Sunday, June 15, 2008

down to 35

We are down to 35 shots left to final. Will is on his own for the next two weeks as I travel through California, but before I left we lined up a whole slate of shots for him to attack in my absence. Those were all shots that, pretty much, could be solved with our existing lighting infrastructure and lighting/compositing strategies. Of course, what that means is that when I return we'll be left with a pile of what we casually refer to as the "hard" shots.

What makes a shot hard in this film? The biggest difficulties probably relate to water, and we have our fair share of splashing, pouring, dumping water shots to contend with. But we have other issues, such as the shot with a few thousand versions of Leed swimming around (hard because we have to keep them from looking identical AND because we have to get them through the actual RAM-limited render process). There's a file which doesn't even open in Maya any more, and we have to try and repair that one. There's the film's first shot which is hard because it's 1000 frames long and features a huge scale change that has to happen seamlessly. Another way in which water is challenging is that we have three shots that occur under water, and thus we have to figure out a nice way to simulate light coming down through a reflective/refractive surface from below.

But I like our chances. I am almost finished with my responsibilities from the spring term, and thus I will soon be able to focus more on these challenges.

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