pressure is building

I'm only sleeping through the night because of a back-of-the-envelope calculation from the other day:

270 seconds of character animation in the film (roughly), spread out over 9 weeks means 30 seconds per week. We've got four full-time student animators (5 secs/week each, assumed). That's 20 of the 30 seconds we need each week. Then I hope we can count on our alumni support and beyond for the other 10 seconds a week.

In other words, it seems feasable. However, schedule slippage will kill us. And there are a hell of a lot of what I'd call "hard" character shots on the film, so it wil kill us too if we somehow can't cut our teeth on the easier work.

So now I'm just hoping to get real shots into layout ASAP. There is a great deal of artwork coming through, which means modeling will be busy this week. That's good. If we can layout with proxies and get the real models in after they're done we'll actually be getting somewhere.

113 shots to do as of today.

long and scary

Class begins Thursday.

Chris (Bishop) and I have worked hard, especially in the last month, on creating the storyreel for Uprising. As of last night, it was running at 8 minutes long, which is WAY TOO LONG for a class project. I think some serious pruning at the head might reduce it to 6 minutes, which is still long but feels at least possible.

My goal is to screen the reel to the class during the second class meeting, a week from today.

back from Texas

The best saying of the weekend was from a Texan who (in response to questions about Bush's Crawford ranch), said about the president:

"He's all hat and no cattle."

(this one was passed on to me by Steve Weisler)

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I may have finally completed the first draft of my next animated short, tenatively titled "Uprising," which will be produced by my Computer Animation III class at Hampshire in the Fall. I'm nervous about the size and scope of this project given the 3-month production schedule, so I'll probably write a lot about it here.

Opening Day

After a long day with my 11-month old daughter, I decided to start a blog. Reasons why will come in time.