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.