Last Scene?

It's possible that I put together the final scene of the movie yesterday. We'll have to see how it plays. If it ends the film too abruptly, I'll have to manufacture a closing shot. This final sequence is 465 frames long; because just about every character that has appeared in the movie is present, it's rendering out at about 50 frames at a time before it crashes. Since I have to render a right-eye view also, we're actually talking about 930 frames that have to be produced. The movie should clock in around 19 minutes with end credits... More later...

Planning for Post

With the end of the narrative within my sights, I've been working on Frankenstein vs the Wolfman at an accelerated pace. I'm genuinely excited by the prospect of working on it again, which is something I haven't felt since I started production. The time it takes to animate and render these things is so painfully slow, it is almost like watching paint dry.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have basically abandoned the script at this point and am generating action beats as I go. The events do line up with what was outlined on the page, so I'm keeping the recorded dialogue intact.

If I can keep up this rate of production, I could be done with the animation in about two months.

With that in mind, I've begun to start planning for post production. I am having a screening tonight with the post-production team - Andy, Mitch and Other Andy - all of whom will be contributing to the sonic landscape of the film. We'll be spotting the film for sound effect placement and trying to find out how much of the sound fx can be found in sound effects libraries and how much will have to be recorded.

Last week we recorded some ADR with Tom Zack, who plays the Frankenstein Monster, due to the fact that he's leaving us to move to Arizona soon. The recording consisted mostly of pained grunts and groans that we'll be able to lay in during the action sequences.

Once the movie is finished, I'll have my work cut out for me. I need to cut and score a trailer to show off what the film looks like in motion. I'll need to color correct the footage and fine-tune the visual end of the film, then get the multiple versions prepared. And, I'll need to get cracking on DVD menus and special features. That's one area specifically that I haven't given much attention to yet, as there really isn't a whole lot of behind the scenes footage you can provide when you're working on an animated movie on your home computer.

Score Meeting; Plus, Nips and Tucks

I had a chance to meet this past weekend with Ryan Wummel, who composed the scores for both Raven and Raven 2, about the job of scoring Frankenstein vs the Wolfman. Since we've been working together on these movies since my last misbegotten live action movie, Gothik, in 1998. In the intervening years since Raven 2 (for which Ryan won two film festival awards for "Best Score"), Ryan has gone back to school for music theory and music production in hopes of improving his sonic talents. He's also invested in some new equipment which ensures that his Frankenstein vs the Wolfman score will benefit from a fully synthesized orchestral sound.

In screening the 16 minutes or so of completed footage for it's first audience, I was made aware of a couple of small problems that needed to be corrected for the story to connect all the right dots. So, I spent some time re-doing a couple of shots, rendering new shots to clarify a plot point, and was also able to create a new sequence that continues the countdown to the day the movie will be finished.

One of the things that I am dealing with is the possibility that I'll have to throw out the final three pages of the script and improvise an ending; the scripted ending is proving to be too convoluted and technically difficult to pull off. To that end I'm using the existing audio tracks recorded by the performers but making some substitutions to shots, props and scenes. The movie will still end virtually the same way, but I'm just taking a slightly alternate route to get there.
Stay tuned...

The Light at the End

I have just finished rendering a sequence that takes place in a bar called The Scabbard Inn, where our diminutive heroes go to investigate a possible wolfman suspect. With this sequence in place, we're now looking at a full narrative run of 16 minutes and 22 seconds. The only thing left is the "Final Battle" sequence between Frankenstein and the Wolfman. I actually started working on this project starting animation on that sequence first way back in December of 2004, so it's kind of fitting that this will be where it wraps up.

This final battle will be more complicated than those in either of the two Raven movies, involving more characters and more action beats. One of the glaring drawbacks I see when I look back at the Raven movies is how hurried their climaxes are. Even though they took forever to work on, when played back in realtime they go by in a flash. I'm hoping that I'll be able to correct that error with Frankenstein vs the Wolfman and actually deliver something that has a little more payoff.

I am starting to think about the audio end of the movie and am trying to gather sound effect libraries together and have preliminary dialogues about the direction of the music.

Today I came across a couple of items that may interest you that were buried deep within my computer - test renders from the proposed Raven 3-D project. Before I settled on doing Frankenstein vs the Wolfman, I initially was planning to do a third Raven movie - one that would wrap up all the loose plotlines from the first two shorts. In the end, those dangling plotlines dictated the story and I ended up not having enough interest in it to see it through. And, because it was the third movie in the series, I was planning to do it in 3-D. So, get out your 3-D specs, because here are a couple of test renders that I did to see what Raven 3-D might've looked like.

Passing the Fifteen Minute Mark

Today, the running time on Frankenstein vs the Wolfman in 3-D is fifteen minutes, fifteen seconds. There are two major sequences left to do that will connect the first section of the movie to the second, leading right up to the still-unfinished final battle. I can begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. With any luck, the movie might be finished this year. I expect it's running time will be about 25 minutes.

One of the things that I've discovered in the production process is how to correct mismatched footage that is produced when a Poser camera move produces a lens distortion in one of the left or right eye views. The scene I'm working on now had one such error in a shot where the camera dollys in on the Frankenstein monster; as we push in, the right eye view was distorted so that instead of the 3-D pair of images falling side by side, they were misregistered up and down.

I came up with a solution in After Effects that involved adjusting the scale of the right image so that it would match and overlay the left. This approach left a blank space in the top and bottom of the frame which shouldn't be noticable once viewed through 3-D glasses.

There was an earlier shot I had to correct as well, when our three heroes are talking with an inquisitive policeman; in this case, I had positioned the 3-D "window" incorrectly and had to slide the images together for better positioning within the 3-D frame. This resulted in some "windowboxing" on the sides of the shot, but it happens so fast you won't even see it--unless you're looking for it now that I've told you about it!

One of the next scenes I'll be doing invovles the inkeeper Mr. Talbot. Of course, his name is another nod to The Wolf Man. Initially, there was a scene that took place in a pawnbroker's shop, run by a man named William Henry Pratt - which is Boris Karloff's birth name. That scene (at this point in time, anyway) has unfortunately been dropped.

New Screenshot Added

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

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.