I'm finally finishing Lord William. Gonna start animating him right away. I like his costume. Gonna be fun. What isn't going to be fun, however, is keying him out. We originally planned on using a greenscreen. We switched to blue. Probably gonna have to bust out the green again for him. Because he's blue. Which was a little dumb. Green is even going to be tricky. Might have to get crazy and use magenta.

Recent backgrounds. Sure is a lot of them.

Scene 19 in progress. The last little outro of the film. I've since added more shots. There's some neat lighting effects too, but couldn't render them. Computer is getting too crashy.

Scene 15. Missing a couple elements. Like crows in the roof shots. Thought it would be about 6 shots originally; turned into 19. But it didn't take very long, all in all.

The scene is cooler with voice over and music. And sound would be neat too.

There's one more scene that involves the exterior studio. Gonna shoot that. Then i'mma wreck it and make the 'in ruins' version of it. Then I can get rid of the thing. Running out of space to keep all this crap.

Couple stills from the scene.

Did about half an assload of work today. Too much to get into. I was gonna shoot all the exterior studio shots in one go, but I found I had to get into and finish a scene before I could say I was done. Which is what all this junk is.

Gonna have to wreck the exterior studio when i'm done - gonna have shots of the same thing, in ruins. So gotta be sure i'm done with it.

And another one. Day for night action.

Exterior studio backgrounds. Here's the two from another scene.

Found a new trick for comping HDR stuff together. Its drudgery, but it works.

Finally over the hump for this not-fun set.

Main wide shot in progress. Still need to shoot the sky. Using a random one as a temp.

Couple more details, then it's done. Finally. The grass is hair. Pig hair (from bristle brushes). It's furry.

Though this set was gonna be fun, but it's been pretty damn tedious. Having to tear through it with willpower.

Carving the pink styrofoam was the worst. And the clay tree. I hate clay.

Cranked out the plague doctor in record time. 10 hours from start to done shooting. Course it's pretty easy cause he's standing there doing nothing but looking creepy. Here's a full size HD frame.

Almost the same as previous post, except there's two cow shots. I cut them a little brief. Can barely see them. This beast of a scene is pretty close to done. Parts one, two, and three. This being part two. Then I get to see how the snappy transitions between parts work.

Got two solid days to finish. Gonna make the costume for the plague doctor in this scene tommorow. Should be pretty fast; gonna be a crude leather costume. Mask and huge hat will probably take a bit longer.

Cranked out a new set in record time. Gotta have disciprine. I did. it's done. This part's gonna be a close-up fest. Ba-jam bajman bajam (bajam being the sound of a fast cut from one close up to another).

Assorted shots from part 1. Shots of Cornelisz are temp. Not gonna bother rendering out the actual animation myself. Leaving that for Mike. Shots ain't in order either. Gonna be about 11 total.

That's it for my share of this part. On to part 2 next.

Handed the project (gibbet scene) over to my mang. Gonna bat clean-up on his super-mac. Some of the stuff looks good on a giant screen. Some, not so good. Gonna finish part 1 tommorow, and build and shoot the set for part 2 on the weekend.

Scene 6 part 3 sketchpad shots. They were pretty fun.

Lots of After Effects shenanigans going on.

This part of the scene is inches away from being done. Almost done Scene 6 part 1 as well. On to part 2 next.

We managed to do maximum balls-to-the-wall animated HDR. Hooray. This is a reprocessed shot with new settings.

Damn embed code is cropping my clips. Clink on the big blue link for actual clips.

Reshot the animation for Cornelisz for this here shot. Definately worth it. Didn't work with 30 frames of animation, cutting on the hold. Now its 56, and we can cut on the movement.

A shot from part one of this bit, with a little colour action. What is that, soft focus? Romantic.

The first buncha shots rudely edited. Colour is all over the map. Trying to do a kinetic cut-on-motion kind of thing. Hence the Weinerwold. Gonna be tight when Mike gets his high-powered mac and experienced hands on them shits.

Got tired of fighting with the background plate behind Cornelisz for this scene; tried just cranking out a set element to stick behind him. Should have done it to begin with; took me under an hour. Photographed it with the wood glue still wet and the stain fresh. Just did some Photoshop sketching to figure out what rakish angles the thing should have. The computer cheats are often more trouble than they're worth; they're easy to begin with, but usually result in many hours trying to make them match the other elements.

Pics are raw mid exposure, and tonemapped result shopped into background. Still a little crappy, but there's gonna be all kinds of blur on that thing. There's some dark edges around the wood frames on the left hand side of the building. Gotta go. I'll do that in designated festering time.

Stopmo-ilization from Band Sinistre on Vimeo.

A challenge for this scene is going to be making the 'cheatin' (keyframed photoshop stills) match the actual stop-motion animation. This clip is a test of possible solutions. Most of the problems/solutions aren't visible on this small low-res clip. Really have to see it in full HD. The second clip has a 'wiggle' expression on the rotation of the gibbet - 24 times a second. To make it more choppy and less computer-y. There's also a 'match grain' going on, with the sample pulled from actual stopmotion in another shot. Also a tiny bit of flicker added to the whole thing.

Another test. Different settings.

Another one. Looks nice n' crispy at full res.

