8/18/03

The blackout prevented me from getting work done for a few days, but everything is now returning to normal and I can continue working.

Well, here it is....this is what my movie is about in its most basic form: two men struggle to get through a door guarded by a vicious giant cat made of smoke.

I have a picture of the cat armature (Left) as well as some pictures of the humanoid characters in various positions (pictures area).

How I am going to achieve this is that I will animate all the characters as stop-motion puppets. I am shooting the entire film digitally using a Sony VX2000 connected via firewire to my G4 using Framethief. Then the cat will be matted out in Adobe After Effects. I will be creating a cat model in Alias' Maya and use the MayaLive plugin to match the camera and rotoscope the cat's movement. Then I will be able to match the movement that I had animated as a puppet, yet render out a cat made out of smoke.

Once I have the smoke cat rendered I will composite those images with the previously shot material, thus having the smoke cat interacting with the metal stop-motion puppets. I'll post more about my equipment with specs and photos later, as well as a more in depth explanation of exactly how these things will be done. A lot of the matte "painting" and compositing will be done by other students who need or want to work on an advanced production. If it were not for this help I doubt I would be able to finish this film in less than One and a half years. As it is I am shooting for it to be basically finished by the end of April, and be completely polished by next August.

8/13/03

Armatures complete! Well, two out of three characters' armatures are done at least. There are three characters in my film, two that are human and one that is a big cat. The cat's armature is almost finished, it should be done by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. The characters still need to be finished, I need to add heads, hands, and some extra other stuff, but this is pretty much what the two main characters will look like.

The armatures are made out of aluminum. I bought the Ball and socket joints from Armaverse. The rest of it was cut, drilled, and put together myself. I bought aluminum in lengths of 3' long and 1/4" wide. I had to cut the aluminum in half to get it so thin. The armatures stand 6" tall. The only tools I used were a C-Clamp, Needle nose pliers, a Phillips head and Flat head screwdriver, a drill gun, a hacksaw, and a file. If I had access to power tools it would have taken a few days less to construct.

8/03/03

As of now I do not have a title for my film, but I'm working on it. I have all of my ideas and the series of events written down; but I will not share any of that information at this time. The finished piece should be about 3 minutes long, but will be no longer than 4 minutes. It will incorporate stop-motion and 3D computer animation.

I have started constructing my armatures, and after running into a few problems I have a new design that will work much better than any of my previous designs thanks to Stop-motion animator Jim Danforth, who helped me on the message board of Stop-motion Animation. An interesting fact is that Jim Danforth was the animator for one of my favorite creature films of all time "When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth". Thanks for the help Jim!