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This blog is soon to be obsolete. You'll note that the video clips are gone too. Gonna have a proper website up soon. I'll the 'you are ell' when we gut that up and running.

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.