EEkkk

Don't ask about the title. I just felt like it.

Anyway, I did some voice work today, and I'll probably be perfecting it for a while. It's for the beginning of the film. I have yet to shoot the footage that the voice overs will, uh, go over.

So yeah. Very small progress.

Lazy

I am too lazy to think of something different, so here is the update that I have been posting in all of the Axis Mundi discussion threads:

Lately I have been working more on the story. I have been spending a lot of time just sitting around and thinking about this project. I like to call this "mental production," hehe. Hopefully the fruits of this "mental production" will be obvious in the final product. I am, however, getting close to filming and editing some more. I will let you know when regular production starts up again.

Better Progress

Yesterday I felt like I did a good job of getting stuff done. Technically I only recorded one shot, but it was a hard shot (like most of the action shots), and I also added a ton of sound effects to the action sequence. Before that it was pretty silent. I also solved my opening text troubles. Now the very beginning of the film is much more awesome.

The Axis Mundi discussion thread at Atari Forums has been pretty successful. I decided to post an update there today. In it I mentioned that I was 3 Minutes and 33 second of the way through the film. Of course, I still haven't made music for all of the 3:33, and I need to do some tweaking to make the story more understandable, but it is getting closer to being 100% polished.

Sniff....

Recently I have had a cold, and today is my first day being healthy enough to work again. I have been able to make some music, although I don't think it is all that great, so I will probably will not use it. I don't know why, but this project is going extremely slow. It is really starting to get on my nerves, because at the rate that I am going, it will take a miracle for me to finish.

Oh, and to follow up the post about the Atari forums: they aren't closed, they are just re-organised. Now all of the old threads are archives, and there is a new forum that looks almost exactly like the other one. I have decided to post an Axis Mundi discussion thread there. It is a good thing that I didn't do so before everything changed, or else I would have had to start it all over again!

Here is the thread: http://forums.atari.com/showthread.php?t=3791

Atari Forums

So, apparently the RCT3 section of the Atari forums is down. Not down as in totally crashed, but down as in no more new topics. I don't know whether it will be permanent or not. I find it kind of weird that I just started visiting and talking about the Atari forums right before this happened. I will find it especially weird if it ends up that the forums will not come back. I hope that this isn't the case, but only time will tell, I suppose.

Breaking Through

I didn't film at all today, but I had a couple important editing/compositing breakthroughs, so I feel like I accomplished enough. I can now skip all of those steps that I showed in those screenshots the other day, and I'll end up getting a higher quality result, since my new way of doing it let's me skip rendering and re-rendering; a process that degrades quality.

WHAM!! You just got UPDATED!!

The Conch Shell of DEATH

Hey, here's something kind of random that I did in blender today. I call it The Conch Shell of DEATH!!!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Axis Mundi discussion thread

I have started a production thread for The Battle for Axis Mundi over at the LG Machinima community. I may also post one over at the Atari forums. For now, here is a link to the LG Machinima thread:

http://gulk.bplaced.net/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=576

I hope that I am not releasing this info too early. I have never really done one of these threads, so I hope that it won't be a disaster.

Yay!

Today has been a lot better than the past few days; I actually feel like I have been making progress. I recorded a few shots and then spent a while editing them. These greenscreens can be tricky. Here's a sample of some of the compositing that I did today:

Step 1: The greenscreen

Step 2: The original video

Step 3: First overlay attempt

Step 4: Greenscreen artifiacts are removed by changing the white balance of the overlay

Step 5: Change lighting to match greenscreened image, add Depth of Field effect, render video.

Step 6: Restore rendered result to original lighting

So there you go, that's your update for April 1st. And it's no April fool's joke (or is it?).