WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO

Mike and I have begun work on the 'animated storyboard'; not quite an actually animated storyboard, but a pre-making of the film. We're putting scanned storyboards into an .avi (movie) file, and editing it as we would the finished product. We'll then add narration, voices, sound effects, and temporary borrowed music. The addition of audio, even though its of a low-grade and temporary nature, is enormously helpful in showing us what our film will look like. Its very difficult to imagine how the story will flow from storyboards only. We'll also be doing a little bit of 'ghetto animation'; cutting out storyboard elements in photoshop, and then moving them around in our pre-movie via Adobe After Effects. So far, i've only seen one of first scenes with the 'pre-make' treatment (storyboards and a few sound effects), and the difference is huge. I was struck by how much we need to add a few shots/elements to stretch the scene out. It went by rather fast.

Unfortunately there's not much to show visually from this process, obviously. But, we are working again on a regular basis - there was a bit of a hiatus there that was getting discouraging. Mike and I are also hammering out what needs to be in our Hell painting.