The latest 7-6-2021

I used this entire long 3 day weekend to work on the film. The work I’m doing now is usually the work of several people. CGI, 3D modeling, After effects compositing, and editing. I’m doing them all. Without a doubt I’m enjoying it but it is tiring at best. Long days and the machines rendering around the clock and the progress is somewhat slow. I need a bank of super fast computers and even then it takes time.

I assembled a rough first trailer on top of everything else and it’s exactly that, rough. Even now I’m re-rendering shots to remove the flaws and make corrections to color and blend that stands out to me.

Raul Arteaga is going to do a sound mix on the final version later this week. There will be a longer better trailer later on.

The entire time line is in place and much of the editing is done. I’m now cutting in the close ups and other angles we shot. I have a lot of coverage and it’s helped to make correct editorial choices. You can never have too much coverage.

The hardest part was getting the proper look for the Dreamtime effect or look part of the film where the two characters are in that strange dream like building environment. I didn’t want the footage to look crystal clear and in focus but rather dreamy and surreal. Through making the visuals over and over again I arrived at a look using light burst, and camera lens blur for the backgrounds and walking ghosts that I was happy with. Then I had to go back to each After Effects file for each composite and re-render them with the settings matched to that look for consistency.

I’m rendering these files out as Quick Time ProRes files. They take an original 2-3 gigs file shot in camera and up the size to nearly 29 gigs or more which is slowly pushing my hard drive space. Luckily I have a huge Raid that Paul Gentry built me and high speed external drives. I tried using H-264 mpeg 4 with some degrees of success but I found on the highly layered After Effects shots they didn’t hold up and produced a lot noise due to their high compression. They work fine for SNG weekly live action footage but not for effect shots.

Today we are back to the studio to fill some masks orders received over the weekend and to work on the Laser Blast figure!

We hope you all had a great 3 day weekend and enjoyed the holiday!