Syncing Effects and Effective Skirmishes

Greetings, one and all! So after all the fun of last week, I promptly got sick with a bug that certainly clings… but for all that, I remembered that there was still one thing that required only minimal brainpower that needed to be done on Chaos Crown. So I spent two and a half days syncing After Effects projects with the far too complicated edit in Premiere that came about when I forgot that my edit was only a rough edit. Things like this can happen when you get married right in the middle of post-production. So that is now finally complete, and I can move on to other things.

The stunt team met again on Sunday, and at long last we unleashed them in a few wild rounds of skirmishing.

It was a day for strange and dramatic events, and it looks like people are making progress in their technique and tactics.

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

Returning Stunties and Completed Drafts

Greetings, one and all! I’m pleased to announce two things in this blog post.
First: that the entire stunt team was finally together for the first time in over a month. To wake them from their sluggishness, we put them through the paces marching, before having them break into teams and do a bit of assassin vs. knight choreography.

Despite the time away and general tiredness, they all managed to finish and get up to speed in good time.

Second: I have finally finished the first draft of a new feature-length script! This did not come without some difficulty, as a logging truck hit a power pole while I was writing, which caused a power glitch. This not only corrupted the script beyond retrieval, but somehow also corrupted the screenwriting program I was using to the point where it could not open any files. The damage went so deep that an uninstall would not fix it, I had to do a manual search and destroy on every loosely related file to get the job done. But, despite that, I managed to improve the script slightly, and bring it all to a conclusion in the next couple days. Thankfully I had an older version of the first two-thirds saved, so I didn’t have to start from scratch. That would’ve been heartbreaking. As mentioned previously, this is just the first chapter of a larger story, but it’s gratifying to have reached this point after so long, and after so many false starts.

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

Written Momentum and Process Retrospectives

Greetings, one and all! After last week’s milestone announcement, I made an unfortunate discovery: The script was losing momentum. This led to yet another unfortunate discovery: Every time this happens, it’s because I’m trying to be budget conscious in my writing. But it would seem the genre is not well suited for that. So I deleted a week and a half of writing, and then recovered the lost page count plus fifty percent in three days. I’m going to have to say that, given the rate of progress, this narrative direction makes more sense. The mixed result is it’s also making me realize just how long this story is going to be. We’re looking at a film trilogy, at minimum, or maybe a miniseries, we’ll have to see.

As a point of historical curiosity, I took a trip down memory lane to see what we were doing ten years ago, this week. Apparently the answer is creating the CG model for Solensgate, the villain’s stronghold in Gatewalkers. It’s kind of interesting to see how, a decade later and more confident in our skills, we’ve turned to making physical models more and more.

Probably because it’s easier to get accurate lighting on a model, as well as some of the randomness inherent in reality. Though I should note that this model work is still mostly in buildings, spaceships, and other non-elastic structures. For the ocean shot and the automaton in Chaos Crown we’re absolutely going with CGI.

Which kind of brings us full circle, because as I’m writing this new and somewhat expensive script, we’re still talking about how to simplify and economize the process. For instance, would a two-legged alien mount be easier to animate than a four-legged one? What should the lighting be for this desert night shot? Things like that. It should be interesting seeing where all this leads.

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

Digital Pens and Wooden Daggers

Greetings, one and all! Once upon a time only having the stunt meet as the central element of the blog was a sign of a slow period. Not in the context of what pictures we use, because my main job of clicking a mouse all day is decidedly unphotogenic, but in the subject of discussion. Right now it’s a sign that I am doing the other half of the job, which takes somewhat less than half the time: Writing. As our last project was technically written many years ago, and then just took years to refine and get a budget for, this week marked the passing of an important milestone. Specifically, the longest page count of an original script in around seven years. It’s still a good way short of feature length, but this is also shaping up to be a much longer story. It will be interesting to see where this takes us.

On to the slightly more photogenic side of the job, due to this weekend's torrential rain, a small stunt team took on a bit of a “hunters become the hunted” scenario using daggers.

In time past daggers have been somewhat underutilized in our choreography exercises, so lately we've been trying to amend that. The choreo was intricate, the moves were sweeping and dramatic, all in all, a good time had by all.

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

Breaching Teams and Plotting Plots

Greetings, one and all! This week could be summed up as “still more writing,” though this time I fell victim to gambit pileup, as various antagonists found their schemes bumping into each other in overly complicated ways. So I went back and streamlined the whole thing. Tedious, but productive.

This Sunday, since half the stunt team was sick… again, our remaining team members engaged in a very tense small group storming session, this time with a new point of access. We rotated out who was defending after every three rounds, so everyone got a taste of being the opposition.

With only three in the storming team, the margin for error was very small. But for all that they did well, with a successful clearing in two thirds of the attempts. Given that, in time past five have failed against one defender, this is actually a considerable achievement.

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