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.

Starting tomorrow, i've got three whole days off in a row again, so it's back to the tree farm for me. I got a head start this evening by doing some housework with my current composite - separated the diagonal 'down the hill' part from the rest, and shrunk the images a little.

The little red square above is about the resolution we'll actually be using - you can see that the actual file is a monster - about 120 megabytes of information. I've only shrunk them down to 1500 pixels high, which makes the file way smaller but is still lots of resolution should we choose to redo it on HD in the future.

The 'sideways view, trail through the woods' composite is coming together pretty quickly. It's advanced enough that it's starting to feel to me like an actual place.

CEDAR GROVE

I'm having fun with atmospheric effects - a bit of light showing through the cedars.

F U N

Now I get to build a West coast looking cedar/salal bush infested forest. I'm going to rock some semi-opaque gradients to get some nice misty West coast action.

CEDARS

Now I get to draw cedar trees, which is good, because they are my favorite type of tree. Trees are good.

THE HILL

Work continues. Ferns and logs and copying and pasting and ink and blah blah.

'NUTHER ONE

Started work on another shot - a fun one. This is the side view of the trail, or left-hand fork that the man takes at the request of the child. The intention is to make it creepier, darker, and more claustrophobic. All this crap will be whizzing by at a fairly good clip, as the man is starting to hurry at this point.

LOW ANGLE

And this is the shot in progress. Most of the trees are recycled from the previous shot - I drew the distant trees in the small top-left picture full-size and full-colour originally (as opposed to misty and far away); now, when the character has come closer to those trees, I can use the same drawings. Like i've done in the larger above image.

And this is a clump of low-angle trees.

I'm back in the tree farm. This, this is a branch.

Low Angle, Inside the Woods

I'm rocking a new shot. Two of these - one near the entrance of the woods, and another farther along. This here is a quick mock-up.

I thought it'd be fun to take stock of all the forest elements i've made so far - there's quite a whack of them. They all represent mostly multi-layer full-sized drawings.

I've got enough of a 'tree vault' now that I can reuse them in various combinations to fill space, without the repetition being evident.

I've been working on filling in the blanks on this composite as well - here's the composite, and all the separate layers. Lotsa crap.

DISTANT STUFF

I'm in the process of finishing off my two big composites - filling in the little details. Just finished adding the 'far-away' elements of my 'sideways-woods' composite.

As people who know us may know, we were previously working on huge project entitled 'The Hell Painting', a 14 minute + stop-motion film. It was put on hiatus due to the immense size of the project - too much work, three years of projected set-building required alone.

However, it has occured to me recently that we might do this project, after finishing the current, but in the same style as 'The Third Night'. I.e., we would scrap the expensive and very time-consuming stop-motion approach, and do it all 2D After Effects style.

The above pictures are some photoshopped storyboard panels from 'The Hell Painting'.

I finally got the composite to the stage that it would be advisable to set the hue/saturation and brightness/contrast of all the various layers. It's nice to finally see a little depth in the image - before setting the levels, it was a cacophany of colour and detail.

Did some flower-bushy-thingys. Got tired of just trees and blackberry bushes.

More bush. Whoop-de-doo.

Here's a few happy trees - they're three little friends.

Well, that's all the work for today. I just finished importing a flattened image of my other composite into my current one, for continuity reference, colour matching, etc.

In the top image, the far trees were drawn specifically as far-away trees, with the requisite simplification and distortion. Im the bottom image, i've just shrunken full-size tree drawings. We'll see if it creates a continuity problem or not.

I'm working on the main .psd file for this shot now - finally get to see it come together after days of tedious tree making. I've only scaled and placed the trees - I still have to desaturate them and lower the contrast to impart the illusion of distance.

I'm going to wait until I get most of the trees and the sky in place to do that. From this point of view, the light is coming directly towards the viewer - i.e. the trees are going to need to look different from the previous composite, which had lighting from the side.

I drew a whack of new trees today; here's the first two to roll out of the shop. Near the eand of my road through the woods, the trees are going to turn to pines.

More trees, hooray.

A quick composite to see how the shot is coming along.

TREE FARM

Well, i've got another three days off in a row, so it's back to the tree farm for me. It's not too tedious all considered - its fun to watch a tree go from a quick pencil sketch to an ink and brush drawing, to a photoshopped image with texture and shading. I've already drawn seven trees today, and I hope to have them all photoshopped before I leave.

The two above trees were fun to do - they are complete inventions. Some of my trees are half-traced from my reference photos.

I've decided to hold off on that other 'looking down' shot, as I have't finalized how I want the big wide field to look. Instead i'm going to work on the 'track forward with man through woods shots'. Here's a reference mockup I made using elements from the other shot.

I'm starting a new composite that will fill the background for likely 2 shots - a shot of the man's legs, looking straight down. I did some tests and calculations, and i've determined that I have to fill this much space with crap. Oh boy.

Here's my big panorama, with the back elements doubled up to fill the space (they don't need to be wide because they won't move much in the final shots). There is alot of crap in this composite - it's just a matter of filling the foreground blanks now - I don't need any more damn layers.

DISTANT TREES

I made the most distant layer, the trees on the skyline. It started as the shittiest drawing i've done for this project so far - good old photoshop magic.

Did another little .AVI test - still looks good. This here is the first frame. My intention is(was) to use a 16x9 screen ratio. But, as per usual, i'm falling for the panorama. 4x3 and 16x9 just feels claustrophobic in comparison. Of course there is no monitor with anything like the ratio pictured above - there would be black bars. Luckily, I dig black bars too.

FAR AWAY TREES

I did all the fartther-away trees today. Involved lots of photoshoppin'. I found that it's quite hard to draw distant trees and make them look good, due to the subtlety of their form. So I chested a little and did some tracing.

PINE TREES

On the left side of my 'panorama', i'm gonna have some friendlier looking pine-like trees. Here's the first one.

This is how i'm doin' my drawings - layers of drawings on tracing paper, that are then assembled in the shop.

I stretched out the sky, for to show the part of the panorama i've been working on.

THE WOODS

My forest is starting to come together, though there's still the layers of distant trees to come. There's also some more work to be done on the foreground; hence the 'floating' fallen log. I also did a quick .AVI test - the motion looks much better than I expected - the illusion of perspective is quite reasonable, despite the flat 2D layers.

MORE BLACKBERRIES

Here's some blackberry bushes. More of them.