Fists, Feet, and Greeblies

Greetings, one and all! This week saw us reach a couple milestones. First off, the final phase of color refinement has been completed. Now all that's left is figuring out how to get the various elements to play nicely together, and make the movie a reasonable download size without creating any grievous compression artifacts. 

Before I get to the next milestone, we'll turn to the stunt team. Sunday saw the team training in the most intrinsic of the martial arts: Unarmed combat. Ranging from teaching the newest recruit, through brushing up technique for the intermediate and veterans, all the way into having our relatively newly minted veteran do some teaching. 

In the process of that, I think we also may have accidentally invented a new training game.

On to our next milestone, this week also marked the first time I have attempted the classic modelmaking techniques called chipping and greebling by the ILM modelmakers. The former being adding even smaller pieces or "chips" of styrene to the model to break of the flat surfaces, and the latter being the use of parts from other model kits in unorthodox ways to add detail and provide some scale. 

It's been a slow but incredibly rewarding process that really makes the design pop. There's still a few more pieces that may need to be added, but after that it's the basecoat that will tie everything together.

Well, that's about all for this week. Until next time!

Ships, Hordes, and Spears

Greetings, one and all! Well, this week certainly didn't let up on the crazy. But, for all that, we still managed to get a fair amount done. For starters, the first starship model is about half done, with the basic shape laid in, and the detail panels added. Here's a quick shot of it pre-panelization. 

Next up, the market research was updated to see what avenues were still viable for getting the Nine Isles project out to the public. After that, still more color correction work on said project.

Last but not least, the team met again on Sunday, and opened with a "Hero versus Horde" choreography exercise, before finishing up with some spear and dagger practice.

This last exercise led to a lot of near-miss strikes that made for a training session that was just about as entertaining as the choreography.

Well, that's about all for this week. Until next time!

Skulls Will Roll

Greetings, one and all! So... life hit hard this week, but for all that we still got a fair bit done. We opened with another day of color touch up, which was quickly followed by life going very crazy for a few days, but we still managed to finish the week with designing and beginning to build the first ship for the mock trailer. It takes a long time to build these things from scratch, but it's really satisfying to see it all come together.

On Sunday the team met again, and worked on a couple different things. The veterans reviewed rolling and diving rolls, our intermediate member learned the diving roll, and our newest member learned the basics of rolling. Of course, this is something you can only do for so long before you become too dizzy to continue, so we then switched up to an exercise where the team paired up, everyone did the same strikes and counters, then swapped partners and repeated the process, going faster each time. 

We did several rounds of this, which was even more tiring than the earlier training, so the team then decompressed by throwing padded swords at each other, which then somehow morphed into a game of toss the duct tape skull...

Which, along with the frequently inverted skulls of our teammates, gives us the title for this week's blog. 

Well, that's about all for this week. Until next time!

Experiments, Improvements, and Flow

Greetings, one and all! After several days of trying to wrap my head around the ship building challenge, I decided to stop trying to do things right, and just try something. The result was turning a large plastic egg into a starship. (Work in progress shot below.) It was a very free-form process, figuring out how to work with the different shapes and materials in real time, along with trying new techniques. The result has a lot of mistakes, but it seems to have broken the initial productivity block on the process. Plus, better to make those mistakes on a test project than on the model you'll be shooting with.

I think it has the look of a freighter or colony ship. What do you think?

Next up, we had a four hour session in a dark room touching up the Nine Isles movie in preparation for release, using the more powerful new tech and the aforementioned friend's greater experience to finalize the color correction on the project. One down, several more to go...

Lastly, the team met again Sunday, and spent the day working on flow...

Working from the foundation of the flourish, we then worked into a strike, then a sequence of strikes, followed up by application via a short choreography exercise.

Well, that's about all for this week. Until next time!

Models, Modifications, and Mayhem

Greetings, one and all! This week was divided into a couple different key lines of development. The first was working on the mounting mechanisms for the ship models we're making for the mock trailer. Unlike a standard model that you can just build, one intended for filming requires you to build the model around some mechanism that will allow you to attach the ship to a rod that's "behind" the ship, relative to the camera, so that you can get all the shots you need. This means that the rod will need to be stuck into the model from multiple different angles, and that the attachment point will then need to be concealed when you shoot from a new angle. This process will then need to be repeated for a model of a radically different design. Needless to say, it's very much still a work in progress.

Next up, footage and edits were transferred to a portable drive, and we've begun the final pass on the Nine Isles project. What it's revealed, thus far, is that most of the technical difficulties I've been struggling with were likely due to the archaic format we had to render the project with, in order to make sure the quality was as high as possible for the next pass. But, naturally, none of the tech liked it, so day one was conforming everything to a more workable format. 

Lastly, the stunt team met again on Sunday, and as a couple of the members are moving away for college, we had a bit of fun on their shared last day, putting the newer team members through the real-life dungeon crawl challenge...

It's fun to see different people handle the puzzles, and work through their problem-solving process. It also works with their agility and combat training, as they have several obstacle course-like puzzles, as well as a few combat encounters. All in all, a fun day.

Well, that's about all for this week. Until next time!

Tech Challenges and Training Intent

Greetings, one and all! So... the first feature render attempt revealed a few technical gaps that required some more research. In short, the new software is designed to work on computers ten or twenty times times more expensive than mine, so it takes some finessing to render things out without the audio getting horribly corrupted. Chatting with a friend who has way more experience in this software gave some useful pointers, and we'll probably be working together on getting everything smoothed out and refined in the near future.

In the meantime, further refinements are being made to the edit, with a scene being trimmed, a shot being slipped, fixing an effects shot, and some more cleanup being done on a few lines, using the new software's slightly more advanced tech. Interspersed through all of that has been a lot of research to figure out how to use the software, and more importantly how to get the results you want out of it.

Concluding a very busy week, the stunt team met again, and this time focused on drilling technique, precision, and intent, cycling between partners as the did so. 

This turned out to be useful for just about everyone involved, because the new people had to learn, and even those with more experience can get a bit rusty with time.

Well, that's about all for this week. Until next time!

Shoots and Audio Trials

Greetings, one and all! This week was bookended with shoot days, but both were undermanned to the point that we only have pictures from the beginning of the second shoot. 

That said, if all goes well, this marks the end of the actual shoot days, and the beginning of the modelmaking and ship shoots.

In between those shoots, the music sync was completed, but during the final edit block I noticed that a particular line just didn't have the audible punch that it was supposed to. Some experiments led to research, and we discovered that the audio renders weren't in the right format. More research and more renders finally put the dialogue and sound effects at their proper quality. Now we simply have to re-level the music to fit the new audio tracks (and maybe edit the credits sequence) before rendering out the first feature version of "The Nine Isles: Chaos Crown".

Lastly, the team met again on Sunday, and we opened the whole thing with timing, distance, and reaction drills, before breaking into a bit of fun...

The creation of some stunt stools encouraged yet another barroom brawl, but this one became 80% improv session, with 20% choreographed violence. Given the headspace of the team at this point, it seemed appropriate, and it nicely filled the remaining half hour of the stunt meet. 

Well, that's about all for this week. Until next time!