Previz draft 1 complete

It’s been a hard week for the Green Spill team. Due to people shortage and some technical difficulties we hadn’t even started work on our previz when we arrived at school on Tuesday. As the previz is to be handed in tomorrow morning at nine, this left precious little time for animating, rendering, applying post and editing the thing. Add to that that most team members had other work during the few days we had, and you might understand why we were a tiny bit worried we wouldn’t finish on time.

We decided to give it a shot and quickly divided tasks between us: Jamie, Aleksander and Andreas would do the animation, producing a total of 67 shots. When they finished a shot, they would hand it off to me who would render it and take it through post. Lastly, Andreas and Alexander would do the editing and I would assemble the DVD needed for the deadline. To keep everyone sane, Andreas suggested that I’d make a list of all the shots in an Excel document where each person could add which shots they were working on and whether they were finished or not. By the end of Tuesday, the list was made, roughly 15 shots were finished, rendering was well under way and I had created a template in Nuke to speed up post-production.

The next three days were a blur where I’m concerned. I got up in the morning, started rendering incoming shots, did some post work, added more incoming shots for rendering, did even more post work and so on and so forth. I then went to bed, slept for an average of four hours, got up and repeated the process. I finished the last shot at 3 AM on Saturday. Three hours before I had to get up for work. During the night, I uploaded all the shots to our Dropbox so Alexander and Andreas could do the editing later that day.

And so we finished on time. The sounds and music are mostly temporary and some of the cuts aren’t quite tight enough yet, but it’s a draft 1 previz and we’ll get feedback on how to improve it tomorrow.  Today I’ve been assembling the DVD and designed a label for it for fun:

To create the label I had to do a high-res render. Thought I’d put it up here. Hope you like it Aleksander

Still reading? Then I’ll let you in on a tiny secret: The highest of our mountain peaks are 14 meters tall, only 8 times higher than our Luna. The render below is made from a camera angle that shows this quite clearly. My reason for using “miniatures” is to make the scene smaller and lighter to work with. To make them look taller and more distant I’m washing out the coulors a bit and applying some depth of field. Here’s hoping people won’t notice