Welcome to 27 April to 3 May 2015. The video this week came out of this series of tweets between me and Hjalti Hjalmarsson about lipsyncing someone saying a phrase with a stack of labial consonants over a mere 20 frames.
So, after thirteen hours of work over the Anzac Day long weekend, I now have an end-to-end watchable first draft of layout. It ended up clocking in at 95 shots over 7 minutes and 46 seconds, not counting credits.
That’s a bit too long for my liking.
Rather than leaping directly into a second draft, I’m stopping creative work on “A moment in the sun” for a bit to show it to a few select guinea pigs. Mainly I’m showing it to people and hoping they laugh at the right bits, but there’s this odd psychological effect when someone else is watching the film in front of me – it’s suddenly much clearer when something’s too slow, when things are good, when things are too quick, when a story point could be more concise or better explained.. all because another person is looking at it.
From this process I’m coming up with a list of fixes and tweaks for overall story and individual shots. I think I can get away with condensing an entire early sequence into a brief story point to speed the story along, for instance. I’ll give it a week or two to build up a decent head of steam before I chug along with it again. (Not to mention after that I’m making production-ready assets – fixing Gronky’s rig, modelling scenery, finalising sky and other stuff…)
Since I’m taking a break from working on AMITS to clear my head, I’ve been goofing around with little visual effects shots this week – nothing worth showing off, mainly just trying to do progressively more complicated things as I go. That’s been good fun. 🙂
And now the crappy news: probably because of
too many hours spent in front of a computer late into the evening this week, one of my eyes has become super sore. Even though one eye is still technically OK, I’m going to head off-screen for the rest of the weekend and see if the bad one heals up on its own – hopefully I won’t need to see a doctor about it, but if it’s been two days without any improvement I don’t want to risk it.
