Finally, an update! A new image from the gypsy flashback sequence has been added to the gallery. The sequence finished rendering two days ago. I spent today going in and doing some color correction within Premiere and animating & rendering a short addition to a shot, originally finished months ago, that had been bugging me.
Also, I've discovered that my plan of attack for post production has been shot to hell due to someone's short sightedness (or my lack of understanding the software) at Adobe. It turns out that Premiere Pro shipped with some nifty color correction plug ins that After Effects 7 doesn't share - meaning that after I go and color correct my footage in Premiere, once I bring the entire project into After Effects, it loses my changes. I'm testing out the possibility of rendering the whole movie out from the Premiere timeline as one gigantic AVI file prior to importing it into After Effects to apply the 3-D effect
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Happy New Year!
It occurred to me recently that the original teaser trailer that I mocked up for Frankenstein vs the Wolfman announced that it would be finished in 2006. Ha! My work process basically limits me to working on it on Sundays, and now that the holidays are over I'm ready to move back into production. Actually, I've been working on it for the past couple of weeks, generating approximately 15 seconds worth of viable footage. This is a milestone actually, since this officially completes the "gypsy flashback sequence", and which was the connecting tissue between two large chunks of the narrative. All of the shots in this sequence have been memory intensive as they utilize many props and characters; in order to avoid crashes I've had to turn off bump mapping completely and disable texture mapping for background figures.
Friday, December 8, 2006
Memory Problems Plague Poser
I have finally finished approximately 22 seconds of footage from the gypsy flashback scene after rendering since the first week of November. Yeah. At some point I installed a Windows XP update that severely compromised Poser's ability to render images. I've been rendering the footage as PSD files, but after the update, Poser somehow ran out of memory (on my system which has 1GB of RAM) while rendering a single frame. The workaround to this problem was to render out uncompressed AVI files, which for some reason Poser is able to handle. But... but... it can only go approx 70 frames before it would crash because of a memory issue. So, I've had to split these scenes into 50-60 frame increments and come back to the PC every 8 hours or so to shut down Poser, reopen the program and the file and pick up where I left off. Tedious. Hopefully, future sequences will be less memory intensive and will render faster.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
It's Been Two Months!
Yep... production has halted again due to the annual holiday hiatus (I'm speaking of course, of Halloween). We had visitors from another country over for a couple of weeks in September, plus my sister's wedding, then Halloween party preparations to consider -so work on the movie has been put on hold. Things are settling back down now, so hopefully I'll be able to get working on it again before the next holiday hiatus which occurs between Thanksgiving and New Year's! But take comfort in knowing that I have not abandoned it!
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
It's Always Gypsies to Blame for These Sorts of Things
I've started work on the Gypsy Flashback Sequence, which was one of those eye-opening moments back during the conception of FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN that got me fired up about doing the movie in the first place.
I don't want you to go thinking that the whole movie is a homage to the Universal Monster movies - our Frankenstein and Wolfman characters share names with their more famous forefathers, but their origins and character are much different - but I did want to acknowledge a link. I wrote a short flashback sequence where we see the future Wolfman's fateful encounter with a band of gypsies and I thought, wouldn't this be a perfect place in the movie to do a short sequence in a style as close to the Universal classics as I can? The computer has finally finished rendering out the first 8 minute shot of this scene, a nice, atmospheric angle on a small gypsy caravan camped out in the foggy woods, and it looks pretty much like what I imagined it to be - in black and white, and 3-D to boot!
It's not all I wanted (nothing ever is) due to the limits of my poor, overworked PC's computing power. The resultant file had so many highly detailed character and object files loaded that it would lock up during the render. I finally had to forego shadows, then even bump maps (thankfully, the characters are seen from a distance)! To compensate for the lack of detail, I used only one global light dialed way down low to simulate moonlight. It doesn't look half bad to my eye - not feature quality, by any means, but decent enough for my purposes here. I don't have a screen capture for you yet, but will post something from this sequence soon.
I don't want you to go thinking that the whole movie is a homage to the Universal Monster movies - our Frankenstein and Wolfman characters share names with their more famous forefathers, but their origins and character are much different - but I did want to acknowledge a link. I wrote a short flashback sequence where we see the future Wolfman's fateful encounter with a band of gypsies and I thought, wouldn't this be a perfect place in the movie to do a short sequence in a style as close to the Universal classics as I can? The computer has finally finished rendering out the first 8 minute shot of this scene, a nice, atmospheric angle on a small gypsy caravan camped out in the foggy woods, and it looks pretty much like what I imagined it to be - in black and white, and 3-D to boot!
