Okay, all the drawings and inked paper has been boxed up and the last archival DVD has been burned — now comes the part of the post-movie clean-up where I sit down and take stock of what went right and what went wrong…
In short, this was easily the smoothest, most frustration-free film production I’ve done to date. Some minor bumps in the road, but waaaay more things went right than wrong:
- This was the first time I picked a target release date and actually hit it — no kidding! It was starting to cut it close, but in the end I got it done in time. Whew!
- Utilized Apple’s Time Machine to handle backups automatically, and on two occasions it saved my sorry butt. Hurray for backups!
- The use of daily image counts worked out great. They kept production moving along with focused, attainable goals, which helped me hit my deadlines… and did wonders for my blood pressure.
- I started out sketching the animatics keyframe poses on paper with the idea of scanning and adding them as I went, but it ended up be so much easier and faster to just sketch the poses with the Wacom directly into Painter. In fact, the animatics poses took only a couple of hours to draw. With only a few exceptions every pose that ended up in the movie was done with the Wacom in the animatics phase.
- First use of a scanner to get drawings and inked images into the computer. Why did it take me this long to see the light???
- Used generic-brand tracing paper to pencil and ink. Penciling was done with the old mechanical pencils I have, with inking done with Staedtler F & M pens. I went with Staedtler over Sharpies because they don’t run out of ink so quickly. The nibs don’t crap out and get wider over time like Sharpies, either. I used the F markers for the lines and the M markers for the bold outline.
- Inking was done on tracing paper instead of relying on the Wacom. Holy bugsnot, what a night-and-day difference from Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog!! Images were flying off the drawing table and into the computer as quick as lightning, without the blurred vision and headaches and lack of time to get anything done. Definitely going to continue to use paper and real ink from now on.
- Used POV-Ray to generate the background starfield. I rendered the background at the same frame-rate as the movie so it didn’t look out of place. Kept the colors and shapes simple, and it worked out well.
- When rendering the color image composites with POV-Ray, I noticed the colors were oversaturated until I set the assumed gamma in the global settings to 1.0. Fixed the problem right away.
- Rendering on the iMac makes the Dells look like old ladies. Unbelievable. Sorry, PC fans, but that’s the truth. Deal with it.
- Finally got a chance to use the editor script I created with POV, and it worked great. I was able to run the final edit as 640×480, another pass at 400×300, yet another at 480×360, all for different movie site destinations. There were no fades or wipes, so I can’t evaluate how that portion of the code works, but I know Evolution will give it a good workout.
Okay, the bumps in the road. Like I said, they were quite minor:
- I penciled, scanned, inked, and scanned again, which I’m thinking was a lot more inefficient than it really should be. For the next film, I’m gonna pencil, ink, then scan, since scanning and the subsequent image manipulation jib-jab probably ate a week’s to two week’s extra production time.
- Colored with the Pen and Paint Bucket tools in Painter instead of the Charcoal tool. While I like the look and texture of the Charcoal, I figure I saved about a billion hours worth of work doing it this way. I’m torn on whether I want to do that again in the future. I’m not thrilled with the flat appearance of the Pen, but I still remember How Space Wars Begin and how crazy I was getting towards the end with all the Charcoal coloring. I’m sure there’s a happy medium out there, but I don’t know what it is…
- At one point I considered using either Prismacolor markers or oil pastels to do the coloring, but the expense of the materials, the inconsistency of the colors, and the general pain-in-the-ass of doing it that way (especially with oil pastels, which tend to smear across the scanner’s lens no matter how gingerly I place them on it) changed my mind. Still haven’t figured out a time-effective way to do it with POV-Ray either.
- I need to experiment with different scripting options to speed up the conversion of Painter’s layers into PNGs files, which POV uses to composite. Doing it manually was slow and annoying.
- At some point I’m going to need to bite the bullet and record audio at 24-bit, 48 khz. This would probably mean the end of Opcode Vision’s involvement with audio, but I suppose that’s evolution at work.
Well, that’s that. This project is officially closed, just in time for me to figure out a new look for the website. Uggh. Anyway, I’m going to switch to production mode for some new movies around the beginning of March, & hopefully make some headway before soccer and volleyball seasons come along and steal all my waking hours. More to come… and thank you for your support 
