Here’s an unprocessed render of a frame from Scene 1 Shot 10: Gronky has just seen something in the distance. Now, what about that 30 March to 5 April 2015 then…

First, hooray for the Easter long weekend. For me it is four days of shunning invitations from relatives in order to bang out as much layout as I can without having the rapidly mounting stresses of the dayjob chomping away at my energy.

Gronky’s buggered shoulder last week turned out to be a mysteriously unparented bone.

So far this week I’ve managed to get Scene 1 laid out. Between that and Scene 7, that’s two scenes down so far.

The more layout I do, the quicker I’m getting. This is nice. I was looking down the barrel of at least an hour per shot in layout earlier in the week, but the last few shots I’ve managed to put together much quicker – around twenty minutes each – with no resultant loss of quality. Noice!

The more I work on layout though, the more I feel the need for production management.

Scenes have dependencies – characters, sets, props and dialogue. Right now I’m keeping track of everything as a spreadsheet, but I’m tempted to knock together some quick and dirty production management software to keep track of it more comprehensively. (A large part of my dayjob involves building and maintaining content management systems, so I’m comfortably experienced with this sort of thing.) But then it becomes a question of whether the time and annoyance saved from having a more formal production management system is more than the time and annoyance it’ll take to design, build, bug-test and use it day to day.

Which is also time I’d lose from actually making the short.

A decision for another time, perhaps. Right now it’s time to grab some food then figure out exactly what I need to scream and grunt into a microphone to make Scene 6′s layout happen. Or possibly I’ll lie in bed to rest up and try to figure out what to establish with Scene 4.