Thursday, September 4, 2008

First Pencil Test...or not.

Well, this blog post was going to be about my first pencil test, but I apparently don't know how to export from FrameThief in such a way that it will upload properly to Vimeo/Blogger. It works just fine on my Mac, but won't work on a PC. I've tried renaming the extension and changing the compressor, but nothing. I'll have to figure that out. In the meantime, here's some negative stuff.

The shot was supposed to be of the cowboy after he's killed the villain. He looks pleased and then the damsel coughs and he realizes she's still on the tracks.

I don't know why I decided to do a movie where I'm forced to animate cowboy hats. I must hate myself. The good thing about this shot is that, if the hat isn't working for someone (it seems alright to me, but what do I know?), I can cut the animation to where he's just standing still and then his face changes.

This shot was worth 7.5 points on that system that Cartoon Network uses. 7.5 out of my total, which is 954. Hah... That means I have to do 63.6 points a week. I'm not totally sure how I'm going to manage that.

I tried reevaluating my point system, and then I decided I'd just calculate how much I should do a week in seconds. It came to 17 seconds a week, which is not impossible, but sounds like a load of stress I don't need to have on my shoulders. The shot I did yesterday and today took probably about three, maybe four, hours total, and it's only 2.5 seconds. Granted a lot of it was learning to animate a cowboy hat, but I'm still not totally secure on that subject. I'm going to take the red marker to my movie tomorrow and see what I can cut out. Even extending my film's rough animation due date to the end of February only brought me down to over 11 seconds a week. I realize I should be working on this film pretty consistently, and I want to, but knowing something like that is more discouraging than anything. It just makes me panic and makes the film seem undoable.

So tomorrow, after cuts, I'm going to hopefully have a more lighthearted number. And then maybe I'll finish that early and be able to insert some of the cuts back into the film. I should probably cut my film to the bare necessities anyway, right? I mean just to make sure I can get the plot to work no matter what.

Welp, what a downer.

1 comment:

Sheila said...

Hey Carder-

I think it is important that you have an understanding of how much work is required to meet your deadline. You could do the same thing Andrew did last year- make some drastic cuts, and if you have time later you can always put the shots back in. It is so much better to streamline your film. Ultimately it will probably be a better film if it is succinct. (Often student films are too long, believe it or not.) Still- try to get as much animation done as you can before next class!