Everytime I have gotten over my head production-wise, however, the outcome has been great. You remember what I wrote earlier about my final project for this semester? You remember that I said that it would be amazing. I know what you are thinking. You’re thinking, “everything you do is amazing.” Well, yes that is true, but this will be a new degree of amazingness.
David and I are doing a 2 minute video that is completely animated (except for a few clips of composited video). Holy crap, animation is a lot of work. It is pretty much poor-man’s animation with just Photoshop and After Effects, but the result is pretty cool. Just to give you an idea of the scale of this thing – After Effects only allows for 99 layers of video/graphics. The three characters that we are animating take up 45 layers just themselves. That is without any other environmental anything. 45 layers.
Timing is also an issue. Since render times take forever (it took 20 minutes to render a ten second scene that wasn’t even completely animated), you can’t really do a quick preview to see if everything is timed correctly. Luckily it hasn’t been a real issue yet – but I also haven’t overlayed the music, yet.
Stick figures. The animation revolves around stick figures. Sounds lame, but actually it is going to be pretty cool and slightly political.
Oh yeah…one more thing. So apparantly this enormous storm was going to come in and kill us all. They had it coming in at 2pm today and basically the state shut down. The kids went home early from the schools and everything. As of right now (11pm or so), nothing. Not a drop. The sky was extremly blue all afternoon. Now I understand the better safe than sorry principle that meteorologists work under, but if you are going to issue a severe weather watches everytime it rains (I not really exaggerating) and pre-empt tv program for half an hour to watch a squall line that is currently in Nebraska…Nebraska, people are going to just stop caring. Early warning is good, but issuing severe weather watches 18 hours before the thing hits?
We’ll see if I’m singing the same tune around 4am when this sucker looks like it finally might hit.