NEW SHOT

I made a fancy little shot; in the original storyboard, we just see a sideview of the dude, and track with him as he walks to frame right. Now, I made it so the camera tracks through the woods before coming to the road. Here's some clips from the rendered footage (the dude is still missing, but that will just be an easy 15 frame walk cycle).

I've redone the 'p.o.v. woods' composite already, and rendered out the footage. These are actual clips from the final product, the first so far for this film.

THESE TWO ARE TOAST

I'm tossing these two composites in the garbage.

When I originally decided to make this an After Effects n' Photoshop layers-based project, I assumed that my storyboard was out the window - i.e. it had a lot of 1st person shots with perspective issues that would be hard to sell with After Effects (hard for me, anyways). Recently, i've been busy messing around with AE, and I think my initial ideas are now doable. Since I needed to change the composite in the top picture anyways, I figured i'd reevaluate how they turned out. I decided to make them more how I originally evisioned.

I've found I really can't use many of the trees from these two in other composites - I really dig the cedars, not this type. However, i've gotten my money's worth out of the blackberry bushes, etc. already, so i'm not too sad about it.

And here they are all together with the background I was previously working on. I'm digging this one so far.

NEW TREES

Here's a barrel of new merde fresh out of Photoshop. I'm Using a sharpie for my leaves now instead of a brush. I think its working better.

That's it for this one. It's just going to be a background - never seen all by itself. I'll be making some nice, rich, saturated foreground crap soon. This background will probably need to be made even lower contrast and brighter at that point.

Back to my regular job - not a bad three days of work, though.

Here's all my back grounds together. I done drawn a lot of trees.

Started a new one today; this is the view looking backwards as you go down the trail. Needs work. Also needs to be about 1/3 again wider.

That's it - not a bad day's work. I've stuffed all the crap in there i'm going to; now its just a matter of simplifying and making it more coherent. I have to make sure it holds up as a composition, and that its believable from a continuity point of view. The image on the left is supposed to be the view to the left if you were looking at the image on the right. Doesn't quite match good enough yet.

Here's the marker integrated into the composite.

And here's the stone marker.

Here's the ground with shading added, and the whole mix, with more shading done on the for/mid ground trees.

Here's the ground added to the mix.

Added some sword ferns to the front trees here.

Here's the ground - combination of two ink drawings - blobs over grey wash shading, with texture/lines, etc. added.

Some major alterations to the line of cedars; a little sunshine. And, some more messing with the skinny alders; some light, soft, blue layers worked in.

And here's all that together.

Another layer; a bunch of skinny alders.

Then I add; the sky, some very distant trees, and a line of cedars.

Now everything's shaded in. Looks pretty crappy, but should come together.

After shading the trunks, I put my 'moss blobs' in. I made them green so you can see them.

Then, using fancy photoshop techniques, I put texture in the trunks (the texture is made from digital photos of trees run through the 'cutout' filter.

Then I clean it all up so's its just solid black lines on a separate layer.

Then I take 5.0 megapixel digital photos of them with my crappy 115$ camera. Pretty ghetto - no scanner involved.

First, I do a big crappy drawing with ink and brush. Then, I take some tracing paper, and draw black shapes that are going to be moss on the trees.

So here's the next background i'm gonna make (bottom panel). For fun, I thought i'd make a more detailed record of the process than usual.

The top image is what i'm going to base my background on - a shot from the University of BC Endowment Lands park, near Burn's Bog.

So that's it - this composite is done. Here's all layers - it was as awful lot of work to do all the required drawings/photoshopping.

I added an 'in front of the man' layer to the trail composite - I think this makes it adequately claustophobic.

The next composite i'm going to do is the stone marker - the dude enters from frame left, stops, and looks at the marker. Then we go to a close up of the writing on the marker.

This here is a quick mockup from various images.

This is me pretending to walk while standing in place, talking to a doll strapped to my back. When you make films, you find yourself doing weird things.

I took all my backgrounds, took little 'snap shots', and put them all together to check continuity, etc. Here's the contact sheet - looks pretty good. My very first shot, the big open field panorama, now appears way off the mark - needs work. And, my very first 'sideview woods' panorama (the four shots on the left) look a bit different then the more recent work. Not enough to be a problem though. Otherwise, the two halves of the 'side view forest trail' need a transition from the lighter first part to the darker second part.

Added a bunch of elements and tweaked the 'Sideview Trail Part 2' composite'. Its looking pretty good, but still feels a bit open. The right-hand part of the composite needs to feel more claustrophobic.

That's better. An hour or so worth of tweaking. The bottom version looks a bit too bright and cheery. We wouldn't want that.

Working on a new one; this one is just a still frame, no tracking or moving layers. It's the point of view of the man when he looks down the forest trail; the trail seen in the previous composite. Still needs a bit of work, however - a little busy looking.

Did a quick test of the pixelation technique - pretty rough, but seems to have potential. Maybe it won't suck too bad.

Here's a look at part 2 of the trail composite, inprogress, with all the aforementioned junk in place.

This one was almost a reject; I spent a long time trying to make it stop sucking. It still sucks for some reason, but it's good enough to rate '2nd layer' tree. Not 1st layer material.

More crap for the woods.