Almost There!

So clooose!

ANIMATION
Okay, so I'm finished with all the content (except for the electricity). I've finished animating all the scenes except for the last ten-twenty seconds, which I'll finish tomorrow. I upgraded everything to 1440x960, so it's nice and big now. The only problem with that is that some scenes, I drew the content with the smaller aspect ratio in mind and didn't draw them as large as others. So, right now I'm going through the process of finding things that look especially blurry and tracing them over on a larger scale. Hopefully I won't have to reanimate too much by doing this.

Finally (finally) decided on what I'm doing for mouths. For this final school screening, at least, I'm just going to be doing closed mouths. The characters will smile, frown, ect. as the dialogue demands rather than try doing lipsyncing, since that would probably take... weeks. If I had been a bit more organized and on top of things maybe I could have gotten it done for this semester, but eh. I already finished scene 1! And most of the characters are pretty easy. Jetpack Dan is almost constantly smiling, Jerry is almost constantly looking a little bored, and Biscuit... is a cat. Staticat is the only one whose mouth will be all over the place.

RENDERING
Rendering might be literally the worst thing in the world- and the worst thing about it is that I've been using my crappy laptop to do it when I should have been using the school's computers all along. Take this last week for example: I was going to render out the 5ish minutes of animation I had so I could show it in class. So, knowing that last time it said it would take six hours, I gave it a solid ten hours to render. I set it least quality to do so and went to bed. I wake up in the morning... eight hours had passed and it rendered THIRTY SECONDS. The worst, right?
  
So, I panicked and ran to the editing lab. There was two hours before class and I hoped by rendering different scenes on multiple computers, maybe I could at least get a minute of new footage to show. I set it up and it says "Oh, sure. Yeah, I can render that entire thing in an hour." So, further proof that I really, really need to get a new computer.

To test how long it might take to render the final product and how much time I should allot, I set the first scene (one of the most complicated because of the puppet-tool'd alien and large crowd scene) to render on best quality, animation compression. It said it would take two hours when, on my laptop, I'm sure it would try to say it would take like, twenty-four or something. So, I need to set aside a solid three days to render as a safety net. Basically I'm going to picture lock each scene as soon as possible and immediately set them to render out while I'm working on other stuff. Yay, multitasking!

Goal: Have everything finished and rendered by Sunday night. Then I'll have Monday and Tuesday to finalize the sound and Wednesday to render it out on Finalcut (which is sooo much easier than AE rendering, ugh). Then I'll have Thursday as a safety-net day to fix up anything I might have missed!

SOUND
I already have a lot of the sound effects gathered, now I just need to line 'em up and make my soundscape magical. Lots of hoof noises, lots of electricity, lots of cat sounds. As I said before I've finally gotten all of the dialogue and... really, I'm very disappointed about the sound the sound booth gave. It ended up sounding worse than the sound I just recorded in my room, ugh. I'll run some filters on them and hopefully I can make it not sound too bad, and the sound effects might help.

I talked to my guy about doing music and he agreed! In homage to the crappy video I made in 2004 that was the basis of Staticat's character, I'm using the song that I wrote for that video- but a sped-up rock version that will play during the opening and closing credits. I gave him the chords, the song and the lyrics (if he wants to use them) and he's going to record it this weekend and have it to me by Monday. He was really excited about it, which makes me really excited! Hooray!

OTHER STUFF
I made my Withoutabox website and started filling things out- it's a lot, blah. I'll get that done while things are rendering this weekend, yay. I also started making the poster- I'm doing a few designs, but one that I like is that I'm taking one of the posters I drew for background scenery (I think we only ever get to see half of it and only for a scene or two). It's sort of a classic war propaganda poster, but with Jetpack Dan saluting the American flag. I'm going to add Staticat (on Jerry's shoulders) spray painting her name (and, consequently, the name of the film) over Jetpack Dan's face. I think it'll be a nice, eye-catching and intriguing poster.

That's it! Hooraaaay!

Chuggin' Along

We're hitting the home stretch! I've completed all the elements (including the new ending) and have animated all the scenes (except for some parts of the new ending). I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from the class despite not being able to show some completely rendered sections that are more than a minute long... thanks to rendering issues. Note to self: Rendering WILL take MORE than eight hours. Ah, the life of an animator. Only thing left to do other than those ending bits are some smaller 'effect' things like crackling electricity and dust bits.

Mouths... blah. I still haven't really figured out what I'm doing there. I've had the mouths drawn for a while, but figuring out how to synch them to the animation without it taking weeks is a little daunting. I might end up just doing mouth expressions that match their emotions rather than lips that move up and down with every syllable without it looking bad. That's going to be fiddled with when I start working more with sound.

Speaking of sound, I've been gathering the sound effects and soon I'll start designing the soundscape! I just need to finish all the animation completely, which I expect to do this weekend. I'll then move on to the soundscape on Monday and Tuesday, and spend all of Wednesday rendering so I'll be ready for presenting on Thursday! So, stay tuned for that!

Andre suggested that I bump the aspect ratio up to 1440x960, since I had been working in a standard definition one. ...Which I'm not really sure WHY I was doing that- I think someone wanted that for a previous project I was doing so I was like "Yeah I'll do that for this, too!" and ... well, anyway, I'm going through and making everything bigger. It's not a lot more work- I have to redo most of the camera angles in After Effects but other than that, it's just changing the size of the backgrounds and since I drew everything very large, it doesn't take away any quality.

I'm going to design the poster soon, which will be fun. Yay!

-Jordan