For the past 15 hours pretty much straight (with a brief jaunt over to see how Chloé’s chessboard animations are going), I have been chairbound in front of my computer, compositing, tweaking, and aligning. I have everything pretty much polished and finalized up to 2:15. Unfortunately, I did not anticipate the brute-force labor that this process entails; it is taking significantly longer than I had anticipated, and I have by no means been slacking. In all likelihood, at the rough-cut screening, I will have everything in place roughly, but in place. It will be good not to spend a great deal of time to get something perfect, only to realize it should be changed later, anyway.
The After Effects project is getting rediculously complex, though I strive to keep everything in order. I have a base composition, which has nested compositions of each edited scene, and some complex backgrounds. Each of these nested compositions in turn has compositions of their own, each composition being an element of the scene composited together. Often there are nested compositions within these compositions, out of necesity. Then, on an average of 4-5 levels deep of nested compositions, there are the actual edited footage files, each clip of course occupying its own layer within its composition. My 1 GiB of RAM is being clocked for all it is worth.
If interested, view the screen capture behind the cut of me rotoscoping scale and position keyframes for the wire-tv zoom-out shot with the children.
2 Comments
wow. that composite looks fucking aces man, quite a bit of labor went into that I’m sure. How are you working around that fan going in front of the screen? that seems like it’d be a pain in the ass to do. Maybe just blur the hell out of the image before the keying at those points? I dunno, but yeah, good luck on figuring out as much of this as you can by Monday night/Tuesday morning.
jesus jed you are one tenacious little sewer ferret… I know obsessive compulsives who would look at this and go, “Jesus man it’s just a fucking video its not like your life will end if a couple of mattes are off.”
But that my friend is one of the many reasons that we all love you so much… So lots of luck and not so much with the going insane bits… we miss you on the chloe shoot. see you tuesday.
-B