Time flies

Well, it’s been over three months since I last posted here. Fortunately it’s not for lack of progress to report. On the contrary, it’s mainly because I’ve been so busy making progress. And because the stuff I’ve been busy with has been the kind of thing that is more interesting to actually do than to write about, at best.

 

I’ve gotten a lot done in terms of animation, rendering, and compositing. I’m pretty happy with the way things are coming along. Unfortunately, Renderfarm.fi is still dead (hang on, now that I check on it, it seems that maybe they’re back in action… I’ll have to follow this up and report on it later. It’d definitely be nice to know they were working again!) so I’ve been doing all my rendering on computers in my house, mainly the dual quad core 2008 Mac Pro workhorse, which is turning my man-cave into an oven as the summer approaches.

I got a nifty little lightning/electricity shader setup from Omori-san (Ekakiya) written in OSL for Cycles. He’s also produced some awesome camera-mapped crane shots over Shibuya and Shinjuku that would be literally million dollar shots if they’d been shot for real. Those are really going to look great.

I’ve also been working with musician, record label exec, and general all-around superhero of sound Rob Mayes on the sound. So far we’ve mostly been just organizing what sync sound was recorded on the shoot and doing some field recordings to fill in the gaps, but there’s a lot of sound design to be done, particularly for that robot dog. Rob is also helping me get hooked up with some composers and musicians who can help with the soundtrack.

I’ve already had one very exciting positive response from a composer I contacted whose work I would love to use in the movie. It’s a little too soon to talk about that, except to say that this person is a true pioneer of electronic music, and it’s looking fairly promising that I might be able to use some of her work in the movie.

So that’s what’s been keeping me busy for the past three months. The next few months will be even more busy, as I struggle to get the movie finished while simultaneously working towards a diploma in VFX from Animation Mentor. That’s right, I’ve gone ahead and taken the plunge to register for the first 12-week course, in which I’ll study Maya and Nuke and I’m sure a ton of VFX industry common sense that I’ve managed to remain oblivious of working on my own. I’ll try to blog here about that from time to time too.