Johannes in action. Animating this scene is getting a bit tedious. I'm almost at that dangerous 'I know how the thing looks now so the magic is gone' stage. Which makes it harder to work.

I think Johannes looks pretty good from profile. I'm going to try to show him from this angle as much as possible.

The idea with this little sequence is that you hear the tied-up guy making i'm-tied-up sounds, but you can't tell what it is. Suspense or something.

Not thrilled with the way Johannes turned out (the new guy in the pictures). Attempt #3 on the face got a pass. Impatience and trying to hurry things up wrecked the first two.

He looks like a pouting pig-monkey.

But I like his hat. And his cross-chest-buckle cape thingy. I made it so the over-the-shoulder shots (see bottom picture) would look good.

Some shots from scene 4 with the missing background put in. I like them allright. They seem less dark with the background in there for some reason.

Otherwise, i've been shooting the backgrounds for the next scene, making props (Cornelisz has some items in this scene) and working on Johannes. Could have been done already, but I blew it with his mask. Was in too much of a hurry - now I have to do it over. Really hoping I can be filming him by Thursday. May not happen though.

Scene 11 background plates, all in the bag. Shot all the ones I need, and all the ones I could think of. A bit brighter than the last scene. More fill overall.

I'm getting much better and faster at this; for the background plates in the last scene, there was days of festering and light-nudging and mind-changing. I lit this one up in 10 minutes. Though I did do some tests at an earlier date.

Also, when processing all the photos, I put the results into an After Effects composition with a character to see how they fit. The tendency is to make them look like nice pictures on their own; that's not the point. They have to be pretty muted so that they don't compete overmuch with the characters visually. So I ended up muting the whites and softening the blacks.

Some background tests for the next scene, Scene 11. The original plan was complicated and atmosphereic. I'm thinking a clear light source will be easier.

Gave Corn some top-down lighting and chucked in some old photos. Curious about how he's going to look out of doors. Should be allright.

Barely different from the last one. Added the missing Cornelisz parts of this scene.

Polishing off Johannes while I get geared up to for the next scene. Should be able to animate his parts real quick. Most of the time, he just stands there with his back to the camera.

This scene is turning into a real monster. I originally thought it would be minute or so. Now it's apparent it's going to clock in at 2 1/2, minimum. These shots are almost all real hard; the one wherein the bird lunges took 5 hours of practice animation and prep work. But i'm knocking them down one after the other, in one take.

The one where he stands up and turns around with the bird real slow was a lesson; wasted alot of takes before I bore down and really figured out.

The animation ain't fabulous, but i'm okay with it. Looks like puppet animation.

I scrapped the shot (see previous video clip) where he swishes the bird around. Too odd, and the bird looked almost cute. Can't have that.

Bird is ready to go. Did a few animation tests. It's a real bitch. Not the armature, or the fact that it's covered with feathers (though those things don't help). It's hard to make it move in a bird-like fashion. The bottom picture is the bird with HDR, or how it's roughly going to look (will be more painterly effects) in the painting.

CHICKEN OF THE DAMNED

Screen test for the bird. I was worried that it was too big, and that it's head was too big porportionally. Looks alright though. I'm gonna finish it off now. Try to ignore the yellow foam.

The background for the main angle has been bugging me. I think I found out how to make it work, though. Made it lighter, grayer, darkened the area behind Cornelisz, and made the gradient on the left (haze) stronger. And most importantly, ran a 'remove grain' filter on it in AE. That fixed it right up. It's hard to tell in a small picture, but it a full size 1920x1080 frame, it looked a bit rough.