Brooklyn, New York
Hey there! Three weeks just flew by, phew.
Since we last communed, I spent a week trying to accelerate my rotoscoping execution with the help of Pete O’Connell. His method is to track the elements and then build splines around the track. In lay terms, rather than trying to create an animated outline around Christina’s shoulder at critical points of movement such as change of direction and acceleration/deceleration, O’Connell’s method uses AE’s point tracker to roughly map the position of her shoulder automatically. Automation both speeds up the process and generates a more consistent result. Sounds great right? The long list of caveats starts with AE’s point tracker, it’s persnickety with grain or low contrast. Anyway, I spent a week getting up to speed on the method.
Being able to eliminate or replace elements of a scene has certainly facilitated DOG repair. It’s also expanded my imagination, what I’m willing to dream about in the future. I can jump and make nets appear, but it’s a bit cheeky to do it three times every second. So, in order not to blow my cover, I spend some time actually weaving nets and making sure they are securely fastened to bulletproof anchors. Translation – knowing how to do something often leads to new ideas based on that knowledge. This contrasts with ideas that require completely unprecedented categories of knowledge for their realization. Going ahead with a project not knowing exactly how to do it is called making the net appear. That’s the definition of DOG.
Speeding up the roto work is super crucial as there is still plenty left. How much is left, how soon will you be finished Dan Kelly? Can you believe some folks still ask me that question? Not everyone gets to read these updates. Caught off guard in meat space, I find myself resisting the urge to bitch slap the uninitiated. My 8/15 estimate for total, absolute, dang near completion was 11/15, 4 days from now. By next week’s update y’all be privy to the RCE or revised completion estimate.
I shifted gears in November and returned to the opening montage, which will include the cruise ship and car models developed by Jonathan. The post production team is pretty skeletal at present, just him and me. As I concentrate on the shots that feature his models he continues to develop and refine his modeling and rendering. During my September visit to Michigan, Patrick, Jonathan and I stood in my driveway and talked about how the reflections on the Honda Odyssey defined it’s geometry. The car models might be more convincing if the reflections from the existing environment were amped up, so Jonathan built tree models and moved them much closer to the cars than they actually appear in the scene.
The highway scene has evolved a lot. Originally it was just a empty highway with cloud shadows racing down it. As mentioned in previous posts, a call was made to flesh out the back story, to give it more umph. I imagined 4 lanes of dead cars stretching into the distance – perhaps an automated highway after it’s controlling infrastructure crashed or car brains scrambled by the devastating effect of an EMP type weapon. After the cars were added however it read more like a traffic jam than a post apoc enigma. It needed something to show time passage, to illustrate abandonment. Snow! Snow also suggests climate change and unlikely weather. Several birds with one stone.
Here’s a rough composition of the highway shot. I tossed the Pasadena sign in as a placeholder for someplace warm.
Miami might be better and more recognizable as a warm place. Plus there are lots of pine trees in Florida, so that works.
The highway shot is slightly shaky because I was shooting on top of the Honda with a tripod and my weight on the roof made the sheet metal unstable. I actually like the shake, but it has to be tracked so that the cars and snow have the same movement. It turns out that this is a very difficult shot to track. AE can’t handle it at all, and even the uber tracking software Mocha has to be carefully prepped.
I’ve been pondering how to farm out more of the finishing work. I know lots of artists and there is a variety of supporting imagery that I could use help on – posters, graffiti, logos. I’ve been thinking about extracting these tasks from the master list and assigning them to available collaborators. Deferred or no pay in most cases but credit certainly, lots and lots of credit!
On November 3 at 9:00 pm I tossed the cats in the van, drove 13 hours to Michigan and added my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Because of my valiant dedication to democracy, these people will be moving into the WH. Cute aren’t they?
