as it is, I’ve been so busy that I can’t find the time to deal with the somewhat tedious process.   I won’t go so far as to say that I won’t submit it to anymore festivals ever.  It just won’t be happening very often.

What now?  I’m not exactly sure.  I always had thoughts of putting it on DVD and selling it ultra cheap, but honestly, I’m not sure if I can find the time for that.  There is a lot involved and I certainly don’t have the time to market it as needed.  Another possibility is to find a distributor.  That may not be a bad idea if I can get accepted.  And lastly, I could just put it on the net for everyone to see.  I’ll be making some decisions soon.

I learned quite a bit through this experience.  I’ll share probably the most important piece of info with all of you making your own shorts.  Make them short!  Twelve minutes is too long.  I talked with quite a few programmers from various festivals that really liked TDDUP, but it was too long to fit in their show.  If you embark on the journey of making your own film (and I can’t recommend it enough), please do yourself a favor and make it under 5 minutes.  Not only will it be less work, but you’re more likely to get it into festivals.

I’ve been asked to create a CG character and make it look like stop motion. It is quite a unique challenge. Something I’ve never done before, but very interested to successfully pull off!

Pepper Films asked me to come up with a story, supervise the modeling, do the rigging, and finally perform the layout and animation. The story, modeling and rigging has been finished. I’m currently doing layout and the first pass of animation. So far I’ve been ignoring the idea that it has to look like stopmo and working exactly how I would on any other CG project. It is really starting to come together.

As usual, my workflow is to not only do the layout/animation in Maya, but also the editing. All the shots are timed and edited in this software using various mel scripts. Once the short is determined, the individual shots will be broken out and animated in separate scene files. Then, from that point on, the assembly of the short will be very straightforward in the editing package.

Making the animation look like stopmo, with all its quirky problems will either be the easiest thing I’ve ever done, or the most difficult. I’ll have to get back to you on that!