Boring post...

Really sorry to post another entry with no pictures or evidence of progress but lately the team have been solving issues and editing our live action footage. I'm going to break it down into what has been accomplished over the last week, as it seems like nothing to the untrained eye reading my blog this week...

Monday - All brought in our set objects. Meeting in preparation for zoo trip. Problems and solutions discussed and documented. Shots and angles planned out. Camera pan tests. Phone call to London Zoo. Gareths project.

Tuesday - London Zoo trip

Wednesday - Transferring footage from camera and videocam to PC. Organising footage and photos into folders. Backing up project. Picking favourites. We tried to figure out a way to achieve a stop motion look with the photos or footage we had. Alec cracked a method of acheiving stop motion look with photos:

1. Import first image of sequence into photoshop - set as background layer.
2. Import the following photos in the sequence as layers.
3. Individually adjust each layers oppacity 1 at a time in order to align with background layer. (remember to slap the oppacity back up once done)
4. Re-size canvas to compensate for loss of frame.
5. Make sure all layers are visable and save as PSD.
6. New project in premier - settings - 24FPS.
7.Import PSD as a sequence in premier - NOT footage.
8. Slap layers into timeline.
9. Resize each frame to the same size.
10. Change duration of each frame to 1sec, and resquish them back together.
NOTE: If you want 1 second of footage then this requires 12 frames. 2secs - 24frames.
10. Export as movie - uncompressed - millions of colours +
11. Re-import movie and change duration of movie to 1 second (assuming your dealing with a 12 frame segment) The project is set to 24fps so it will double your 12 frames and hold on each one for twice as long.
12. Simply copy and paste to loop shot.
13. Export as movie shot.

A long long process but the it provides awesome high quality stop motion results. It also stops the twigs at the front of the cage moving around too much as it would be way too difficult to composite. We did this pretty much all day.

Thursday -

Massive meeting about our storyline. 3 shorts idea scrapped, instead make 1 slightly longer short. Storyboarded & decided on dialogue. More of the "GAY" photoshop, premier routine. We then had the fun task of recording dialogue! We casted Dave Ross as Cornelius, Alec as William, and Tom as McGlone. Finalised disc. Went to transfer audio from CD to PC when hit with an error - CDA. files not compatiable! We had to spend a good hour or so converting them all to MP3's on a shitty MAC. Me and Alec then stayed late matching up the audio with our finished shots in one big premier file. This would give us an idea for timing and allow us to know which shot to import into maya for each lip sync and character animation piece. We had a really good animatic/final live action edit at 6.30pm.

Friday -

10.30am - file corrupt. **** sake. I was too angry to continue work on Team Pedro and worked on Gareths project. Me and Alec stayed late once again and got the live action edit finished with audio for a SECOND time! Was worth it though, it's better now if anything, and ready to be animated on top of. Hurrah!

So yeah that was the boring but much needed week. Next week should be much more fun - painting weights, importing sequences in, lip syncing, and animating!

Stay tuned.