The End, or, On to New Beginnings

Due to all of the people working on this project being so busy with other things, we've decided to kill this project as unfeasible. We may still finish some of the CG sections for fun, or maybe make a trailer, but the project as a whole is at an end.

We'd love to make a movie, and may one day, but our schedules just won't really allow this for the time being.

And, like I said in my last post, pictures always make posts more interesting, so here's one:

Rendered in Cycles!

There is good news though!
(Especially for Redwall fans)
While it's hard for us to all get together for extended filming sessions, we can fit bits of CG work in much more easily as it doesn't have to be done all at once. (Evidence all the bits of CG done on this blog) Most of us have read most of the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, and I had the idea to try to make a 3D model of Redwall in Blender. As far as I know, no one has really made a good model of Redwall Abbey. It won't be easy, but I think it's a more achievable project, and it would be really cool if we finish it. We've started a different blog for that project here: http://projectredwall.blogspot.com/

In the meantime...

While it's rendering I'll put some more details on here.

 The file for the first scene is made up of four blender scenes. I have one for the world, one for the satellite, one for the asteroid, and one for the star field. If you're wondering why I can't combine them, and reduce complexity, there are several reasons. One reason is that it uses two render engines and then composites them. Another reason is that it makes it a lot easier to apply the right effects to the right parts in the compositor. For example, I use a glow effect on the world, which I think looks good and really improves the scene, but that glow effect looks really weird on the star background, so I had to find a way to selectively apply compositing effects.

Animation of the satellite and asteroid is really hard (at least for me, that's one of my weaker areas) because they are in separate scenes, using different render engines. This could be solved by converting the asteroid to Cycles, but the reason I haven't is that it doesn't look as good:

That's with the same lighting as the satellite. Doesn't look nice at all, does it?

Anyway, it can be done, but for now I'll let it alone. Video coming soon!

Minor details

It's kind of interesting to think about the little details, and get some specific ideas about the final product. 

(I know, I should be working on the script, but I've been making progress on that too)

Here are a number of random thoughts;

We should make a total of 12 scenes. I was originally thinking we would have 16 scenes, but I can't think of that many things to fill those spaces, so 12 would probably be better. The reason for 12 or 16 is that in the disk menus you can only fit so much, and I think you can fit 3 or 4 video tiles / icons across, and not more than 2 high. That means that you could fit 6 or 8 scenes on one menu screen, and I think 6 would work better anyway.

Color grading: We need to do this right. Once we decide what clips we are going to use, we need to take them, and exactly match all of the footage. (Except possibly the night scenes) No mood setting yet, we just make all the clips match (white balance, basic contrast, etc.) (probably rendering them each individually before putting them back into the video sequence editor) Next, we do more advanced color grading, day to night, and color mood setting. On the final output we need to do a final grade. The purpose of this is to make sure it only contain legal colors. It may slightly detract from the desired look of the film, but I want this to only contain legal colors. It probably won't matter so much since this will mostly be played on computers or DVD players, but it's good practice.

You might want to check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG_k2wz9mcU&hd=1

We are shooting for a general or PG audience. The only thing we need to worry about is violence. Here are the violent scenes I can think of: 1. The first gunfight. This will be set at night, only one shot will hit, and it will be dark, so not a lot of detail will be shown. 2. The car chase. the following car gets hit, swerves, and gets hit again, blowing up. Again, not a lot of detail will be shown. The first shot will hit a tire, the second shot will hit a gas tank. 3. The car stop. This is when we think that the car has a tracking device on it and one of us gets out to look for it and gets shot at. (They miss) 4. At the CIA when they are surrounded by CIA guards. We could put some action here, but there shouldn't be much.

Check out scene 7 in the script! I've worked a little on it, and I like the way it's going.