Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Going Forward...

I have been able to achieve an acceptable level of production from Poser, so I guess that means we're back in business. I've also had to re-evaluate a couple of positions within the last week.

First, since Poser absolutely refuses to produce the opening shot of the movie, I've had to chop it into layers to get it done. Basically I'm doing it in passes - on this pass, we render only the ground; on the next, the kids walking; on the following, the trees, etc. The shot in question is an overhead tracking shot that follows the three children from our story to a grisly scene in the woods. It will consist of at least five seperate layers. Once each layer is rendered, I'll composite them together in After Effects. I did this sort of thing a lot with the final sequences of RAVEN 2.

At this point, the one minute sequence which I animated back in January - and have been rendering out ever since - is done. I'm using this as my test sequence, and have prepared a DVD with the three versions of it for study. Although my wife says that my character animation has improved since the RAVEN days, the overall look of the footage is taking some getting used to. The desaturated color scheme is more severe than it appeared on my PC monitor. In order to accomodate the 3D, I overlit everything - and on TV it looks almost too bright (especially since the scene in question takes place by moonlight).

Due to the nature of interlaced TV fields, the field sequential 3D version displays more noticable jagged lines on objects than I was anticipating. The anaglyph version requires significant tweaking of the TV's color settings to achieve a tolerable effect (it does work, but the depth effects are not as pronounced as the field sequential version, and ghosting is a fact of life). Maybe this could be remedied by including a couple of setup screens on the eventual DVD.

And, the streaking title sequence will probably not make it to the final film. The style is just not in keeping with the tone of the movie. Maybe I can use it in the trailer...

I keep looking at the thin script sitting on my desk and wondering why I wanted to make this movie so complicated. It's scope, in both the number of principal characters and its locations, are much more ambitious than the two RAVEN films. At this point, nearly four months after starting the project, it feels like I'm standing at the base of a mountain, looking up at the summit - and it's beginning to dawn on me just how much work is going to be required to pull this off. I'm toying with the idea of taking another pass at the script and paring it down, striking most of the peripheral characters and making it more of a three character piece: the little girl Leeta, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Wolfman.

We'll see what happens. The computer's time for this week, and maybe some of next week, will be taken up with rendering out right and left pairs of each layer of this first shot. More as it happens...