Tron Defiance - Last Update

I've thought long and hard about the Tron Defiance film, it has been coming along very nicely but many things have kept getting in the way.  Lots of distractions, like trying to move to a new house, baby on the way, other paying gigs and short films taking up all of my extra time.  I lost heart.

I knew it was something to be proud of, I had kept watching what I had completed in Tron Defiance and I was really excited about finishing it, but time just got in the way, so the project has been scrapped.  Luckily I had finished enough to be a great animation piece to show, so I polished what I had and uploaded it to YouTube.

I'm sad that I won't be finishing it, but I'm also very relieved to not have that production weight on me.  It was quite surprising the amount of work per shot and the workflow was frustrating:

-Animate the character in Daz 3D studio
-Bring animated character in Cinema 4D, apply textures (created in Photoshop) and position correctly.  Then render 3D elements with separate passes for material luminance and 3D data.
-Bring rendered animation and 3D data into After Effects, apply 3 glow layers and 7 lens effect layers.  Position other 3D elements like clouds and reflections into the scene.  Render out the final animation
-Bring final render into Premiere, position into sequence, use Soundbooth for any sound production.
-Render out final piece.

The hardest, most time consuming part were the character animation in Daz Studio and bringing it correctly into Cinema 4D.  That was just nuts!  If one little piece was wrong it would screw up the entire animation key frames and I would need to start over.  Daz Studio was just not a good idea to do character animation in, I probably should have used Poser but I was not familiar with it.  I SHOULD have used Maya, considering THATS WHAT IT'S FOR!  Argh.

I still believe that animated characters were the way to go, but I think I just went about it the wrong way.  I couldn't imagine trying to use green screen actors instead.  Costumes, actors, green screens, motion tracking, composition, refilming, etc., wow, that's like double the work per shot.  And if I didn't do motion tracking, then I would not have been able to have the great sweeping cameras, it would have been pretty flat.

All in all, I'm proud and excited that I was able to finish enough to be a viable demo of my skills, in a way this is part 2 of my updated demo reel which I just released last week.

Here's to the future!



2011 Demo Reel

Massive Update

Lots of great things happening in the last few weeks; I finished several paying gigs which earned me enough money to buy a Canon EOS T3i, yay!  And this camera will be shooting at the Windie City Shootout starting tonight!  We will also be shooting with a 60D as well.  The 72 Windie City Shootout is a film contest in which groups that enter are given a set of 3 requirements (A prop, a line and a location) that have to be implemented into the film.  Then we have to shoot, edit and finalize a 5-10 minute film for the Monday deadline.

So, this weekend is going to be pretty busy, I don't foresee any special FX shots, but we might have a green screen shot for a short newsreel that might be used in the story.  If that's the case then I might be the Director for "Unit B" while the main "Unit A" shoots the actual film.

We have a tentative script all thought out, with enough vagueness to accommodate the variety of requirements that we get tonight.  Both the Story and the Production team are meeting tonight in Carol Stream to go over the requirements, finalize the script, and set a shooting schedule for tomorrow.

In other news, our recent film "Just Add Water" was screened at the 4th annual Land of Lincoln "21 Project" film contest, and we were nominated for 4 of the 5 categories.  While we didn't win any awards, it was still an impressive set of nominations for a film in which I thought was a very small step backward from last year's entry.  In addition to the other entries being a vast improvement over the previous years, we had a large pool of competitive short films to compete against.  Overall it was a satisfying time in the midst of the Decatur festival, I only wish we could have stayed longer.

Other film updates; "Gorgeous Knight" is still being worked on.  I got an update from the studio that the final "chase" scene came back from their animators wasn't good enough.  So they may be looking to me for either technical advice, or to have some hands in it, not sure yet.  They want me to review the current state of the scene and go from there.  Right now they have me near the top of the Credits list as "Technical Advisor" and as top "Animator" / "Special Effects", so that's fantastic props already.

And more paying gigs coming up as well as non-paying gigs (just because I like to stay busy), so no rest for the weary!