From Year to Year

Greetings, one and all! So, here we are, the New Year. 2022 saw a lot of changes, what with marriage and a pending infant, who is due this year.

As the change of year can lead one to reflection, I’ve thought back to 2020, and everything that happened then. Between the lockdowns and the fires, it was the shadow of impending doom for a filmmaker. But then we cast a bunch of people for our largest project to date, and managed to shoot it in 2021, despite actors having spotty schedules, or people catching a certain popular virus at work or on vacation, but thankfully never on set.

Yes, I’m now wading through the mountain of effects work, and grappling with audio issues from a recording device that was slowly failing without us noticing, but through all that, I remember what I said in the blog post “On the Mountain” from September 2020. Referencing the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel, I said “If any of this takes off, it means that there was fire from heaven.” Well, ladies and gents, I’m pleased to report that there was indeed fire from heaven. Things are still a struggle, and I can become depressed far too often as I battle through mountains of issues, but it helps to remember that we’ve already moved beyond the possible, so whatever comes, God will see us through.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall close this blog update with our traditional farewell, and return to staring at a screen, while tediously clicking.

If all goes well, we should be seeing the stunties again very soon…

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

Building on the Peak

Greetings, one and all! As is to be expected for this time of year, production progress is spotty until the New Year. That said, we still got a smattering of effects shots done, including (I hope,) the ruined city! Below is a work in progress screenshot.

The process was tedious, and the program was getting to the point of crashing every few clicks, or any time I dragged an object to a different place, but it’s finally in a state where we can let it sit for a while, and then revisit it to see if any issues jump out at us. That’s pretty common with any shot that you’ve been working on for an extended period. You start to lose perspective. After that, hopefully it will all render like it’s supposed to…

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

Entering the Season

Greetings, one and all! As predicted, the ruin models were painted in the time expected. After that they had a good weathering, and we shot them… twice. Racing to do shoots in the gaps in the cloud cover led to some inconsistencies that needed to be resolved. So this led to two separate shoots, along with an alternate angle on the ships from an earlier shoot. Since then, we’ve been working on building the shot of the ruined city, which… will take some time. The program doesn’t seem to be a fan of all the layers that are needed.

On top of that, the fire shots were completed, and now there are only a couple more to go. These could be difficult, because they’re at an odd angle, but we’ll see what we can do.

Lastly, the team met for the annual Christmas party…

As per tradition, they participated in one of our long form narrative games, which ended in a bit of a cliffhanger. Now I’ll be spending the Christmas break figuring out how in the world their characters could even survive this.

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

Flame On

Greetings, one and all! We opened up this week with building small scale ruins for yet another wide shot. Between when this is written, and when it’s published, I’ll probably be painting them up. After that, we scoured the internet for quality fireball sound effects, as the ones we have are showing their age. After reacquainting myself with the Creative Commons audio aggregation sites, we turned to completing the fire visual effects we have at hand. Currently it’s looking like about three or four hours of work per shot, and these are the fairly simple ones. But I think the tedious hand animation will still beat out the time needed for a decent simulation.

Anyway, that well in hand, the team did its last meet before going on Christmas break. We engaged in a tried and true exercise, with some very specific limitations…

The less experienced stunties are starting to show some good progress in their tactical thinking, which pleases far me more than I expected. I guess there’s just something about someone pulling out an unexpected win… Anyway, a good, if cold, time was had by all.

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

Sailing to Nightside

Greetings, one and all! So this blog week started out with a bang. No sooner do we finish the Nightside model, than we get a brief bit of clear sky, which lasted just long enough to shoot the model, before the storm clouds struck with sleet and hail. While that fell outside, we assembled those takes with the footage, seeing what worked best with the background plates, and ultimately doing a hybrid of different takes.

On a roll, we added sails to the tiny ship model just in time for the next break in the clouds, where we turned the one ship into a fleet.

Integration with the ocean plate is still in process.

Sunday the team met again, and this time we put some more stunties through the wall exercise. (Okay, there may also have been some friendly sniping involved…)

Proving once again that even the least experienced can take down the most experienced when exhaustion is a factor.

Well, (barring boring marketing talk,) that’s about all for this week. Until next time!

Markets, Ships, and Heists

Greetings, one and all! As expected, this week was a little less productive, thanks to the Thanksgiving weekend, but we still managed to make some notable progress. The first bit is market research, not for the current project, per se, but for every one that comes from here on out. Seeing what audiences naturally gel with the kinds of things we make, where they congregate, who the influencers are, and so on. Still early days, so we'll see where it leads.

Next up is making tiny ships. One particular location in the movie will have to be filmed at two different scales, so we’ll need two versions of the model. One to the scale of the tiny houses shown earlier, and another that’s much, much larger.

Last but not least, the stunt team met on Sunday, and thanks to a very rainy day, we had to go to Plan B: Choreographing a museum heist.

This one went a bit more Jackie Chan in its physical comedy, so it was pretty entertaining.

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

Small Duels and Smaller Houses

Greetings, one and all! So, we opened up this week with finalizing the models for the night shoot, and reshooting them. They’ve turned out much better, this time. After that, we got into making even tinier houses, for a long range establishing shot…

There’s a lot of work to do to finish this up, but it’s a good start.

Lastly, an unexpectedly smaller stuntie assembly meant that we had to improvise. So we set up a rotating “back to the wall” drill, where one stuntie takes on the others with his particular weapon set, until he loses and the victor takes his place against the wall, at which point the defeated player swaps to a different weapon set, and tries to retake his crown.

This would be a lot easier on the stunties if there’s more than three of them in the rotation, but it prototyped well.
Now that we’re going into the Thanksgiving weekend, things could be a bit slower, but hopefully we’ll come roaring back in the new week.

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