Yeah we’re still alive.
We haven’t had much to tell you guys for the past week or so. Apologies for that.
I’m now trying to move things in my schedule so that I could concentrate on our animations music track for a day or two. Now it seems I might go to my band’s practise place during the weekend and/or monday and just play around with my synth, drum machine and four-track recorder and hopefully come up with something useful.
-jussi
Going back to one of the first big scenes you spent huge amount of time to get some little movements just right and then moving the camera according to new plans so that those little things get totally cut out is… well, a bit hard to swallow even if it was you who eventually thought it’d be better that way.
We’re now trying to find the best path on setting the tone for the first third of the animation – the scene where our antagonists make their first appearence by falling through the ceiling. On the other hand there are those little things I mentioned that would be fun to have in the frame (nothing major but I polished them like some weird workaholic polisher would polish anykind of polishable thing) and – even if I say so myself – those Lemmings marching in the background are funny to watch.
On the other hand (thanks to our mysterious Mister S – the sensei) it might be better in a dramatic sense not to reveal them too soon. There is a little clue in the soundtrack what the blurry things in the background are, but even so it’s not too much information and still you don’t really get to see them properly until just before the fight sequence.
Now that I really think of it, this just might be the direction we need to take. Oh well, it’s only a matter of moving the camera around. Atleast we don’t need to re-edit the sounds Teemu has so far made, since the lenght of the cut will be identical.
Here’s a quick screenshot I did for test purposes – there will be more tweaking and all. Notice the fuzzy little things in the right corner and how the fingers, both arms and the console controller are not visible at all. And now try to guess if those were among the things I paid attention to when animating.
-jussi
All right.
Now, since we don’t want to upload every single scene in youtube before the whole thing is finished (there are some things I can’t wait to show you, tho) but we do wanna give you guys something every now and then to keep you entertained and in the loop – so to say – I decided today to give you a peek behind one quite a long scene you might have seen before. Wow that was a long sentence.
Everybody I know hates animating long walks (even people who are not into animation have that disgust hidden somewhere deep. I know. I am a Psychonaut). And since I’m not everybody, I tend to take things even more seriously so I really really loath doing those and would give one kidney to a poor Malesian dude for getting long walk-animations and all the rigging jobs I need for the rest of my life from him. That is a reason I really wanted to cheat in doing this walk-to-the-fridge scene that was quite important in building the suspense before things kick in to high gear. (I’m not really that passionately against animating walking, but rigging I f*cking hate. Quite coincidentally I ended up doing zilch rigging-wise. [cue sarcastic laugher])
I think I did a pretty good job - especially if you think about what you see in the finished scene compared to what you can now see in this behind-the-scenes-kinda clip, thanks to me.
So here we go.
The final scene (which actually goes on a bit too long):
And the retarded version:
How’s that for breaking illusions?
-jussi
Yeah,
so Teemu had maybe one weekend plus two or so days to fix and add things me and Pete asked based on the first sound-draft. And by the lords above he did so!
We got our thing barely together in time, but together enough so we could participate in Suzanne Awards (Blender-thingie) with our head held high. It still lacks a few foley sounds and some kind of music (there are too many long almost-silent scenes now), but already the sounds have added a lot to our piece. If we don’t come up with any better ideas for the music I just might head to my bands practise place and try to conjure something up.
Oh, and if you’re wondering: yeah we sent our animation to the awards but it was via private message. We don’t want most of the people to get spoiled with half-finished thing so we will publish it here once it’s done for good.
That’s all for now. Keep checking the blog every now and then - we will try to keep posting something semi-worthwile even tho we’re almost done with the project.
j
Super-quick update here. Me and Jussi have been polishing the edit and adding titles and end credits. Thought you might like a peek…
Just waiting for some updated sounds from Teemu and we’ll be all set to submit this to the Suzanne Awards, deadline tomorrow. 
- Peter
We keep progressing, za-dam!!
Teemu just sent us the very first draft for sounds, and while we (he) have still quite a long way to go, we are definately getting there.
