Greetings from sunny 29 November to 5 December 2015. We hope you enjoy your stay. Have some pictures!
Last Sunday, Gronky’s glitchy curve-based mouth finally got replaced with a mesh-based mouth. The rig is much more intuitive and predictable than before and just as expressive. And I reckon it looks much better – more like a big plasticine pad. 🙂
The mouth was the last job to do before I could start layout. I screeched into a microphone for a bit after the mouth was done to get some scratch, then struck out and began doing layouts of rough shots to pin down framing and staging. I also made sure I did thumbnails of shots the night before so when I sat down to work, I wasn’t going in cold.
Over the course of the week I kept adding more shots (one shot a day was my absolute minimum target) and before I knew it, I had nine shots and thirty seconds of edited footage. I hit the weekend slightly ahead of schedule, right at the point where the action-comedy stuff kicks in. I’m a little bit afraid of how that stuff will turn out because I haven’t done much of it before, but the only thing for it is to give it a shot and stay upbeat in the face of repeated failure. 🙂
This is such a small project that I’m not even using a spreadsheet to track shots or dialogue in layout this time around. It’s nice to just draw and make the thing I drew then see whether it works in the edit, rather than losing my will to live amongst spreadsheets and correctly-named files and so on. I’ve worked at streamlining my writing and pre-visualisation process over the last 18 months and it’s feeling nicely lean now.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading and please hit me up with any questions or remarks in the comments or on Twitter. 🙂