Finally found the holy grail for HDR tonemapped animation. 16 hour day yesterday. 11 hours today so far. But it's worth it - he looks way less shitty than he did before.

Dec 16 Asst Goodies from Band Sinistre on Vimeo.

Biblical day. 13 hours. Started at 5:45. Way to beat to write anything. But I'M HAVING A GOOD TIME.

Untitled from Band Sinistre on Vimeo.

Scene 6 Part 3 In Prog (no editing)

Damn, this stuff's hard. I'm perfectly happy with how this stuff looks rendered small or low res, but when you see it in full HD, it's so crystal clear that it becomes really obvious it's one element cut out and being animated on another. Bugging the crap outta me. I guess this is 'grain matching', a part of compositing I haven't gotten into yet. I'mma see if the boys can fix it.

Otherwise, i'm destroying all the work I gotta do.

A'ight. Gonna start embedding clips via Vimeo so they looks crispier and junk.

1B_04 In Progress from Band Sinistre on Vimeo.

Did loads today. Scene is almost done. Didn't have time to render it all.

1B_04 with more stuff moving around in the background. This is a fun-ass scene. Sure like this way of working; 'building' elements as I feel the need for them and cramming them in there.

1B Shots with prisoner dude. Lots of cheating goin on.

I've got nothing better to do right now, so i'm gonna lay out all the After Effects stuff going on in this shot for shits/giggles. Cause i'm bored. There's nothing CGI in here (and the whole film) except atmospheric stuff - haze, fire etc.

Background

An HDR pic of a local spot. There's an adjustment layer on it with a brightness contrast going down. All layers are set to 3D; background is at 5000 pixels.

The Stake

It's about 10" high. HDR photograph on a bluscreen. Took a separate exposure with different lighting with the camera in the same spot. Brought that pic and the HDR pic into AE, put Keylight on it, and set it to 'screen matte'. Saved frame as photoshop layers. Used the resulting matte as a photoshop mask to cut out the stake. Put it at about 2500 pixels back.

Banner(s)

Same deal; HDR pic and separate exposure for bluescreen. Cut off the bottom of the flagpole, and put it and the banner on separate layers. In AE, did a precomp with just the banner. Keyframed a mesh warp to make it wave. Put the precomp into the shot, and then stuck in the flagpole, and parented it to the banner. They're at about 2000 pixels back or something.

Dudes

Same deal. I photoshopped out the torch and hand and rotated it about 20 degrees to the left so it wouldn't sit right in front of the stake. I stuck a 'CC generate light rays' on the torch. Mike has, or is getting, a pack of pre-matted fire, including torches. He'll put one of those on there when he gets this project.

There's a smoke dealie going on behind the stake; it's a white solid with a 'generate fractal noise' going down. Set it to 'screen' I think. Evolution is keyframed.

Copied the smoke dealie and put it in the foreground, changed the evolution keyframing and messed with it a bit. I had plans to put another dude on the left, but I liked what the foreground haze/smoke did for the composition. So I left it.


Camera

There's a camera going on here two. Can't really remember what the settings are. I think depth of field is enabled. It's got an expression-tool wiggle of (0.5,5) going down.



I sure like this way of working. Building up a shot from various elements. Kinda like painting.

Here's the clip. In tiny low res grainy quality. I could probably post it on a video site and embed the thing, but i'm too lazy. And youtube is gross.

There's a wee bit of 'wiggle' on a couple of the shots. I'm sure digging the expression tools in After Effects. It's ruthless with the syntax (like programming language) but they sho' work good. Instead of keyframing a little bit of camera shake with the 'wiggler', I just bust out the wiggle expression. No keyframes. Which makes life a lot easier. Having to redo the keyframing wiggle-tool every time I want to adjust the overall camera movement is a pain. Now I can change the overall camera movement all I want, and the un-keyframed wiggle expression tool just goes along with it.

Two more shots from 1B. Only eight in total. Scary dudes. These screen grabs are exactly half the size of a final full frame.

The symbol on the banners is pretty weird. I was trying to come up with something in photoshop involving a pic of a helmet and a crow. And I made some kinda early-Modernist automatiste monster. So I slapped it in there.

First four shots from scene 1B. Still need a little work, but close to final. I didn't know til recently that if you import a .psd file into After Effects, it preserves layer masks. Which is handy. So I can do a quick temp job on the masking for the dudes. And somebody else can go back in later and improve them.

Wish I could upload in higher res.

1B is happening pretty quick. Not much longer now.

Scene 1B wide shot comp test. Gonna need some photoshopping. I bought the horses. They're little plastic ones. They ain't gonna move, so why not. Might try to put dudes on them. Via photoshop.

1B soldiers comp test. Dudes pictured may be final, assuming Dave doesn't hate my lighting too much.

This is a fun-ass scene. Gonna toss in a couple up-close wide-angle shots. Kind of a Eisenstein 'Alexander Nevsky' kinda thing. This thing should scare kids pretty good. In a good way.

Sho' is hard doing this stuff while making a living and having a career.

Tests for scene 1B. Gonna be real fun. Gonna shoot an assload of soldiers, matte em' out, and stick em in. Then gonna parallax the shit outta them.