Monthly Archive for January, 2011

Your Face is a Website

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 9:31 PM on January 29, 2011 in Filmmakery. 0 Comments Tags: . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/D0

There is now an entirely separate website for Your Face is a Saxophone: YFIAS.com.

Right now there’s very little there besides an attempted-hype-building countdown timer, a random video clip, and some blurbs of drivel about the project, but it may amuse you for a short period of time.

    Your Face Has Completed Becoming a Saxophone

    Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 2:33 AM on January 26, 2011 in Filmmakery. 0 Comments Tags: . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/HS

    At this very moment, in a Final Cut window on my computer, I can watch, from start to finish, the completed pilot episode of Your Face is a Saxophone.

    Well, actually, I’m still waiting on some people who are recording tracks for the theme song, so the audio for the title sequence is placeholder for the next few days. That notwithstanding, I have fucking butterflies. Fucking. Butterflies. All over my stomach. On the inside.

    Whatever happens from here on, I will be able to look back on this episode knowing that I have achieved this. I have done something. Made something. Nay, we have done something, not just I, but the cast, have brought this creation into existence.

    That would be a triumph just by itself. But on top of that, what we’ve created is pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

    For the next week and a half, I’ll be getting everything in order for the Kickstarter campaign. On February 6th, this wild ride begins.

      Waiting For Progress Bars — A Tragicomedy in Two Acts

      Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 2:13 PM on January 8, 2011 in Filmmakery. 0 Comments Tags: , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/yf


      Post-production on Your Face is a Saxophone is going quite well. I was terrified that the whole thing would still be rendering by the first week of February, but it turns out that I’ll probably finish right on time.

      I did a few things to speed the process along:

      • I lowered the amount of motion blur samples from 8 (the default) to 3. This means Motion will only use 3 different variations of each frame to create the blur effect, which is A) faster and B) actually looks better for my art style. There are some shots (notably the entire opening scene) which still have 8-sample blurring, which I decided not to re-render because it would waste too much time.
      • I set the render quality to “Normal” instead of “Best” for certain shots with many objects. This was a painful decision, as “Normal” quality creates some very noticeable jaggy lines, but I can’t afford to wait 5 hours for 2 seconds of footage right now.
      • I optimized a chair model which had apparently been causing a major performance hit this entire time. Because Motion can’t use actual 3D models, I decided to give the chair an illusion of depth by duplicating the graphics for the seat and the back about 328523857 times. This looked decent, but was apparently an enormous resource hog. I discovered that I could live without the depth effect, so I did.

      Additionally, I noticed yet another piece of evidence that Apple Motion was programmed by monkeys — not even trained monkeys, just garden-variety, crap-throwing capuchins:

      Another one of my time-saving techniques is to render the background separately from the characters, and composite them in Final Cut. This requires the characters to be rendered with an alpha channel, which is data telling Final Cut which parts of the image are supposed to be transparent (i.e. everything but the characters). Motion has the capability to output the alpha channel by selecting the “Color+Alpha” option when you render. This works perfectly, except for when it randomly decides not to.

      This wouldn’t be a huge issue if I could tell whether Motion was forgetting the alpha channel while it rendered, in which case I could stop the process after one failed frame and start over. Unfortunately, the only video-playing piece of Apple software that seems to have any idea what an alpha channel is is Final Cut — everything else (i.e. the Preview window while Motion is rendering something — see picture above) displays transparent portions as pure black. Thus, the only way to know if there’s a problem is to load the video in Final Cut, after spending between 10 minutes and 7000 hours waiting for it, and see if the black parts go away. If they don’t, then I just wasted 10-420,000 perfectly good minutes of my life, and have to do it all over again.