This week at the Nerd-O-Drome

In the hope of increasing the visibility of our little studio, I've asked the Bit Films Intern Supervisors (myself included) to gather some bit of production news from this week of work and let me throw it up on a blog post.

Cornucopia (Perry)

One big piece of news is that we've moved from "untitled feature project" to a acceptable working title. Eric and I finished the first complete draft of the film's treatment, and though it's full of problems, it's exciting to see it from beginning to end. Interns Marcel and Leo have been cranking out beautiful visual work that have really made the environments come to life. I've been working on some simple boards. Here are a few samples for you to enjoy:

a concept painting of the junkyard (Leo)

a concept painting of a growing vine (Marcel)

a rough board from act I (Perry)

Caldera (Viera & Bishop)

Team Caldera had a productive week. the last of the boards were drawn, the first render test was completed, and progress continued on layout and character modeling. Here are some images from the week:

a render of the cove environment (Viera, cove model by Jake)

an act III storyboard (Bishop)

Tube (Kurdali)

Bassam's got his own blog for the Tube project, and he provided a timely post today that covers his team's progress this week.

Other Interesting Stuff

Studio-wide, we also made major advances this week on launching Blender and After Effects renders from Helga. We have yet another new system for launching a general render, and this one seems to be the most functional yet. Heck, it can even handle the annoying stuff that has to happen to get aerender to actually render (please, Adobe folks who might be reading: make aerender actually launch from the command-line without needing any window server connections). More on this as it develops.

Also, excitement builds for next week's SIGGRAPH conference, where at least four of our summer crew will be relocating for the week. So things may be quieter than usual in the 'drome.