The joys and pains of new media

We all make mistakes. I certainly have made one. I thought I checked out the internet aspect of this project careful prior to production, both for music rights and acting. I knew my music rights would have to be paid for by the year. Those I have secured, as planned. The Actors rights are another thing.

I was an actress myself. I want to protect all infringement of rights. I didn't even post images of my actors on my blog or site until I called the SAG office to make sure I could prior to the internet rights being secured, At that time it didn't seem like a major hassle to get the internet rights for a 4 minute student film. Now I will most likely not be able to show this film anywhere on the internet. Hard lesson to learn. Tough one. I am still waiting calls from the California SAG office, just to get information, but I feel sorry for my actors most of all. the only way I could pay them was having a good product being seen. Many miracles are needed now. Only God... Only God because the greed of this world is crazy!!!

Two meetings and the results

I met with Michael Hosenfeld and Andy Milkas, about my project. Both about different elements. Michael about the Matte painting and Andy about the Bible tracking and the roto-scoping .

Michael helped me see that the red, one color sky I had was being reflected in my water and thus making my piece flat. I need a more multicolor sky. He also showed me how to use reference photos for distance color reference, and some other uses of z-depth. It was a great meeting and I have changed and simplified my project.

Andy showed me that I don't have to use 3D tracking for the transition scence and how to do it. He also gave me general instruction on the composition.

In general both meetings brought me to simplify this production.

November 10th Deadline and the lesson of simplicity.

Well, I had a "full run" of my video for the 10th. But I've had this for a while. All I added was the crowd element. It looked horrible. I was completely displeased with everything. I was rushing so much to just get something that nothing was very good.

What I learned was what I've known from the beginning, less is more. After listening to my sound track for weeks I have finally been able to hear where I can cut it to shorten the piece. Less is more and a simpler cut or a safety cut is a smart idea. I have to pass. I shared this at class. Now I have to do it.

The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty -Proverb 21:5

There is no Easy Button!!!

But I keep trying to press it and keep ending up more and more depleted. I was trying to shorten my rendering by only making two really large Matte Paintings. Problem is I was trying to make an image that was like 22,000 pixels wide and I was wondering why my computer was taking so long to render. You just can't do it. Not on my iCore7 with 16GB ram. I found this out when I gave up on it after it was still rendering after two and a half days and decided to go to a render farm. The Render Farm said to test your images and make sure one frame will render on a machine with 8GB of ram and 500 GB storage. I was like what limitations for a render farm when I realized, wait a minute, if render farms have these limitations to their computers I better check if I can render out one frame. I was rendering straight to disk. Well needless to say I tried to render one frame and the program crashed.

Lessons learned:

1) One Super gigantic Matte Painting that I can use for close ups and wide shots etc. is not possible via computers right now. My brother later told me I was trying to render out an image bigger than IMAX. Well I know movie images are 4k, 2k in the theatre for distribution, but what is the common image size used for most matte paintings? I haven't been able to find this out. The size I have rendered is 8000 x 3000 (Cinemascope) so I can pan within it. Now I will paint on it in photoshop then bring it into Maya to bring it to life.

2)Stop trying to press the easy button- Just do the work!!

Compositing the Bible images

Well creating the tracking and the Bible image was a major task.

1) Accurate tracking is necessary. I had to track in Mocha and the tracking had to be dead on. This meant adjusting the Adjust track and using perspective etc.

2) Make sure the mattes were feathered for a smooth transition

3) Export the tracking and corner pin data to After effects, then composite the images

4) Create moving light images to match the lighting in the scene

5) Blend using multiply- the page image over the BG paper plate

6) Composite this into the Matted out book area

It still need tweeking but the results look pretty good.

From this:

To This:

(I can't post the video yet I still need SAG approval)

Bible Image and Bookmark Image

Here is the Bible image. I was going to ask someone else to do it, but after I played around with an idea of what I wanted, I used it as a sample image in my matte and decided to use it. I decided to created a stylistic image of "Jesus and the Feeding of the 5000" using my greens screen footage:

The image will change to a more water color stylized image before the Galilee transition:

The Bookmark is simple:

Seek the Advice of Many Counselors...

Today I got the chance to ask Gavin's advice about my project. The 3D tracking really is so big, I really was right that it effects the scaling and basically all the elements of the 2D and 3D world. He also gave me some great advice about the crowd replcation and doing it in layers. To have more control over lighting of the elements over distance.

I'm going to work real hard and try and meet up with him with my work again.