It's not all I wanted (nothing ever is) due to the limits of my poor, overworked PC's computing power. The resultant file had so many highly detailed character and object files loaded that it would lock up during the render. I finally had to forego shadows, then even bump maps (thankfully, the characters are seen from a distance)! To compensate for the lack of detail, I used only one global light dialed way down low to simulate moonlight. It doesn't look half bad to my eye - not feature quality, by any means, but decent enough for my purposes here. I don't have a screen capture for you yet, but will post something from this sequence soon.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Voice Recordings Complete; Revisions Made to Footage
The final voice recordings have been delivered, so now we have the dialogue for the full movie in house. I've been taking the last couple of weeks to go back and fix some niggling visual errors that have been bugging me in the initial batch of footage.
The scene in question takes place out in front of an inn at dusk, with the inn's windows lit from inside by lamplight. In the original footage, it appears as if each pane of the window had been painted bright yellow. The fixed footage makes it appear as if the entire window is lit from within by a warm glow. In order to acheive the effect I wasted time with another screwup; I painted all the windows green in order to greenscreen them out and lay the glow effect behind them; this produced very ragged jags around the figures that passed in front of the windows and had to be re-done. The second attempt involved removing the back of the model so I would have a nice alpha channel to work with. Needless to say, that method produced the best result.
I'm anxious to get back to work on animation but work and other domestic issues are taking center stage; in September, my sister is getting married. In addition, a number of family members are flying in from over seas, so it's sure to be a month full of activity.
Once I do get back to FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN, I'm thinking of working on a scene from late in the movie that I've been looking forward to since I conceived of the project - a black and white origin-of-the-Wolfman sequence that's been planned to be done in black and white.
The scene in question takes place out in front of an inn at dusk, with the inn's windows lit from inside by lamplight. In the original footage, it appears as if each pane of the window had been painted bright yellow. The fixed footage makes it appear as if the entire window is lit from within by a warm glow. In order to acheive the effect I wasted time with another screwup; I painted all the windows green in order to greenscreen them out and lay the glow effect behind them; this produced very ragged jags around the figures that passed in front of the windows and had to be re-done. The second attempt involved removing the back of the model so I would have a nice alpha channel to work with. Needless to say, that method produced the best result.
I'm anxious to get back to work on animation but work and other domestic issues are taking center stage; in September, my sister is getting married. In addition, a number of family members are flying in from over seas, so it's sure to be a month full of activity.
Once I do get back to FRANKENSTEIN VS THE WOLFMAN, I'm thinking of working on a scene from late in the movie that I've been looking forward to since I conceived of the project - a black and white origin-of-the-Wolfman sequence that's been planned to be done in black and white.
Friday, July 14, 2006
Spot Checking for Audio Effects
Movie status: a couple of weeks ago we sat down and went through the finished segment of the movie with a fine toothed comb and made a comprehensive list of what audio effects will be needed for the movie. I made a list a couple of pages long, so this should be an interesting process. Andy and Rob want to record all new foley and effects work instead of relying on library sounds. We're due to begin that in a couple of weeks.
In other 3-D movie news, we skipped out on the Superman Returns Imax 3D Experience due to the fact that only 20 minutes of the movie were rendered in 3-D; next week, however, signals the release of Monster House in "Real-D" digital 3-D, so we'll be making a trip into Schaumberg to see that in a digital cinema. Also, Night of the Living Dead 3D will be getting a nationwide release this fall to 1500 theaters - which means it may actually play in here in Rockford!
And, Frankenstein vs the Wolfman got a mention in this month's issue of 3rd Dimension Graphics, an online Poser eZine.
In other 3-D movie news, we skipped out on the Superman Returns Imax 3D Experience due to the fact that only 20 minutes of the movie were rendered in 3-D; next week, however, signals the release of Monster House in "Real-D" digital 3-D, so we'll be making a trip into Schaumberg to see that in a digital cinema. Also, Night of the Living Dead 3D will be getting a nationwide release this fall to 1500 theaters - which means it may actually play in here in Rockford!
And, Frankenstein vs the Wolfman got a mention in this month's issue of 3rd Dimension Graphics, an online Poser eZine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
