Am I getting anywhere with these character studies? Not sure. They're fun though.

It takes a pretty strong conscious effort to draw differently than I usually do.

I'm okay with the subtle shoulders-up animation. Larger body movements remained a challenge.

There's some pretty super-random sound bytes in here.

I'm almost done developing a system for producing the characters, that involves as little work as possible. Copying and pasting from an ever-growing library is the idea.

Tried out some hand-painted backgrounds; they overall look was a bit cold and computer-ish looking. I'm not sure if it's an improvement or not.

Also tried a more cartoony figure.

Emoting like Stallone. This stuff works good. One 10 minute drawing, cleaned and vectored in Illustrator, then mashed up the wazoo with AE.

This ain't a 'general arsthetic' test. I ain't in love with the aesthetic here. I like it well enough in it's own right, but it doesn't feel appropriate yet.

This here's a test of the AE puppet tool. Not too shabby; beaucoup animation, 1 indefinatly animatable and editable drawing. Groovy.

I went into the studio with the intention of drawing something different. Instead, I drew more of the same. Gotta try harder.

I rocked the Hell Painting for a good solid day today, then knocked off some character samples for the proposed cartoon. They ain't anybody in particular - just getting in there and mucking around. It's become pretty obvious that characters come first - background style is completely subordinate.

We've been doing post work on Hell Painting. More shots too. Been too lazy to post anything.

We've also hatched a side-project; super whacko samurai cartoon. whacko 'cause it's got some strange unique elements. Well, unique-esque at least. Did an atmosphere/concept comp today; here it is. It's a little dark and heavy-duty.

The drawing shot, with some Photoshop shenanigans going on. I like it, but it would make a continuity nightmare. I'll work on that stuff more when we don't have any more studio time left. It also works better with less whacky camera movement. So's you can see what Corn-dog is up to.

Scene 11 in progress. The black frames between shots denote missing shots. This one has been pretty fun so far. Quite a bit different from the last scene. And it's going faster. Doing the simulated drawing is a pretty good time. The arm motion is a mix of animation and stills.

Johannes in action. Animating this scene is getting a bit tedious. I'm almost at that dangerous 'I know how the thing looks now so the magic is gone' stage. Which makes it harder to work.

I think Johannes looks pretty good from profile. I'm going to try to show him from this angle as much as possible.

The idea with this little sequence is that you hear the tied-up guy making i'm-tied-up sounds, but you can't tell what it is. Suspense or something.

Not thrilled with the way Johannes turned out (the new guy in the pictures). Attempt #3 on the face got a pass. Impatience and trying to hurry things up wrecked the first two.

He looks like a pouting pig-monkey.

But I like his hat. And his cross-chest-buckle cape thingy. I made it so the over-the-shoulder shots (see bottom picture) would look good.

Some shots from scene 4 with the missing background put in. I like them allright. They seem less dark with the background in there for some reason.

Otherwise, i've been shooting the backgrounds for the next scene, making props (Cornelisz has some items in this scene) and working on Johannes. Could have been done already, but I blew it with his mask. Was in too much of a hurry - now I have to do it over. Really hoping I can be filming him by Thursday. May not happen though.

Scene 11 background plates, all in the bag. Shot all the ones I need, and all the ones I could think of. A bit brighter than the last scene. More fill overall.

I'm getting much better and faster at this; for the background plates in the last scene, there was days of festering and light-nudging and mind-changing. I lit this one up in 10 minutes. Though I did do some tests at an earlier date.

Also, when processing all the photos, I put the results into an After Effects composition with a character to see how they fit. The tendency is to make them look like nice pictures on their own; that's not the point. They have to be pretty muted so that they don't compete overmuch with the characters visually. So I ended up muting the whites and softening the blacks.

Some background tests for the next scene, Scene 11. The original plan was complicated and atmosphereic. I'm thinking a clear light source will be easier.

Gave Corn some top-down lighting and chucked in some old photos. Curious about how he's going to look out of doors. Should be allright.

Barely different from the last one. Added the missing Cornelisz parts of this scene.

Polishing off Johannes while I get geared up to for the next scene. Should be able to animate his parts real quick. Most of the time, he just stands there with his back to the camera.

