LED lights

While I was at it I ordered two LED lights from MPJA as well (saves on shipping)
Warm white: http://www.mpja.com/90lm-Warm-White-SMD-LED/productinfo/19567%20OP/
(3600K)

And cold white: http://www.mpja.com/90-lm-1-Watt-White-Star-LED/productinfo/19585%20OP/
(6000K-6500K)

These are both 90 lumen SMT LED's, and my thinking here is that you could build a 900 lumen light for $20 + about $10 for case and circuit board. You could have 10 of each, and switches to set it to various color temperatures from 3600K to 6500K! (though luminence across the spectrum would be uneven)
I'll be trying out these soon, and seeing if they are feasible for set lighting. Also, while I can build one of these rather cheaply, I'm planning to run it on 12 VDC or so. Not everyone has 12 V power on set. I have more power supplies than I know what to do with (Just kidding), at least 12V ones. Also, most of mine are set for the standard 13.8 VDC, so I may need to put some sort of regulation in there... things get complicated... This might also be worth looking at too, but is a lot more expensive and not as bright: http://www.mpja.com/LED-High-Lumen-12V-Module-White/productinfo/18875%20OP/

That's all for now!

Stepper motor coming soon...

O.K. so the first stepper motor I got from MPJA worked, but didn't have enough torque for what I needed. I measured the coil resistance, and found it to be about (I forget now, I think it was about 70 Ohms). I ordered a new motor, and it should get here in two days (Wednesday).

There are no particular torque specs I found on it, but comparing it to similar motors, it looks like it has about 4 times the power that the old motor had. This is the new motor:

http://www.mpja.com/Stepper-Motor-NEMA-17-12V/productinfo/18734%20MS/

It has a specified holding torque of 3.2 kg/cm, which I think is still rather on the low side, but we'll see.

Also, that's holding torque, which is usually somewhat more than rotational torque.

I also ordered a driver IC (actually a few, I'll probably burn out at least one...) so I'll have a nice neat driver circuit instead of the big mess of transistors I had on the breadboard before.

http://www.mpja.com/ULN2003A-Darlington-Driver-IC/productinfo/19604%20IC/

This does have a nice data sheet, very helpful!

New post about LED lights coming soon.

Scene Music

It's still up in the air whether we will make our own music or use royalty free music (for the most part anyway). I'm thinking that we will use available music for the most part, so I've been going through music libraries to fit music to scenes. I started looking for music for the car chase, and came up with some for the other scenes too. Here's what I've got right now (this is just the first pass, anything that could potentially work, and it's late, so I'm not as picky)

First scene (outer space):

http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100856

Burglary:

http://audionautix.com/Music/SneakingUp.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/StalkingPrey.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/SuspenseAction.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/Touchpoint.mp3

Car chase:

http://audionautix.com/Music/ModernRockBoy.mp3 One of the most promising.
http://audionautix.com/Music/LineOfFire.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/Delusion32.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/LongLiveDeath.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/HighTension.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/Pentagram.mp3 Cutouts around :40 could be good for slo-mo
http://audionautix.com/Music/RP-FightScene.mp3 Promising, pauses here could be good for slo-mo]
http://audionautix.com/Music/RockYourWorld.mp3 nothing special
http://audionautix.com/Music/RockerChicks.mp3 big sound]
http://audionautix.com/Music/TheHunter.mp3 too short, maybe for the second chase?
http://audionautix.com/Music/WhatsItToYaPunk.mp3 Mood change at 1:20 then back

End credits:

http://audionautix.com/Music/RememberTheHeroes.mp3

And here's a piece I liked for no apparent reason, http://audionautix.com/Music/SlimAndNone.mp3

I didn't like a lot of the car chase ones. It's going to be hard to find a piece to fit well and sound good too. I need to go back and listen to them with real speakers too, I was using Bose headphones, and a lot of them sounded like they really had too much bass, so I need to determine whether it was the headphones or the music.

What do you think? These are just rough ideas for now.

Response curves in Blender

This isn't exactly new, but it's something I don't think that many people realize, and I may want to reference it again, so I'll put it here.

In the scene properties side panel, (this section is between render and world) under 'color management' there's a set of render buttons labelled

Default     RRT     Film     Raw     Log

Try the film option. It really does a pretty good job, and the other options can be good for quick and easy color response adjustment.

Storyboards

I've been working on some storyboards for the first scene. I think that if these work out we may use these instead of the (rather tedious) written camera movements. There will still need to be some written descriptions, but not nearly as many.

I have slightly simplified and re-written the first scene to make it quicker and easier to film, as well as being easier to follow. (always very important!)
 Remember, the script is not locked yet, so feel free to put in any changes you think would help (always commenting, so we know what you changed)

Here are some of my first attempts:

O.K., so it's not great, but you try drawing in a moving 15 passenger van!

Feedback wanted!

Smoke reference

I know I'm going to need this later on, so here is a really helpful article about smoke and explosions.

http://www.blendernation.com/2013/03/12/how-to-render-large-scale-smoke/