Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Production Update: The Haunter...



It's been a while since I've given any real update on the progress of this project. While I'm reluctant to give away too much of what has been going on, I still feel the need to share a little of the experience. Though I admit it's not very exciting. :)

Production has been slow. Too slow. It seems I find ways of delaying working on the movie, or perhaps I get bogged down on details of it, or (most recently) I find technical problems that I dwell on and feel the need to fix (actually, it helped a lot to fix my most recent PC issue, but you get the picture.)

Anyway, I had a bit of a breakthrough this last weekend. Finally got a fair bit of filming done. It's early days yet (did I say that? I've been working on this for months!) but I am really quite excited with the results so far.

The story is a dark one, and I'm trying to reflect that with the use of light. I'm also having a lot of fun with focus (iClone's depth of field to be precise... close enough) and that is adding to the mood of the shots. I must say I'm quite impressed with what I've produced so far (which is contrary to how I felt a few weeks ago, so phew!!) And no, that picture up there is NOT a screen shot. :)

I've also spent a bit of time on the animations. Mixing bvh/bought ones with hand made motion edited ones. It takes a LOT of time and patience, but well worth the effort.

Lastly, I've opted to do this film in 720p (1280*720). I haven't done anything of that size before ('The Movies' maxed out at 768*432, unless tweaked), and while this is beautiful to look at, it has some "issues". Disc space was the first thing, but a nice new terrabyte drive solved that. But now I find my cheapo version of Sony Vegas can only export up to 800*600... so it looks like an upgrade is in order.

So there you have it. Work progresses. Slowly, to be sure, but things are picking up.

My apologies to my voice cast and those that are waiting for this to be done. It's still got a long way to go, but it IS progressing. :)

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Nahton's 'This Basic Pack Life'



http://www.moviestorm.co.uk/community/index.php?page=videos&section=view&vid_id=103345

I just wanted to highlight this BRILLIANTLY funny entry in the Moviestorm Basic Pack Contest. Literally had me laughing out loud as I watched it. Comedy doesn't get much better than this.

You can Vote Here and I encourage you to do so. :)