This scene is turning into a real monster. I originally thought it would be minute or so. Now it's apparent it's going to clock in at 2 1/2, minimum. These shots are almost all real hard; the one wherein the bird lunges took 5 hours of practice animation and prep work. But i'm knocking them down one after the other, in one take.

The one where he stands up and turns around with the bird real slow was a lesson; wasted alot of takes before I bore down and really figured out.

The animation ain't fabulous, but i'm okay with it. Looks like puppet animation.

I scrapped the shot (see previous video clip) where he swishes the bird around. Too odd, and the bird looked almost cute. Can't have that.

Bird is ready to go. Did a few animation tests. It's a real bitch. Not the armature, or the fact that it's covered with feathers (though those things don't help). It's hard to make it move in a bird-like fashion. The bottom picture is the bird with HDR, or how it's roughly going to look (will be more painterly effects) in the painting.

CHICKEN OF THE DAMNED

Screen test for the bird. I was worried that it was too big, and that it's head was too big porportionally. Looks alright though. I'm gonna finish it off now. Try to ignore the yellow foam.

The background for the main angle has been bugging me. I think I found out how to make it work, though. Made it lighter, grayer, darkened the area behind Cornelisz, and made the gradient on the left (haze) stronger. And most importantly, ran a 'remove grain' filter on it in AE. That fixed it right up. It's hard to tell in a small picture, but it a full size 1920x1080 frame, it looked a bit rough.

Cornelisz, revised. Extensive suck-reduction. Still needs a detail or two. There's a couple shiny spots on the face I gotta eliminate.

It's pretty easy now to spot the villain, I think. There were some comments made about a certain spokes-pirate who sells spiced rum.

Currently upgrading 'Cornelisz'. Fixing all the stuff that's been bugging me. New mask, new hair, new sleeves, extra body bulk, etc. Also revamped the animatronic face movement. Gonna be controlled via dials on a little control panel. Vastly superior to the first barely-working version.

Bird is also almost done. Not brilliant, but pretty reasonable-looking.

Back in the studio Thursday. Corn's sleeves might be too light (almost white). Besides making him too 'busy' looking, they're also serious spill-bait.

3 rough AE comps, (not necessarily the right background and lighting). With a little digital camera movement. Key is rough.

Another one. Got lots in the bag now.

One of our Lowell hotlights fried yesterday. A wire was rubbing against something. Shorted out, melted a hole, stopped working. Just when we were finally ready to really go full-steam ahead. We had to light the bluescreen with one light. We tested it and found it keyable, though. Nothing every works perfectly it seems.

The garbage matte is cutting off a wee bit of his head. Just a quick little comp. We like it. We've established a quality level; not spectacular, but we like it. We did 7 shots yesterday. They're just the model huffing and puffing with some head movements, but hey. That's alot of stuff in the bag for one day. Gonna see if we can't polish off his shots within a few days.

I was having a hard time with the arms; there's tension on them due to the rope. I remembered something I saw from the 'making of' of an old Japanese stop motion. I trick they were using to animate moving grass. Works real good. Just secured a thread spool with a nylon insert lock nut, tight enough that the tension don't unravel it.

We've been having problems with greenscreening. We thought we had a good result, but we really didn't look close enough. We're using an AE plugin; Keylight 1.2. Which is a great pice of software, that's been used for a zillion Hollywood films. Point being, it works just fine.

The main problem is always the same; we key out our green, but it also removes some pixels from our puppet, resulting in a hideous dancing grain. It's been frustrating, because it feels like we're doing everything right. We've been reading the instructions. And Dave has the photographer training. Switching the Keylight view to 'screen matte' shows us that we've got a clean result. Likwise with 'status view'. The only thing that killed the grain was switching to 'Intermediate view', which disables the spill suppression. So our problem is spill. But we put the puppet on a black base (instead of a green one); same result. The tiniest bit of reflection from the not-quite-matte black was giving us a teeny bit of spill, which meant grain. We figure we can disable the spill suppressor - doing so results in a bit of a green halo around the subject - and then clean up the rest with different keying tooks, choker mattes, etc. But we don't want to do it that way. The most recent shot took 20 minutes to animate. If it takes 45 minutes to key, that's an obvious problem. What we want is to pick our matte colour, and poof, have a passable result right away without touching a setting.

