The Last Month

It has been mental trying to get everything done. Last night I managed to key out another 14 seconds, but I’ve not been able to test it yet. All in all I have inked 14 secs, have 16 secs ready to ink, and 26 secs keyed out. That means I’ve got 38 still to start, and 7 for Claire to do in stop motion.

Claire has made the armature, and will start putting it together pretty soon. I picked out the plasticine last week, its less purple, and more PURPLE!!!

We had lots of fun and games a couple of weeks ago, trying to sort out the line testers so we get a nice contrast between the white of the paper and the black ink. That all seems to be sorted now, and we’ve got a nice script to use in Shake. We just plonk the jpegs into Shake, it crops it, and does various other things that leaves us with an alpha channel black outline, that we export as targa, stick into Photoshop to colour it, and then stick it all back into Shake to fix something else… its all a bit complicated, but as long as I know what to do and when I don’t think it matters if I know how it works. I just know the result is good, but we’re going to do some more tests tomorrow, and adapt the script to work for Bron’s film – obviously we’re swapping films to colour them, so we both need to know what to do. If it all works then its going to give us so much more time, and help lower stress levels.

I think we are all feeling the pressure now, just to get the films finished. It hasn’t really sunk in that this is the end of uni, and our films are going to be shown to loads of people. The website for the degree show is up and running, and our posters and synopsis will be going on there pretty soon. I need to start thinking about business cards and some kind of advertisement gimmick for my work. Bron had a cool idea about making badges…
I’m a bit dubious about these “awards” – “the peggies” (I’m sorry, but I can not take that name seriously. For 1, my nan’s name is Peggy, and 2 nobody is going to know what on earth a peggie is, or who we are. At least we could make LAFTA stand for something to represent us).