Bird cage. Didn't build it. Just borrowed one. I think I can make it work.

I had to mask out the front bars of the cage in Photoshop. Was not fun.

Also made the back wall. Was trying to avoid using that angle at all, but it proved impossible. Not sure what kind of material all the splotchy shit is supposed to be. Who cares. It doesn't look bad, and it's done. I was going to have some big banners hanging on either side of the doorway, but it proved unworkable. The small scale became evident with the fabric. I knew this would be a problem, and planned to Phtotoshop a larger scale banner in. Also didn't work.

Made a table. Full puppet scale. Gonna shoot Lord William at the table looking at military maps, and Corndog standing behind. I'm going to try to shoot all three elements together. To reduce the amount of keying. We'll see if it works or not.

I made the table, even though it's only for one lousy scene, because shooting three scenes in a row in the same set with everybody in the same place seemed dull.

Top group of pics are the backgrounds for scene 8. Bottom ones are for scene 16. They're missing a key element - bird cage. I have the thing - just have to shoot it and shop it in.

Still need to do scene 12 backgrounds. That's next. Gonna have a full puppet-scale table.

Scene 16 plates. Working full tilt now. Not posting a lot of stuff here. Too busy doing it.

There's three scenes in this set. Gonna do the backgrounds for all three in one go. Trying to be as efficient as possible.

Don't quite love the colour for these plates, but i'm going to stick with it. I already have a slew of Photoshop actions saved to generate the split-tone effect. Not worth the trouble to alter them in Photoshop. I'll just make them all match, then generate an RGB curves in After Effects and apply it to all the shots.

The wide shot with all the dudes took an outrageous amount of photoshopping. But it's done.

And here's the floor I made. And printed out. And used as a floor.

Scene 8 plates. Each with the regular version, and the day for night version. It's gonna be an interior night scene. I may have blown it photographing the candlelight highlights though. May have to reshoot. But I know how to do em know.

A couple test comps with shots of the set. It's a useful practice. Helps keep in perspective the relative importance of the background. I.e. not the most important thing.

It's missing a few bits, but pretty much done. The missing bits are done. I just ain't glued them suckas on yet. I baroqued the shit outta the thing. This set has been a real bastard. A real battle to dial back the suck. I'm happy with the thing now though. This is just the side wall. Front wall done too. Now I just have to make a floor in photoshop. Then i'll have it printed out.

I have indeed been doing shit. But too busy/lazy to post anything. Probably put something up real soon-like though.

Spent almost an entire day battling design problems. Needed more stuff to fill the big empty spaces and make it feel more like a window. Tried all sorts of things; probably about 5 different attempts in total. Even got as far as building a jig for making an asian-looking window grate. But those problems are solved - just a couple hours left to finish this thing. Then I gotta knock off the (much simpler) side wall, and the floor. For the floor, i'm just gonna make a big-ass photoshop file and get it printed out full-size on photo paper. And glue the sucker on there.

Here's a crude mock-up of what the final result may look like. Cornelisz is in there for scale.

This big whacky thing is going to be a huge wrought-iron window. Or patina copper, rather. For the Interior of Lord William's digs. There will be other elements, but this will be the main one. Going to go for a less ambitious set. Just some strong design.

I had a different plan, but I had to scrap it when it became apparent that it would be too expensive. So I photographed the stuff that I had, and photoshopped this big whacky design.

Finished the post for good ol' scene 4. Bird attack action. Added lots of camera movement, depth of field, atmospherics, and other assorted bullshit.

Scraw scraw!

Been doing lots of work. Mostly post work. So not much to post here really.

I fixed Lord William. Now he looks like a sensual old man. I hope. I was trying to think of ways to make him scarier. Then i just said 'to hell with it' and gave him a Kaiser Bill moustache.

Lord William

He started out looking like an eighteenth century French aristocrat. Now he looks like a grandpa who'd like to tell stories around a campfire. Oh well. To hell with it. He's done. Maybe i'll clean him up a little. The dude looks like he needs to fire his valet.

The painting is done. Her it is. The middle pic is it full wide. Added me some canvas texture. Could almost pass as a painting now.

Almost time to polish this thing off. I think i've already hit the diminishing returns point. Just need to make sure that i'm happy with the overall composition, and that any details added from now on will actually be seen.

To that end, it's time to specifically plan out the tracks/shots for this thing. I had it roughly planned out to begin with; now it's time to make a very specific plan. So that I can work on the composition of detail areas rather than the whole thing.

Had to learn a bag of new hotkeys to make this process more efficient. I knew they were there, I just never bothered. I'm shooting the little dudes in batches; i'll shoot about twenty at a time, on a bluescreen. Then I HDR them (they don't really need it, but I can make the lighting more directional with it), and HDR them again with exposure fusion to produce the most key-able shot I can. Then I drop a harsh matte in After Effects, and save the matte (in 'matte' mode) as a photoshop layer. Then bring it in to Photoshop, and apply it to the dude shot in question. Then 'replace footage' in AE with the next exposure-fushion shot. And repeat. It's goddamn tedious.

The clip is a test-drive of the parallax action. The layer height needs fine-tuning. The lowest layer is too high up, etc. But it all seems to be working.

The pace is starting to pick up with this monster. Lots of copying and pasting elements.

I've got a multi-stage plan for this part of the project. In order to avoid too much festering and time-wasting. Stage 1 is the longest (current stage); pour in tons of non-specific junk in there to get the composition nailed down.

Stage 2; spend a couple of days putting in the more fun, imaginative details. There's a boatload of shit in there already, but it's all pretty white-bread.

Stage 3; make the details for scene segues, that'll be separate, higher-res files parented to the main file.

Got myself back on track today. I bore down and followed the plan I formulated for the piles of gooey monsters. That, plus a few aerial elements, all following the composition plan, made it feel more like a proper composition. It's not even close, but I can feel the suck being dialed down.

The master file i'm working with is quite bright; this pictures are all darkened down. I'll almost certainly ending up doing that with the final composition; one of the things bothering me was being able to see every little corner of Hell. It's more interesting when, in some parts, you can only see little glimpses of shapes in the darkness. Leaves some room for imagination.

Had a crappy day with this thing yesterday; spent alot of time staring into space, thinking of ways to make the composition work.

The above picture includes my composition plan reference layers. There's been a few of them, but these are the current ones. It's awkward making something that's a coherent composition via tons of little layers and details. Not a very painterly way of doing it. But this is how i'm going to have to do it.