At 8:55 PM on December 29th, 2010, the “production” phase of the pilot episode of Your Face is a Saxophone was officially completed. I would have posted about it then, but I wanted to include that 23 frame video, and it took an hour to render. Oh boy, is rendering the rest of this gonna be fun!!!!!!…oh god help me.
January will consist of post-production and promotion/proliferation prep-work. The episode will premiere on an Internets near you on Super Bowl Sunday, February 6th, 2011 — the best day of the year to make fun of the advertising industry.
I have exactly seven days left before the end of the year. This means six days to work, because I can’t work on New Year’s Eve. Fortunately, there are only two scenes left, both of which have completed enough environments to work in. Barring apocalypse, I can do this.
I’m not sure if I’ll have time to completely finish the scene for which Dave built the environment before the deadline, but all of the characters are animated. Inserting them in could, theoretically, be considered “post-production”, so I won’t fret about that too much.
I expect to be finished a few minutes before midnight on December 30th, because work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
I decided to add some lighting to the elevator shot I did two weeks ago. It makes the whole thing look much, much better; I especially like the transition from the uncomfortable fluorescent green to the warm and inviting lobby lighting when the doors open.
The lighting was originally going to be a bit more complex, but then I hit Render, saw “8 hours 40 minutes remaining,” and was all like fuck that let’s do something else.
Speaking of lighting taking an exorbitantly long amount of time, no work on Your Face is a Saxophone would be complete without yet another aggravating aspect of Apple Motion’s awful, awful programming rearing its ugly head. I’m convinced that the Motion team’s competency reserves were completely used up on the top-notch UI, leaving only a bunch of mentally retarded goldfish for anything under the hood.
You see, in other programs which do 3D lighting, there are a number of different settings you can use to prevent your graphics card from melting while you work. For example, Cinema 4D, which David Lanz is building some of the other environments in, has, I believe, two or three lower resolutions for lighting than “full”, all of which don’t look particularly nice, but give you a good idea of what the final product will look like while using less processing power.
That way, you can adjust and work with the lights without having to get up and go make a cup of coffee every time you click a fucking button. Needless to say, this is not how Motion does lighting, because that would make too much sense. Instead, Motion has two quality settings for lighting; one is called “On,” and the other is called “Off.”
Now, from what I’ve said so far, you may have surmised that lighting is a particularly intensive task for a computer to do; the kind of thing which could potentially slow the system to a crawl. You bet your ass it is, especially in Motion, which already takes every other opportunity to attempt to incinerate your motherboard. Therefore, your options are to either not be able to see what the hell you’re doing, or see the full-quality, full-resolution results of your work at all times and only be able to move your mouse every five minutes.
Resolution If you have a complex project that is causing your computer to play video at a very low frame rate, you can lower the resolution of the Canvas to reduce the strain on the processor. This frees you from waiting for the image to be rendered at full resolution each time you make an adjustment.
That’s great. Except for the fact that that doesn’t work.
Motion Blur Turning this setting off disables motion blur previewing in the Canvas. This may result in a dramatic performance improvement.
That’s true. Which is why I never turn Motion Blur on while I’m working. And nobody else ever does. And why it’s disabled by default.
And that’s about it. That’s all you can do to make Motion perform better. Amusingly, this article is about improving the speed of playback. I’m not even trying to play anything back with lighting turned on. I just want Motion to not crash while I’m looking at one, single, non-moving frame.
The good news: I’m about two thirds of the way done with principal animation. The bad news: every single scene I have left to do requires a new environment that I haven’t built yet. Yay!
Fortunately, I was able to construct the elevator/lobby in one day, and finish the entire scene in the rest of that day and today. And that included time I took dawdling to add or tweak little details when I should’ve just been finishing the animation and saving all that for later. So as long as the environments I have left aren’t any more complex than the lobby and elevator, it should be absolutely no challenge to hit my self-imposed deadline.
Shooting a scene with a mirror is a bitch. You get that one, perfect angle that frames the action just the way you envisioned it, but then you realize that you can see the fucking camera in the reflection. God. Dammit. Aaagh.
But if you’re doing animation, there’s no such trouble; the camera is invisible.
Look at this:
You know how hard it would have been to shoot that in real life? Really fucking hard. And no, I’m not referring to the difficulty of casting an actor with a lightbulb for a head.
Also, isn’t that a sweet reflection effect, you guys? Right? Isn’t it? Totally worth me wasting about an hour and a half on that I could’ve put towards making actual progress? Right, guys?