We tried using blue instead. It totally solved the problem. There was a teensy bit of grain in a test case wherein our foreground blue was very different from our background blue, and the foreground blue area was larger than it needed to be - we could have blocked it off to get a minimum of spill. But a proper test was totally fine. We like to do a few tests, to see where the threshold is for suckage. We're not toally sure why blue works so much better, but it does.

Here it is. Our first animation element. He'll be one of three elements. The animation ain't very inspired or great, but in this shot, he'll be almost completely covered by Johannes in the foreground. A good shot for practice and out-bug-working.

The keying is rough. Just for see how it looks.

We've been delving deep into greenscreening and keying. Not nearly as easy as we thought. That is to say, it looks good, until you look closer. I've found the answer to successful greenscreening; read the manual. Keylight explains all and in depth in the .pdf that comes with the plugin. It's pretty powerful software - you can key out some pretty heinous stuff with that thing.

I haven't posted anything in while because i've been too busy working. Which is probably a good sign. What we been doing? Made another puppet - the 'Tied-Up Model'. We used to call him 'the Chained Model'. But rope works better. So we call him 'Chainey'. I crapped out another animatable head in record time. He justs opens his mouth. But that'll do for this guy. I was racing to finish his costume for a greenscreen session, which was a mistake. I ended up altering his jacket substantially, redoing his sleeves onces, and his vest three times. Slow is fast, I have to remember.

I like the hat. It's period.

Been doing loads of other work too. Too busy to post any pictures. Which is probably a good sign. I'm trying to work 10 hours a day minimum, and 3 hours a day on those days when i'm at my day job. It's pretty exhausting. Been more like 12-13 hours a day recently. There's always more work to do; yesterday, for example: dipped two sets of hands in latex multiple times, built them up, etc, poured resin many times for the 'tied model's' head, made the eyes, located their final positions, epoxied them into place, built the neck armatures, tested out various joint epoxies, tested out various faux-suede staining methods, worked on redoing Cornelisz's head motion control pins, etc. etc. etc.

A couple little colour tests. We stumbled on a neat HDR technique; altering the colour of the original three exposures. Does some neat stuff to the colour; in particular, it leaves brighter colours bright (like props) and sucks the orange out of the wood. These aren't great examples of this technique. But you get the idea.

Here's the final lighting rig. Tons of cards on everything. People sometimes ask me how big the set actually is; see boot in set picture.

After hours and hours of lighting, we've finally settled on the final lighting for the scene. And with small variations, most of the scenes in this set. There's no longer anything we can or want to do to it. We finally got the light on the back wall just how we want, after going back and forth and fiddling with it dozens of times. This particular shot won't likely even be used in the film; Dave is going to tweak the colour and levels of it, and us it as the 'master' for the set. Meaning we'll make the rest of the shots match.

We also shot the majority of the background stills for the current scene (Scene 4). So we have something that will actually be in the movie. Far out.

Putting a bunch of plates side by side to see how they much up. Gonna take alot of finicky colour correction. See middle, bottom image; quite a few shots will just have a background like that; not much to see, and out of focus.

The lighting sure is finicky. The HDR processing makes it more so. It's pretty much done, though. We're getting reasonably consistent results, and keep going back to the same set-up. It's not as simple as making it look good; there's other considerations too. A great deal of the backgrounds that'l constitute most of the footage will be just the back wall, up close. I've found that too much contrast in the back wall is distracting when you stick a puppet image in there. For example. We're also not really sure exactly how warm or cool the thing is going to be overall. Probably pretty cool. It's more evil.

We've put some gels on our lights; tungsten to daylight conversion. Dave was finding that he had to push the raw exposures harder than they should be pushed to correct the colour. HDR does some pretty whacky stuff; one picture will come out great, and another nearly identical one, with the light moved slightly, will come out dark and murky. We're learning some stuff though.

On this one, I crudely photoshopped in some haze. I think I like it.

Three variations. Lighting is finicky.