Month: July 2012

Set-building "completed"!

Taking advantage of the beautiful weather, Steve and I ventured onto the deck outside the Vienna House in order to carve out some foam and then hot glue textured paper and colored fabric onto it.

We started by seeing shapes in the raw foam, in order to make as little work for us as possible.  It didn’t take us long to realize that the slantier the edges of an object, the more futuristic they become, as evidenced by this crude sketch:

If angle a is greater than 90 degrees, the couch is from the future...

 

It also works for refrigerators.

As with most things for this project, even though many of these objects began life as tests for one thing or another, the end results proved to be “good enough” to include in the filming.  Speaking of which, our next step is to choose the audio takes we like the best and begin filming the first scene.  We’ll be delayed a week due to vacationing, but the building phase of SpaceBase: Infinity is nearly complete!

-Mike

Nat Meets Rufus…

It’s both surprising and satisfying when months of planning and experimentation pay off in the form of a successful 13 second animation.  After learning from countless mistakes, we may finally have a production process that will work for the final episode.  Amazingly, it’s easier to list the things that went right this time around, rather than what we need to learn from.  It’s in widescreen 1080p, the lighting looks good, the animations are relatively interesting and believable, the mouths match the words and head movements, and the picture quality and camera work have a relatively professional feel.  Life is good at the Vienna House.

Vegas has some great tools for animating mouths using keyframes and matching the waveform of the audio track.  We don’t, however, have the computing horsepower to preview our animations at full 1080p, so we’ll need to solve some technical issues there.

Next week, we’ll attempt to make some lounge furnishings (sink, refrigerator, sofa) and some mounting rigs for the (Christmas) lights.  Until then, you can also check out this flythrough of the set for the filming of “Meet Rufus.”

-Mike

Attempting twelve seconds of dialogue and completing four…

After taking some time off, the production of SB:I resumed with a whimper today.  After two hours of computer hassle, we learned ourselves some lessons and have barely anything to show for it…

  • Do not use 8MP stills, they each take up 8 megs and my laptop is like 7 years old.
  • Do not bother acting out the scenes, or at least, not like we attempted – it produced very little actual animation.
  • Do not move the heads while they are speaking, the computer animated mouths will either look silly or take 10x as long to produce.

Also on our to do list:

  • Remember to bring the prop miniatures to the “studio” next time, Cliff needs his tools!
  • Figure out a new way to mount the camera.
  • LED lights!  Christmas lights!  The one overhead position-able lamp is functional, but not producing the shadows and colors we want.
  • Make the mouths.

Enjoy the video, but don’t blink!

Finally, The Name is penning a fourth original tune.  The live show will have to be delayed, but maybe it’s time for a second EP…

-Mike