BSA324: Skyway Robbery (Progress blog) - Chris Sutton

Oct 4 - 2D animation, The power of the blue pencil I have been working on the 2D planning for Skyway Robbery. By having the 3D in the backgound layer in a JPEG sequence, I can plan the character movement/animation using the old pencil trick. As it is just planning and won't appear in the final cut, I am more focused on getting movement and character right and being sketch is not a problem.

Oct 3 - 3D images, computer loading problems and a need for speed I have been transferring files from the render farm onto other hard drives so I have back ups and putting the EXR files through Adobe After Effects and turning them into JPEG sequences. As I mentioned yesterday, MOV files simply slow harmony down too much.  Some computers in the boom room seem to be struggling to move my EXR files around. Should try to avoid using these computers as they could stuff up my files. Time is of the essence, need to get the 2D animation done as soon as I can but I also need to get more hours on the internship. This is one hell of a juggling act.

October 2 - Files too big, better computer needed I have been mostly just putting the exr files from the render farm through Adobe After Effects to turn the files into files that harmony can use. Some of the files seem to be too big for harmony. MOVs are simple too big and lag out the computer when used in harmony. I have resorted to JPEG sequences to display the 3D models. While have to do more tests.

October 1 - More rendering Mostly just rendering today. After getting all the indoor scenes on the render farm yesterday, I spent 3 hours today doing minor fixes on outdoor scenes before putting them on the render farm. Hard to say when they will be done as the jobs seems to be moving slowly, I don't have many computers on render to and some twerps on the other end are ruining renders by turning off their Deadline slaves. I can understand it when there is a class but if people are just doing it outside class hours cause they can't be bother moving I'm going to have to start hiding angry messages in my animation.  Having more trouble organizing the final voice actress. Sara Matika is the actress who has argued to do Julia's voice for me. Problem is that both Sara and Carlos are busy people so finding time is difficult. Really kicking myself over throwing away last Tuesday thinking that I had been overbooked. This is just something I have to work around, I'll l...

28 - 29 September - The start of 24 hours (Hopefully) Went through the animatic, needed some tidying up as mislabeling was making it hard to sort files and scenes. All are now set up with a numerical order, making keeping track of my progress a lot easier. Ticking off shots as I go. A circle means I have that task done, a cross means that component is not required for that scene.

24 September - Exhibition 3 and other thoughts on the project While I have gotten the exhibition up, I can't help but feel that we REALLY didn't put our best foot forward. It just seems like there is less than there should be. I am just as guilty of this as everyone else, I had planned to have some draft animations to show, but none were ready to be shown.  Will just have to try make up for this during the final hand in. Made a quick plan for what I would like for the Flicks, will need to sort out spacing with Royce and the rest of the 2nd years. There is a lot I would like to put up and I'm not sure that is fair to others. After talking to Liam for a bit, I'm thinking it might be worth running the 2D at a lower frame rate, something a kin to what is done in the recently released "The Dragon Prince" Netflix series. This would save on time and assist on actually finishing the project. Currently looking at 12 frame a second, but that is up to rese...