Marching On

 Yep, literally. The effects work on the last three episodes have been pretty well sewn up, with a spanner thrown in the works at the last moment. But more on that later.

Sunday we shot the final scene in Season 1, or rather, the green screen element for the final shots.

This consisted of a lot of marching, shot from different angles, then composited into the final shots, one of which is shown here.

  This is actually the shot that threw the production a curveball. The compositing demands of the two shots were so high that it crashed After Effects. When I booted it up again, all my work from Episodes 11-13 was inaccessible. However, Premiere (my editing suite) can still “see” the work, so the episodes can be published; I just can’t access the files for adjustments to the color or other effects. Fortunately most of the work had already been completed, so all we lost was some fine polish on a couple shots and about 12 hours of creative cheating to finish the scenes.

Speaking of, during the Sunday shoot we shot a bit of close-up action, but it didn’t work out as hoped, so we’ll just have to finish up on the happier note of showing the team in their “epic version” costuming from that scene.

 That’s about all for this week. Until next time!

Gatewalkers Episode 10 Broken

Gatewalkers Episode 10 click here

Experiments and Discoveries

 So this has been a fairly interesting period for us. For starters, we’ve discovered why the last couple uploads have taken ridiculously long. Apparently Google has been restricting bandwidth to smaller servers (like ours,) for the past month or so. This has resulted in snail-paced usage of sites like Google Maps, and constant runtime errors on YouTube. But, most importantly for us, it doubles the time it takes to upload an episode. We’ve never had the fastest internet, and the average before this has been about an hour of upload per minute of run time. Now it’s at least double that. This would lead to the next several episodes taking 20 hours to upload, and the finale taking over 26. During that time our internet will be almost useless to anyone who wants to use it for any reason, no matter how simple. Despite this we will still try to get the episodes to you in a timely manner, but that may not always be possible. So if you log on one Wednesday looking for the episode, and it’s not there, rest assured we’re uploading it at that very moment. It just could take a while.

Now, on to happier news. The last couple weeks have brought us near completion on most of the season, we’re into the refining process now. Here you can see an early attempt at creating artificial depth of field, and what is called “rack focus” in the lingo.

 Last week, a slightly smaller stunt team played around with hypothetical weapon designs, and their proper use, with an eye to the cinematic.

As you can see, this led to a little bit of, umm… posing. (Or, as Jackie Chan would put it, the “wow.”)

A few things regarding the future of the team and our projects are forming up, but there aren’t many details right now, so we’ll have to keep you posted.

That's about all for this week. Until next time!

Gatewalkers Episode 9 Diplomacy

Gatewalkers Episode 9 click here