Update...

So, we are coming down the home stretch for this presentation. I will meet with the Fusion staff one more time to finalize all the videos and to go through the actual presentation itself before the actual meeting with the Comcast reps.

When I started putting together the project videos, I decided to make a font change although they never explicitly chose a font for me to use, but they did specifically want lower case...

But I decided to try a different font, Fireye Headline. This font, was thick enough to show off some really cool shine effects, and gave a slick futuristic feel without being overdone. But yesterday we talked on the phone and they said that they liked the font, but they still wanted me to change it... to Franklin Gothic.

Such a standard looking font, I cringed. The way that they present their business is mostly flash and bling, and I really wanted to emulate that. But besides the point, I realized that this is something I need to get used to and that I just need to do it whether I believe in it or not.

So, very nicely I just gave my reasons for choosing this font, and I that I would be happy to change it. And so I did. It doesn't look bad, I just think that now it doesn't match the rest of the flare in the videos. But, moving on...

I've also come across my largest After Effect project yet, and probably the most inefficient project as well. I've dealt with relatively small projects in the past, nothing ever this big, so my project organization and efficiency is untested at this magnitude and I'm really getting into problems. Specifically I keep getting AE errors after about 200 frames, and working within the project is difficult and slow. I have several 2k+ resolution images I'm trying to work with and it's causing some strain on my system.

To deal with this, I've gone back and rendered out some compositions and used the rendered frames instead, which has helped, but I still get errors at about 550 frames. And I still haven't seen the actual animation in its entirety which I know will get several revisions once I see it in action. The animation is zooming out from earth past all the planets, past several galaxies to view the universe as a whole, so there are many high res images being used, especially of earth, and a whole lot of particles.

But, now that I think about it, the way I will approach this is render out the background animation seperately (BG, stars, and particle nebulas). Then overlay the planet animations taken seperately. I did this before with the valentine's project for Fusion, the BG flashing hearts animation was really intensive, so I rendered that out seperately which enabled me to render anything on top of it much, MUCH easier!

The other animations are done, and I did all of them on my laptop. But the big one won't open on the laptop because of the memory requirements so I have to finish it at home on my main computer. I'm almost done with College, only one term left, but I'm still struggling with finding the time in between work and school to get this big project finished.

I can't imagine all the extra time I will have once school is done! :)