The painting is done. Her it is. The middle pic is it full wide. Added me some canvas texture. Could almost pass as a painting now.

Almost time to polish this thing off. I think i've already hit the diminishing returns point. Just need to make sure that i'm happy with the overall composition, and that any details added from now on will actually be seen.

To that end, it's time to specifically plan out the tracks/shots for this thing. I had it roughly planned out to begin with; now it's time to make a very specific plan. So that I can work on the composition of detail areas rather than the whole thing.

Had to learn a bag of new hotkeys to make this process more efficient. I knew they were there, I just never bothered. I'm shooting the little dudes in batches; i'll shoot about twenty at a time, on a bluescreen. Then I HDR them (they don't really need it, but I can make the lighting more directional with it), and HDR them again with exposure fusion to produce the most key-able shot I can. Then I drop a harsh matte in After Effects, and save the matte (in 'matte' mode) as a photoshop layer. Then bring it in to Photoshop, and apply it to the dude shot in question. Then 'replace footage' in AE with the next exposure-fushion shot. And repeat. It's goddamn tedious.

The clip is a test-drive of the parallax action. The layer height needs fine-tuning. The lowest layer is too high up, etc. But it all seems to be working.

The pace is starting to pick up with this monster. Lots of copying and pasting elements.

I've got a multi-stage plan for this part of the project. In order to avoid too much festering and time-wasting. Stage 1 is the longest (current stage); pour in tons of non-specific junk in there to get the composition nailed down.

Stage 2; spend a couple of days putting in the more fun, imaginative details. There's a boatload of shit in there already, but it's all pretty white-bread.

Stage 3; make the details for scene segues, that'll be separate, higher-res files parented to the main file.

Got myself back on track today. I bore down and followed the plan I formulated for the piles of gooey monsters. That, plus a few aerial elements, all following the composition plan, made it feel more like a proper composition. It's not even close, but I can feel the suck being dialed down.

The master file i'm working with is quite bright; this pictures are all darkened down. I'll almost certainly ending up doing that with the final composition; one of the things bothering me was being able to see every little corner of Hell. It's more interesting when, in some parts, you can only see little glimpses of shapes in the darkness. Leaves some room for imagination.

Had a crappy day with this thing yesterday; spent alot of time staring into space, thinking of ways to make the composition work.

The above picture includes my composition plan reference layers. There's been a few of them, but these are the current ones. It's awkward making something that's a coherent composition via tons of little layers and details. Not a very painterly way of doing it. But this is how i'm going to have to do it.

Made a bunch of Breugel monsters. Probably not gonna go here, but I slapped them in for fun. They're the wormy-looking things.

The middle part of the painting. I actually had to crack open Photoshop, once or twice, for this part. I've got a general plan for composition. You can see evidence of it in the flame-y bits.

A detail of the centre of the painting.

This part of the project is going to take longer than I anticipated. I'm starting to hit the threshold where I can copy and paste elements. I've already shot about 50 separate elements.

The carriage is a temporary version, for compositional purposes. I've got separate layes with all sorts of compositional reference lines drawn on them. So the thing will feel like a coherent composition when it's done.

All the little dudes in there so far are a bit dull; they're just non-specific dudes there to make it look crowded. I'm going to start adding fun stuff pretty soon.

Goofing around with the Hell composite. These shots are goofy; sweeping helicopter stuff. And the camera isn't looking at anything in particular.

I'm currently working on populating the centre of the thing. Gonna be a lot of work. There's a certain threshold you hit where you can start copying and pasting existing elements. I'm a long way from that point now. There's about six rusty-armor-spear guys in there now, and about 10 'souls'. I want to have hundreds in there. I've got some efficient ways of doing it though; I make a single crude key in Aftereffects of the element, and then just 'replace footage' for the rest of the elements from the shooting batch. And i've got an array of Photoshop actions saved, some tied to hotkeys.

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to blend elements into the painting. The little people are almost the same size as the entire hell set. Their level of detail was obviously way higher. All I did was a 'reduce noise' in photoshop. Which could also be described as 'throw out detail'. I lost some nice detail, but there's not help for that. It worked quite well to smoog all the elements together.

The painting, underway. It's rather a big file; 12,000 pixels wide. The red rectangle in the upper left is 1920 pixels wide, or maximum zoom in After Effects. The photoshop file of the landscape has three layers; the basic picture, then a shadow layer and a highlight layer; i'm painting into masks to reveal them if I need a dropshadow or a highlight from an added light source.

For the specific close-ups for segues within the story, i'm going to be doing some separate higher-res stuff and parenting them to this file in After Effects. Still not enough resolution in this file for that, even though it's huge.

The middle of the thing is going to be pretty busy and full of people. The edges are gonna be more sparse. There's also going to be some aerial elements that'll go in these parts. I.E. flying things. So the stuff underneath ain't so important. There's some suck going on in the left-hand part; gonna be covered up.

Hell, in progress. I'm going to do this part of the movie for the next two weeks. I was losing my work ethic with the other set; better to switch to something fun and keep working. It's all floral foam. With a tealight in the middle for lighting. I'm going to photoshop all the people into in. Gonna be hard. The puppets i'll be photoshopping in are the same size as the Hell set. I'll figure something out. Also have to figure out how to get enough resolution out of the thing. I did the math today; a nine-photo stitch still wouldn't be enough. And it takes my computer about five minutes to save a photoshop file that's 12,000 pixels wide. Which ain't enough. Gonna have to do some shenanigans with AE, I expect. Parenting high-res close up shots to a lower res wide shot.

Also considering having Dave bust out his medium format on the thing. Might even still have his 4x5. That would do it, for resolution.

