It’s just 1 to 7 May 2016, don’t be afraid! Have some new art!
Remember last week when I said I was ready to jump into 3D layout again? Turns out that was wishful thinking. There’s a step between pitchamatic and 3D layout which I thought I might skip for expediency’s sake, but it turns out
I don’t want to skip it after all.
That step is the 2D animatic, also known as the story reel or the Leica reel. It’s where the movie starts to get timed out. In the workflow I’m using (borrowed from the Blender Institute), the file which begins as the 2D animatic eventually gets filled up with more and more complete footage until finally the movie is all done. That file, masteredit.blend, now exists. Woo!
To kick that off, I made a spreadsheet for the shots and another spreadsheet for lines of dialogue, based almost entirely on what was in the pitchamatic. I reference the relevant storyboard but the shots have all new shiny names now based on a scene, a camera setup (shot) and which instance of that camera setup I’m up to. If I’m using camera setup 2 for the third time in scene 1, that makes it shot 01_02_C. These will go on to become parts of filenames when I start moving 3D assets around.
Since I already had storyboards and most of the dialogue from the pitchamatic, it took me a single day to rework the pitchamatic file to cobble the animatic together.
Compared to building the animatic from nothing over a couple of weeks, this was much nicer!
The rough running length is
about 3:40. It is no longer the monster seven minute animatic I was facing down a year ago. I
almost cried with relief, truly.
Over the course of the week I’ve been reviewing the animatic to figure out what’s missing, what isn’t timed right, what doesn’t work as well as it could… that sort of thing.
The animatic has shot names attached to markers to make reviewing easier.
And here’s how that works – set Metadata to stamp output, tick Marker..
…then put markers in your timeline. M places a marker, select and Ctrl-M renames it, G while selected moves it back and forth. Noice!
The intercostal strain makes it uncomfortable to sit in a chair for too long (especially after sitting in a chair all day at my dayjob), so I’ve been doing most of the review work from bed. Nevertheless, I have a to-do list! Much of it involves audio work.
This has also been a week for switching technologies. I’ve switched from Bittorrent Sync over to Subversion to synchronise the movie’s file repository across multiple computers. There’s also an ugly but functional Subversion client for Android which lets me export single files to phones and tablets if I want to have the latest animatic in my pocket.
And after Tumblr advertised discount toilet paper at me I’m checking out WordPress. The dream is to host all the things on quollism.com, ad-free, but still allow people to participate.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
