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!