FORGE: A Feature Film by 500 Cuts

If you’ve been reading this with even minor regularity, you might have noticed that I haven’t posted in a couple weeks.  Would you feel better if I said I thought about you all every day?   It’s true.  On Monday, the 13th of July, I returned to teaching.  It’s a great job, but when you haven’t been doing it for a while, you get rusty.  So I’ve been taking the past few weeks to get my act together.

On the movie side of things, progress is being made.  The picture edit is 100% complete, promising visual effects tests are coming in from Elena, Alex, and myself.  And Tom Hogan from San Francisco is taking a crack at music.  His early concepts are great, but I know he’s busy so I hope he can get a complete pass done in the next couple months.  Right now, he’s waiting for a cue sheet from me.  “Cues” are sections of music that go with a specific sequence or scene.  I don’t imagine there being wall-to-wall score, but it will help fortify the slow parts!

It’s a billion degrees in Portland today so I’m giving the computers a rest.  My office doesn’t have A/C, and even if it did, the three machines and 6 LCD’s would offset any positive cooling influences.  The “Heat Blast ‘09″ will last a few more days, they say.  So I may be posting more than once a week just to keep busy!

Thanks for stopping by.

I knew from the outset that I would be stepping well out of my comfort zone on this project.  That is the sole reason for this film’s existence!  I wanted to push the boundaries of what I’m capable of learning in a few months.  How much information can I process and retain?

If you’ve heard Alexander Pope’s famous quote, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…” then you know where I am right now.  I have taken in a lot of information in many areas of computer generated visual effects, but not ALL of the info in any specific area.  So I’m dangerous because I don’t have what I need to succeed in any one of the many facets of CG, but I’m still expecting to see the end result when I render!

CG is like a home theater system:  It’s only as good as its weakest component.  Modeling, lighting, shading (i.e. surface texturing), simulating, match-moving… all these things need to be quality in order for the effect to work.  My problem is that I’m not taking it step-by-step.  I’m trying to throw dashes of each thing in and hope the soup turns out.  Sorry… I promised building analogies…  It’s like I’m framing, dry-walling, and painting a room a square foot at a time and wondering why the house doesn’t look like a house, yet.

It’s ironic (sadly so) that I’m going through this since I’m a teacher.  I build classes so cumulative knowledge builds up over the course of several weeks.  How many times have students asked me a phase five question in phase two and I answered, “Don’t worry about that, yet?”  Many times.  So many times that I’m numb to it, I guess.  Am I above my own advice?  No is the final answer.  I need to take satisfaction in smaller bites.  When I’ve achieved complete results in one area, then I’ll move on to the next.  That’s the goal now.  Wait for the final result instead of slapping the half-baked parts together and getting disappointed.

Pope is also famous for the quote about watches and opinions.   When it’s all said-and-done, my watch is the only one from which I read the time.  So what’s the rush?

The picture edit is, for all intensive purposes, complete.  Jason W. and I have been meeting up early and going through the edit while eating donuts and cursing CS4’s inability to export long projects.

The next step is to get some visual effects concepts out to those who may have time to lend a hand.  I’ve been learning Houdini, which is great, but it makes me want a faster computer.  So while fluid simulations are baking, I troll through Newegg.com and price out faster computer parts.

More soon.

Take a listen.  This was done in Reason 4.

As a side note, the picture is uncorrected and the dream sequence particles are a temporary placeholder.  You may recognize the scene as the one from the screen test we did back in March.  The purpose of the transition is Paul’s dreams are connecting with the system’s intelligence, but the audience doesn’t know that yet.  The blobs are just a stock bubbles generator done in After Effects and we’ll use them for timing until the real fx shot is completed in August.

FORGE Music Test from Colin O’Neill on Vimeo.