So. To celebrate this rare feeling of uncontrollable love for the universe and flowers in my heart plus the fact that it is once again friday I decided to post a clip of scene familiar to anyone following this blog, but this time edited together with final renderings and those foley drafts.
You’re welcome.
-jussi
Ga-ZAM!
Damn! We’re so close to the finish line I can smell the paramedics waiting for the exhausted runners. And boy – even if the taste of my stomache acid fills my mouth and everything is turning white – it feels goooooooooood!
I think I’m 99% sure I just finished editing the animation (some of it is still half-finished renderings) and while there is room for improvement I’m so damn proud of what we’ve achieved during these ever-streching 10 weeks.
It doesn’t look like Pixar, the animation isn’t as smooth as something even smoother than a baby’s butt, BUT it was done by three doofuses in mere ten weeks or so (learning to use Blender included) and atleast we had a blast doing it (if this blast includes occasional breakdowns, always failing I-will-quit-smokings, near fist fight experiences, yelling, screaming and attempts of killing the pain with excessive drinking). Story and attitude-wise I see this project more like a continuation of those Tarantino and John Woo inspired action videos we did in high school with a bunch of mates.
So what happens now?
I’m done editing (There! I said it! WOOOO!), so now I’ll convert the whole thing into a low-resolution movie and pass it to Teemu so he can start working on the sounds. In the meantime we’ll still re-render a few things and replace the old files once they’re done. And then *druuuuuuum roooooooll!* *ba-tshing!* we should have one five-and-a-half-minute (not including the credits) DIY short-animation in our hands!
Check back soon!
Oh, Jere (he left to Scotland for a year): cheers mate!
-jussi
hi, it’s been a long time. We’re now rendering the final scenes of the animation, and starting to cut them in a while. There will probably be some semiready version of the whole package later this week, since we have to hand something to Teemu to start with the sounds. Anyways, we’re now just gathering all the pieces, and will probably soon be celebrating the end of some darker times. Naturally there will be a bunch of updates as soon as we get something done.
-jere
So, since it’s “THE FINAL DAY” I thought I should just go ahead and write this one in english too.
The thing is, like hell it is the last day. We are almost there animation-wise, yes. But other duties are waiting, so we can kiss our five-day-summer-vacation goodbye and focus on things that matter. Like work and more work instead of some crazy and gay ideas only us born in the 80’s could come up with such as kicking back, enjoying the nothingness, get wasted and maybe play some console games (I’ve still only clocked 36 hours on Oblivion…).
But the GOOD NEWS EVERYONE, is that we should have most of the scenes rendered next week so that we could do a quick cut of the animation and pass it to Teemu for the sounds.
I’m dreaming of a day without obligations, a world without deadlines, computers that won’t crash, smooth animation for everyone, and a bloody week off for us who have worked like maniacs. But I’m still loving this, so go figure.
Expect to be youtubed in the near future for some low-quality clips of scenes finally coming together!
j
Just a quick word from my tired but happy fingers. (wow, that didn’t sound dirty at all!).
After spending a week with a few unfairly rare sights (alien friends, that is [thanks for the whisky, btw!]) and staying up late – or actually early – every night and that I stumbled back to the office just to find two human looking empty caskets in a verge of bursting into tears. Few bitch slaps later and we we’re back in the game. We realised that there is inhumanly slight change of us actually having to spend only three extra days with our project (that is: animation and that – not counting editing or anything else at this point). So there is a change afterall!!!
I fine tuned some scenes of mine one after another and saw that I don’t have that much to do anymore. Sure things might turn to crap and so on, but atleast I have my hopes up now. I’m sure this will be something we can be proud of, especially when you think we’ve only studied this stuff for a year and hadn’t even opened Blender before the summer. And there have been some wild nights out in the middle of the week, which usually doesn’t really help if you gotta do some challenging scenes and poses.
So. More tomorrow. Now I gotta finally catch some sleep or else I, or this project, will turn to this:
Collection of horrible, horrible 3D
Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the shit man bite!
-jussi
