Been doing loads of post. Cleaning up old scenes and putting the final touches on others. Not much to post yet. Got the edit up and online on the AVID. Lol

About 20 hours deep on the post for scene 16. It's definitely the most complicated post work i've done for any one scene. All my hard-learned lessons for workflow are coming in handy.

Through various byzantine machinations, i've wrangled myself a new computer. Nothing too fancy, but a huge leap from the old one. The previous one wasn't capable of doing proper post work. The new one handles it easily. So I can finally do that stuff myself.

Did all the keys for Lord William in scene 16 yesterday. They were the most complex keys i've done to date. Which was compounded by all the colour shenanigans.

Here's the comp/precomp layers setup for Lord William in a medium shot (like the video clip)

Shot

-Lord William precomp

-LW highlights precomp

-LW highlights precomp, using above layer as 'luma matte'

-Black solid, mask keyframed to follow the hair

-LW footage for Matte, keyed for hair, 'set to screen matte', using above as alpha matte

-LW footage for Matte, keyed, set to 'screen matte'

-LW Darks precomp

-LW Matte for Dark precomp

-Black solid, mask keyframed to follow the hair

-LW footage for Matte, keyed for hair, 'set to screen matte', using above as alpha matte

-LW footage for Matte, keyed, set to 'screen matte'

-LW Footage (keyed), above layed set to 'luma matte'

Point being, there's a lot of crap going on.

Had another whack at the colour for scene 16. Just for fun. I've got Dave working on it too.

The wealth of options is actually making it difficult. Hard to commit to a colour scheme. We can control the highlights of the table, the highlights of Lord William, the darks of Lord William, the highlights and darks of Cornelisz (the dude who's back we're looking at in the picture) and the background all separately. And they're all bright to begin with.

Hard.

Test of the candle light business. Not bad, but needs some sexy 80's saxophone.

The background plate for this shot setup (of which they is six of em) has been hard. It was originally shot for a daylight scene. I've been trying to shop it up to match the animated elements. Almost there. The shadows on Lord Willy are too cool. But that'll be easy to fix.

Here's some of the many layers and masks needed for the candle set up. They are, from left to right and top to bottom:

Final composite

Lord William highlights layer

Lit candle shot

Processed and separated candle highlights

Dark shadows layer

Red backdrop for matting the candles

Matte for table edges & Lord William

Matte for candle edges

Matte to remove darker parts of candle highlights

This ain't an actual shot - it's the final setup for all the candle and lighting stuff. Contrast is too high, and there's some glitches with the candle highlights overlay. The nice thing about the setup though, is that I can vary the colour and darkness of the highlights and shadows independantly until i'm happy with it.

First five takes from scene 16. The unprocessed raw footage, without lighting effects and candle shenanigans. They also need some holds added. The first shot is suspect; what the hell is doing with his spoon? Waving it around? The last shot (Bravo!, etc.) is a failed take. He starting falling over near the end. And the arm movement is goofy.

First almost-full test of setup for scene 16. Too dark. And Lord William ain't moving, which makes things harder.

Working on scene 16 now. Gonna be another monster.

Cornelisz shows up in the court of Lord William; Corndog asks him to burn a carriage for him - a model for the centrepiece of the painting.

The original plan was to have the court full of soldiers (see pic with tons of soldiers). After some brain-based storming, we figured that it wasn't appropriate. Needed something more intimate. So we've decided to have the scene at night, and Lord William has a dinner spread (or post-dinner, with the dishes still there). And candlelight. It's going to be a real challenge to pull this off.

Here's a couple rough test shots (candle pics).

Look at dis boid. And dat boid.

The bird's pretty shitty. Which is why it's small in the composition. Birds are really goddamn hard to make. Why did I pick birds? Why'd it have to be birds? I realized though, that our visual-metaphor-bird doesn't have to be seen super close up to work. It just has to register as a boid.

There's just two shots of Lord William left to do, and that's it for the scene. Except three shots of the tiny bird in the little cage. Should be a fast job for those shots, as there's only going to be significant movement in one of the shots.

I finally got to put some of this stuff together for the final version, and slap on some colour and assorted bullshit. It's pretty exciting - stuff actually happens in this scene. Human drama and whatnot.

