Sorry, don’t mean to repost again from the Durian blog, but I felt this little video was worth it. Gives a nice sense of the space I’ve been working in the past year, the size of the team and some of our rituals.
Basically, we’ve only got two more weeks till our “pre-premiere”, so we’re going a little nuts to finish things up before the team leaves. I’ll be staying longer for a bit less than a month to take care of odds and ends… but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! We’re allmmoosttt there….
Shot and edited by animator Beorn Leonard. Music is “Perambulator” by his brother, Simon Leonard.
Welp, I posted this over on the Durian Blog, but it seems perhaps more appropriate for my personal site.
Just had a short jaunt to Savannah, Georgia to showcase En Route and see my friends and family. Since I took a year off for Project Durian, most of my friends from school are graduating this year! So it was a little bittersweet, but definitely a lot of fun.
En Route won the following Awards in the graduate category:
• Best Cinematography (Jason Osterday) • Best Editing (Me) • Best Production Design (Aaron Hoskins) • Best Graduate Film (my producers, Andre Danylevich and Yotam Dor) • Best Visual Effects (Sandro Blattner), which was in competition with both grad and undergrad films.
I’m so proud of the work that everybody has done on the film!
Hastily put this video together, mainly for the blenderheads following the progress of “Sintel”.
Sintel is coming along nicely! Only 45 more days before the premiere. SO much work to do!
Welp, we’re in the home stretch with En Route. We’re hoping to premiere it in Savannah in late May… which means we’ve got about two and a half weeks to get everything done!
Last weekend I worked on the poster (above), the website, and the trailer for the film.
Pretty pleased with how things are coming together!
For those keeping track, I’m still in Amsterdam working on Project Durian for the Blender Institute. Time is flying by. It’s a bit hard to believe I’ve been here for nearly eight months! Only three more months on the project, and we have SO much more work to do. Are we really 75% done? Doesn’t seem like it.
Things are picking up speed though, and the team is expanding! Hopefully we’ll be able to do this thing justice.
Since January I’ve been focusing most of my effort on the 3D animatic, which I’m trying to bring to the level of quality where you can just watch it and see the film as it will be, with decisions about character blocking, shot design, and editing all set and final. There’s a lot of considerations to be made, from timing and performance, environment design and composition. It’s been a really fun and gratifying experience, because I’m basically shooting an entire movie without having to get up from my chair! Week-by-week, scene-by-scene I’ve just been piecing the film together… and just this past week I’ve finally replaced the last storyboard. We’ve got the whole film in layout!
Although we’ve been posting frequent updates on the Durian Blog, my most recent post I feel is worth including here as well. Here’s the first scene of the film in OpenGL. So no renders, but the animation is 90% done:
Although there are flaws I’m aware of, I’m pretty proud of how the scene is working. I’ve never actually shot a fight scene in real life but I did a fair amount of experimentation and ‘research’ (action movies FTW!). Check out all the cameras!
I would say my usual “Let me know what you think!”, when I post new work, but we’ve already got 115 comments on the Durian blog, and it’s hard to even find time to read them all.
As you may know, my life for the past four months has been consumed by Project Durian, which has been an amazing experience so far. However, I was fortunate to be able to spend the holidays at home, and over the past couple weeks I’ve been trying to get some work done on my film En Route. Things are coming along nicely!
As we’ve known from the beginning, the visual effects workload is pretty intense, and we’ve allowed our vfx team to set the pace for postproduction. I’m extremely excited by the work they’ve done so far, and plans are currently in place to bring this film across the finish line in late March!
I’ve only bit off a few shots to handle myself, but I thought I would post a tidbit about what I’ve been working on the past couple weeks.
There is a scene in the movie that involves a CG toy plane. Here’s a glimpse of the final shot of that sequence:
Doesn’t look real yet, but I’ll keep working. I also worked on a shot from a scene at a science fair. My actor was supposed to play a character at multiple ages, but for this scene he was supposed to look twelve or thirteen. On set we I had him stand on his knees, to make him look shorter… but it didn’t look quite right. In After Effects I tried fooling with his on-screen proportions to make the shot more convincing:
What do you think?
Anyway, I’m really holding out on you — these are just random shots that I’ve spent a bit of time on. There are a lot more ‘newsworthy’ shots being done by the vfx team… but they may not see the light of day till the premiere!
For now, I’m back in Amsterdam to redirecting my focus on “Sintel”. Full-on production is gonna be a long haul, but who said animation was easy?
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