4 posts tagged “production”
So with four days away until due date, I'm going to start doing a run down of the elements in this film. Mostly to show what they are, but also a bit of discussion as to how these pieces fits (or doesn't) within the project.
First off the motion graphic pieces that shows up on the TVs and jumbotron in the film. These were definitely the hardest elements to lock down. I originally planned to create up to six versions to be mapped on to the CG screens, but with production time for the CG elements taking up more time than I had hoped, I decided to cut down the number of screens to three.
The most difficult thing about the production of these screens comes from the fact that everything was all based on the same "brand" 'The number one product', I wanted to keep typography consistent thought out all three spots, but that created a quit difficult situation in terms of designing them, since to have each screen holds it's own in the scene, they have to be stylistically very different spot.
The three themes I went with were, a pop culture based spot, a product/infomercial spot and a personality/celebrity spot. The idea behind these spots and actually the whole film are based on a lot of Asian advertising styles, where advertising literally only feature the brand and an A-list celebrity spokesperson and most of the time, the celebrity really have nothing what so ever to do with the product. I've always found this concept to be very interesting where a brand is purely driven by celebrity tie-ins. Especially compared to western advertising where the focus is associating an emotional attachment to a brand and less about having some celebrity vouch for a product.
Of all the elements I created for this film, I really hoped to have more time to develop the design of these spots. Personally I really want the designs to be a bit more thought out and more elegantly put together, but not having these spots built were really holding up the CG rendering, plus given it only shows up for about 1 and a half second or so in the whole piece, this was a compromise I am happy to deal with.
At the same time, I really do like the somewhat over the top boldness of the moves and treatment. In a way, it fits the very Asian corporate design sense. They want it loud, they want to show that they spend a crap load of money on the spots, I was definitely thinking of my art director when I was working in web design in Hong Kong, I remember the very line I got was "Keith, your designs are too American, you have got to add more to it, the clients are not going to be happy to see they paid all that money for a few lines and blocks. Needs to be louder."
About 24 hours ago I was writing about this render. I'm still writing about this same render... granted it's actually working now, but it took way too long to figure out just what was wrong with it. Memory issues...
This scares me a bit, knowing how 5gb of ram on my mac is actually not enough to make this one scene work, I threw it over to my PC only to remember I didn't get that ram upgrade when I got the machine. No love either. So I spend bulk of my day trouble shooting the scene, cutting down, removing elements that I don't need. And I still have things to add to the scene...
I'm not happy about it, but I will most likely have to do this scene in passes, just not something I'm interested in doing right now, this scene already being a massive 12 hour render, I can't afford to lose a computer to rendering for a full day. I don't even want to think about going to school to render, I'll be lucky to find a chair to sit, getting on a fast, working computer will indeed take some major hustle and possible physical violence... 40 something thesis students and 20 usable computers... Way to go NYU.
I guess it's a good thing that I'm getting to the stage where I'm doing production level rendering at this time of the process, it's good to get an idea as to how long things are going to take in the final render. It's odd when you think about the difference in time, when I was doing After Effects work, a six hour render for 30 seconds is insane, I get worried when it takes a minute or two to render a frame.
Going to CG it's something else all together, 6 hours to render 90 frames seems quite normal and even after all this time, it's still something I have to get used to. But progress is good, as of now every scene are lit, all but two have final textures applied and now only one scene I haven't done a full res render yet. I've managed to be ahead of schedule by a bit, not a whole lot, but it's good to know that I'm on track.
On rendering, since my desk sits right next to my bed, I've gotten used to falling asleep to the smoothing sounds of spinning hard drives and revving cooling fans. I used to complain about how loud the fans gets on the G5s, now it's gotten to the point where it has become the reassuring sound that my computer is working on my project. The sound is also why I'm up right now, as the fans stopped spinning and literally I woke right up like an obsessed boss, looking over the computer's shoulder to check if it is indeed working or just pretending to work. Turns out it went for a break between frames and forgot how to start working again...
It gets to a certain point in any project where you can't help but feel overwhelmed by the tasks ahead. Work on my thesis have somewhat stalled in recent days, it's not that there are no progress at all, it's just that most of the work have been adding and tweaking detail, thus there really haven't been much to show in terms of quantifiable progress. At this point even though I know I've been putting time into the project, the lack of meaningful progress is rather discouraging.
On the good news side of things, my test green screen shoot two weeks ago went really well and this weekend will be the proper shoot, getting these shots down will really help lock down a few scenes that I've been having trouble with, the test shoot was a good test run to figure out the kinks and broke down what worked and what didn't.
Below is a still plate from the test shoot, realized quickly how I wasn't getting enough distance between the subject and the screen to get a good enough separation for keying. This will be taken cared of in the proper shoot this weekend.