A few shots of Lord Billy, with some rough post. Threw them together for fun. It's getting boring just shooting without seeing what she's gonna look like. There's some whacky colour experiments going on too.

I'm not posting everything i'm doing/have done; there's about 35 bits of animation in the bag for the scene already. About 10 or less more to go. This scene has turned out to be a real beast. I thought it might be a bit boring, but it's probably one of the least boring scenes in the film. There's actually stuff happening. And drama and shit.

Here's Lord William for 12_29. Just the raw frames - no cropping or tonemapping or nothing.

I'm trying to avoid doing any post work beyond what is necessary to finish the scene. Fooling around with the footage wastes alot of time. That aside, I am doing a little bit of post, just to keep morale up.

Threw on some excessive reverb. And put in a rough sound effect.

Lord William is just a still in this test. I've since animated him. The HDR is a bit much on Cornelisz, but I have a plan for that. There's heavy HDR on the close up shots of Cornelisz, which I did cause he looks less crappy that way. So I have to match the wider Cornelisz shots with the close ups. But the same level of HDR tonemapping looks excessive. So I rendered out alternate versions of the wider shots, with almost no tonemapping. I'm going to overlay those versions on the HDR ones and carefully lower the opacity to blend them, and hopefully find a good middle ground.

Dude, relax from Band Sinistre on Vimeo.

Couple test clips from Scene 12. I'm avoiding doing post work on it. Dont wanna waste any time with redundant post work on an inferior computer. Just sticking to the minimum to ensure everything is workable. I'll do the proper post in one go after everything is shot.

Quit Yelling at Me from Band Sinistre on Vimeo.

More practical storyboards. And a sample chart; the type I use to animate dialogue. I thought it looked a bit Lee Valley-ish, so I sepiatoned the sumbitch. The dialogue is pretty easy, as the puppets only move their mouths up and down. Flap flap flap.

The top part of the picture is a storyboard made while staring into space and drinking beer. And for grants. The bottom pic is a practical, business storyboard. Spot the difference.

Here's some more. This took 9 seconds to do.

Carriages sure have a lot of shit.

Glad we (I) finally stopped goofing around and recorded a professional voice actor for the part of Lord William. Working with a pro is a much different experience than working with a 'pretty-good but not quite a pro' actor. This dude (who also played the main character, Cornelisz) brought all sorts of background to Lord William that didn't even occur to me in any concrete fashion. And these aspects of his character also made the plot make more sense. Fifteen minutes of character investigation by a true pro built an iron foundation for our formerly slightly shaky plot line. Hot damn. The man doesn't do anything less than a rock-solid take, ever. He only gives subtle variations of intonation that may or may not be appropriate for the scene, and can only be inferred from careful study of the context. It takes a year of listening to his work to appreciate the subtlety of the work he gave you.

What i'm trying to say is, I like the guy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dobson_%28actor%29

Dude was in Death Note. Fuckin' tight.

Things are motoring along pretty quickly. Finished another short scene, shot the backgrounds for three other scenes, and shot most of the animated carriage. A few different loops, to go with the horse. It's not very efficient for me to be rendering that stuff out, so not much to post.

We burned us up some black paper. Shot it with a couple still cameras, shooting as fast as possible. It didn't work very well, as the flames were moving way too fast. I stumbled on a neat After Effects trick though. Works pretty good. I think this is how we're going to do the fire. It would be easy enough to shoot real-time fire with an HD camera, but we thought it would look too real. Not hand-made enough.

We also finally rerecorded the VO for Lord William. Sure glad we did. We all got schooled on what it means to be a pro.

The deadline is approaching for the film. I'm working all the time on the thing. No days off. Not posting much though; every hour devoted to doing practical things counts.

HOLY SHIT A HORSE

It's not the best animation in the world (gonna do another take), but it doesn't look stupid. It's a miracle. The horse was always a lurking problem in the back of my mind - the key prop in the film is a carriage. And a carriage has to be pulled by horses. Can't really cheat that. But surprisingly, the horse only took about a day and a half to make. And I got passable animation on the second try. Far out.