People are Hard, Robots are Easy

Dragging my ass on getting started again after the long Christmas holiday break-thing. I really wish I had a powerful laptop and then I could work on the film while on vacation. Then again, I guess that's why we go on vacations, to not work. I recently watched the second film and realized how much better it was than the first and then I watched what I've done so far on the third and realized that I'm accomplishing the goal. The second film had better action scenes but the character animation was still a little weak so I wanted to really focus on the character animation because I knew that making action scenes was actually kind of easy now. After all, animating a space ship or robot is 10 times easier than animating someone picking up something or worst, walking. I really dread the people scenes because you can fake a space ship flying but everyone knows what a person walking looks like.

Whelp, hopefully I can hit the drawing board soon and have this done before Spring.

Back on the horse

Trying once again to get Episode III on a good schedule. So many delays: Weddings, kids, stupid-ass job sucking all of my energy. I think I am officially 2-3 months behind schedule which means I have to start doing some over-nighters on the weekend. Another major set-back was the new Blender upgrade. Although the program had a lot more bells and whistles than the old Blender. All of the benefits were outweighed by the fact that it kept crashing during the rendering process. That's the equivalent of you writing a 100 page book report and your computer crashes right before you were able to save it. This alone, put me behind for over 2 weeks as I tried to render a simple city-scape fly-over. I've officially gone back to the old version of Blender and will stick to it until they work out the bugs.

Whelp, off to work I go

EM

Episode III Ad

I've created a Ad for the third movie and posted it on the Tube.

Because of life happens events, production on this movie are going mighty slow. I'm about 11 minutes into it. I'm assuming, production will get back up to speed by late September, life happenings pending. I also need at least 5 other people to do some voice-overs.

In the second movie, ARARAT. the weakest link I think were the people animation, so in this one I'm trying to focus more on making them better. For some scenes, I've found a way of rotoscoping my movements and creating actual realistic character actions. I'm giddy with excitement at the prospects of this discovery.

EPISODE III– First look

I've already started on episode III.

People seem to like episode II. As I work on III, it's almost like I can predict any mistakes that can happen even before I start animating the scene. I'm also less afraid of trying difficult scenes because I know all kinds of shortcuts to fool the viewer into thinking it took longer to render than it did.

The only obstacle I'm encountering is sequel syndrome, where the movie makers have to find a way to make this movie even better than the one before It. This is a huuuuuge mistake when it comes to sequels. Once you make a sequel that's super great (Empire Strikes Back, Wrath of Kahn) Every sequel after that gets compared to that one. Therefore, you need to do what Lord of the Rings did. Keep them all equal or better yet (and sometimes a little riskier) just make each movie it's own animal with it's own life and ideas (Matrix, Blade). I know there's no way I can keep out-doing the previous episodes because sooner or later you'll hit that Star Trek II, Empire Strikes Back, wall. So I'm trying to make Episode II a new animal.


Leechee Waa. The concubine to the Emperor, and her ladies in waiting.


A Claw. Basically a futuristic forklift.

E.M

Home Stretch

Okay, So it's been like for freaking ever since I've posted anything to this blog. It's probably because...oh, I don't know, Because I've been working on the movie?

I'm officially in the home stretch right now. So much so that the two main characters don't even have to speak anymore. My goal was to finish it by Christmas so I could send it out as presents but it looks like( If I do it right and don't rush it) perhaps by New years, but, we'll see.

As usual, I discovered that the easier a thing looks ( a character picks something up) the harder it is to animate. And the harder it looks (exploding ship) the easier.

To whet your appetite, here are some stills from the movie:

That's it, EM

Edit as you go

I've reached the halfway point.
I've started to do full edits of the movie from the beginning to the point I'm at now.

I can't imagine animating the whole movie and then going back and adding the voices, music and sound effects. it would take a week of editing at least. And then, heaven forbid, you discover a mistake or you don't like the flow of a certain scene.
If I start editing now, I can fix mistakes as they happen AND when I reach the the last scene, the movie will be ready to go.

EM

FARM. Now a movie, not an episode.

I posted another Ad for the movie.


So far this thing is 20 minutes long and only half way done! I really hate the talking scenes. they take forever because first I have to translate the speech into a visual form so I can see where words start and end. Then animate the mouths to it, then the facial expressions, then the body language.
I like action scenes because you just make something go from A to B.

Episode one is 23 minutes long which is the same as a 30 minute TV episode, so I guess this is going to be a OVA which in japan are Original Video Animations or basically a movie version of a TV show.
With the animation looking 80% better than the first. It's starting to look more like a movie version anyway.

EM