With 10 days to go before thesis due date, I find myself at an odd situation. I'm done, and have been for a few days now. This is new to me, very very new to me. I've been known to be the type of person who's always stressing out, working down to the wire, to the 11th hour, sleepless for weeks, making deadlines minutes before it goes on air kind of deal.
But here I'm done, ok done not in that "this is a masterpiece, you can't improve on perfection" sort of done, more in the likes of, I'm content with what I've created and will be fine with handing it in, if I am told that this is actually due tomorrow.
I mean as with any creative work, is it ever really done? You either run out of time or you've given up on trying to improve it. The only reason I've stopped is because I have solid final renders for all my scenes and decided I needed to get started with compositing and check if all the scenes are working.
This is a rather scary time, the next 10 days, for I'll watch the film over and over again, looking for the tiniest flaws and attempt to fix it. And I'll show it to a friend, who will watch it and make a very innocent comment about a color choice, a lighting angle or a pacing issue and have that comment throw me into a frantic emergency mode as I attempt to redo complete scenes because that never occurred to me during production.
Right now I'm busying myself with color grading. I have two color styles I'm toying with, one sticking to the cold stark sci-fi blue, green thing. Another one where I'm pushing a warmer color set over a what should be a stark cold environment. Both looks I've played with in the past year photographically, both styles I love equally.
This is the toss up now. I'm leaning more toward the warmer tones, since it's something I've started playing with recently and also a style that I want to develop further.
While the colder looking blue green style is much more indicative of a stark urban distpoian night scene. As a color and a style, it's easier for the viewer to identify with the mood I'm trying to convey, as they can relate to prior usage of such color combination.
I have both version rendered for a screen color test tomorrow, as much as a creative decision this is going to be, it may very well end up being a technical one where one of the styles works better with the projector we are using during thesis defense.
Also a good thing to have noticed this early is that, I'm already seeing presentation issues right now, my D1 footage looked a lot brighter after going through a mpeg 2 compression to go on DVD. This may just be the difference of how Quicktime plays back on a computer VS how the apple DVD player plays back footage, the issue right now is the Apple DVD player pushes the gamma up way too high, it would be really bad for this to ruin my presentation. The color test later will help answer a lot of these questions.