The baroque window casting was a complete failure. The mold sucked ass. Because I ignored all the basic rules of casting. That's disingenuous; I ignored common sense. I'm not going to try to do it again. I'm just going to build them all, like a man. I'm going to put that bit on hold, because it's going to be expensive.

Lord Billy's House

This window thingy is gonna be the main unit for the set. I'mma make a latex mold and cast a whack of them out of fiberglass resin. Hopefully it works.

Only got a lousy two shots done yesterday. They were hard though. Lots of takes. I ended up filming them backwards, like I often do. Should have done that to begin with. They're the 'close-up floor' shots. The keying needs some serious work. There's some whacked-out colour around the edges. I'm going to wait until i'm on a real computer before I take care of that.

The new shots are at 00:20 and 00:38.

I like this shot. It's the first one done with the 50mm prime lens. It has it's uses.

Scene 7 in progress. I'm doing it out if order; doing all the shoots for each setup at once. So there's some key actions missing. Hopefully it'll all make sense when everything is in there.

Busted out an old scene 4 shot with Johannes, my least favorite puppet. Rendered out the old version, then a new one with a bunch of crap splooged all over it. Looks more cinematic. Suprisingly, the animation still sucks.

A couple scene 7 backgrounds. Finally opened up the window, which has remained closed for the whole film. Guess this is going to be the only scene where it's open. There's one more Interior Studio scene left after this one; barely a scene. Just some quick cuts between Cornelisz and the almost-finished painting. Then that's it for the main set and main scene of the film.

The current scene has other parts which happen outside; probably going to leave them for now. Lord William is close to finished; I might finish him and then knock off the Interior Court of Lord William set. Once I shoot the scenes in that set, which should be pretty easy and fast, we'll be getting close to done.

Scene 7 in progress. Aiming for lots of closeups and quick cuts. Corndog is missing from the wide shot. The first shot ain't quite working; tried to get a bit too fancy. The shot immediately preceding is a CU shot of the sketchbook with a sketch of the gibbet on it (same thing we see in the painting in the first shot).

Scene 14 Corndog shots.

Haven't done any colour correct for him yet.

The animation for this scene has been a real bastard. Just can't seem to get it right. By 'right' I mean a pass. Thought i'd be finished this business last week. Not done yet, though there's only five shots of Corndog. The three shots in the clip get a pass. The last half of the last shot is missing. I got tired of waiting for it to render. But he's got a line of dialogue missing.

I had alot of the old HDR problems come back with this scene. I figured i'd us this scene to have it out with the process, so I could should the rest smoothly. I've got things reasonably solid now. A subtle, mild HDR that's going to stay consistent for the rest of the film. And it leaves the bluescreen keyable still.

Here's the three backgrounds, with candles and shenanigans. Threw out all the backgrounds, etc. I did on Tuesday. I wanted a decent reverse shot (2nd shot) and it kept looking bad. So I figured it might look good if there were candles on the little table-dealie. So I redid all that stuff.

Wait, there's more!

Processed a brighter version of the candle shot. Then processed another high-contrast version for use as a phota'shop matte for it. Keyframes the opacity of the result in the AE background to make it look like the candlelight is flickering.

Final Plate (above pic)

I use the shot with the candles as it's own mask, to reveal the day for night ambient exposure underneath. So's I get cool shadows with detail in them. Instead of being pitch black.

Then I blow out all the candles, and turn on my ambient light, and shoot it again (bottom pic). I then run it through Videocopilts awesome 'Day For Night' AE preset; top pic.

Spent all day making three backgrounds for scene 14. That's all it needs. Pretty short scene; Corndog is painting away, then Anna-Maria shows up with her dress all torn up. Corndog' all like, 'what the hell'.

These are the most complicated backgrounds i've done so far. I'mma explain everything I did for these ones for fun. I could have done something simpler, but I felt like it. Doing fun stuff is good for morale.

There were many different exposures for each background.

Firstly; the scene shot with candlelight, including tiny candles I made and lit. Then I blow out the tiny candles, and shoot it again with the light from the unseen candles. So that I can photoshop out the flames. The above pic is the main exposure, with the tiny candles.

Working on the backgrounds for scene 14. The still of Cornelisz in this shot is just a temp, pulled from another scene.

Trying to do a thing with animated candles. That part of it is working fine. This shot ain't quite working though. I did a focus pull for this shot; shot the background, then shot the foreground bits where the table and candles are separately. Tried to then mask it out, but it ain't quite believable. Not quite buying the candlesticks either. Put them in separately. Gonna have to think of another way to do this. It looks fine in a small compressed clip, but full res HD is another matter. It's completely ruthless; any and all of the suck is visible.




Here's a wee candle test. It's a bit crappy; the camera is moving around and I was blowing on the flames to make em' flicker. So they flicker a bit too much. But it's pretty easy to do. Bumped up the iso and lower the F stop until I could get a decent exposure with a fast shutter speed. Put candles in front of a black background. Turned all the lights off. Then just set the shutter to 'continuous' and held it down. Since the candles are already on a black background, just had to bring the frames in as an image sequence into After Effects, and set the sequence to 'add'. Or maybe it was 'screen'. Either way, it only takes about 10 minutes.

Scene 19. Added the exterior studio in ruins.

Scene 2. Gonna be better with music and sound and whatnot. I would have liked to colour correct the moving leaves, and the birds in the last shot. But my computer is getting too crashy to be running multiple effects on multiple things.

Computer is a litte too old. It's getting a bit ridiculous. And it makes working incredibly slow.

The orange-looking first part is a stand in for the painting. We'll see something similar within the painting.

Scene 2. Was a bit too much work. Though it didn't take me long to ruin-ify the house.

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.