Category — Filmmaking

Sunday marked the conclusion of the pencil phase for ‘Scary Monster 2′.  Except for some minor tweaks that we’ll fix later, all twenty one scenes have been completed, and are now patiently awaiting ink and color…

All I can say is “Whew!!”

Although I’ve got at least another month left, the hardest part is done.  Done!  All the edits and test reels I’ve looked at to date have me feeling good about life.  Inking and coloring will be tedious, but knowing the final result will look snacky-good… yeah, I can live that.  No problem…

I mentioned at least a month to ink and color, so that puts our tentative (damn, there’s that word again!) release date in mid-May.  Unofficially.  All sorts of wacky things can (and will) happen between now and the end of all this jibber-jabber.  The one I’m hoping for is a mob of friendly magic elves, armed with wicked painting skills and twelve-packs of beer, to show up on my doorstep willing to volunteer their time and energy.  A more likely scenario is an asteroid plunging through the roof over my studio, obliterating my computer and all the hard work contained within.  This is why we do backups…

In non-filmmaking news, the Sprout’s soccer team won their season opener 4-3.  Last season they went 0-7, so I’m already loving this season.  Maybe now the parents will let me keep my coaching job til fall…

This sounds suspiciously similar to the post I did on 3/12 but… this is the final week of pencil drawings for ‘Scary Monster 2′.  I have this entire week’s drawing efforts scheduled out, and so far I’ve been able to get everything done I’ve planned on.  So far.  I have Sunday as the tentative last day for the pencil roughs, and then we move into an inking mode. 

Did you notice the way I wrote ‘tentative’ in big bold letters?  That’s for added emphasis.  Emphasis on tentative.  As in something catastrophic could happen this week that would prevent me from finishing.  Or more likely, something less catastrophic like, say, I get freaked-out/frustrated and don’t feel like doing any more drawings.  Or aliens invade… okay, that’s just silly.  Anyway, if all goes well, on Monday I can start the inking and making things look purdy.  And my eyes will stop twitching involuntarily…

First soccer game of the season is the 30th.  We have yet to have a practice where all the team members have shown up.  This does not bode well…

Besides working on pencil roughs for ‘Scary Monster 2′, I’ve been busy hacking away at some of the other movie projects languishing in pre-production purgatory (in case anyone’s counting, there are thirteen… thirteen!).  I had to split the various tasks into bite-sized little nuggets of chewy goodness — the better on which to snack on during lulls in the pencil-slogging drudgery.  One task was to go thru the robot movie’s raw audio and separate out all the individual dialog bits.  When I go into an audio mode for ‘Scary Monster 2′, I can go through the robot dialog and decide which lines were keepers and which were total horse-dookie.  Another thing I’ve been working on is storyboarding for ‘Evolution’ — yeah, yeah, I know, I said I wasn’t going to bother, but I really need to know how many scenes I’m dealing with, so I figure as long as the storyboards don’t turn into a huge, convoluted mess it should be okay.  Famous last words, normally, but so far no problems…

Future little nugs include going through the bee movie script and working on some rewrites, working on the story treatments for some more robot and ‘Scary Monster’ movies — even that little weird movie idea from the other day will get some love (Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think they’re two separate ideas.  Hmmm.  Two more ideas.  Isn’t that great?  Two more things to put on the list.  Someone needs to tell my brain to knock it off…).

Sometime I’d like to schedule some quiet time so I can, I don’t know, do some mindless sketching.  Or read a book.  I haven’t read a book since October.  That’s pathetic. My set of Simpsons‘ DVDs is collecting dust, and I’ve totally forgotten how to work the DVR. Not that I ever knew to begin with. Whatever.

I need to move to an alternate universe where there are forty hours in a day…

Last night as I was powering down my studio, I was wrestling with a bit of a puzzler.  I need to make some changes to the editing system I designed in POV-Ray – changes to improve workflow, allow me to attach audio events that won’t require any adjustment if the synced video frames need to be changed, and so on and so forth… The ideas collided with one another, like bumper cars driven by drunk college students, but I was confident that once I closed my weary brown eyes and let sweet, sweet slumber take over, the ideas would right themselves by morning, and I would awaken with THE ANSWER to my quandry…

When the Better Half hit me with her pillow and told me to drag my sorry carcass out of bed, the first thing that popped in my head was an idea for a movie short involving three-eyed aliens, a squid monster, a dead squirrel, and God.

Aliens.  Squid monsters.  Dead rodents.  The Almighty.

Uhhh… yeah.

Anyone want to trade brains?  Anyone?  I’ll throw in a pair of broken headphones and a copy of the 2003 Guiness Book of World Records.  C’mon, that’s a deal, people!

Sheesh…

I really wanted to be able to hammer out the last of the pencil drawings for ‘Scary Monster 2′ this weekend.  However, as I’m starting to go through the various scenes I’ve already penciled out, sequencing the drawings and seeing them as a movie rough draft, I’m discovering there’s a lot of… hmmm, what’s the word… “sweetening” that needs to happen.  You know, extra drawings to make the scene pop.  Or at least make it look less stupid.  Not surprisingly, a lot of new drawings involve globs of slobber and sweat flying around, with the occasional eyeball popping out.  It’s animation.  What did you expect?

So, we’re looking at one, possibly two more weeks of pencil sketches…

My problem is, there’s a schedule, and schedules must be adhered to.  Schedules are the holy engine that drives our commerce, makes the trains run on time, etcetera etcetera… too bad my ability to accurately judge the amount of time I need to spend on any given activity is pathetically underdeveloped and almost completely useless.  Didn’t you ever wonder how come I never EVER put down a release date for a project?  It’s because I have no… freakin’… idea.  None.  Anyway, having long ago recognized my bizarre inability to guess these things, I always load whatever schedule I devise with tons of buffer time, so technically I’m still on schedule.  Sort of.  Kind of.  It’s done when it’s done.  Leave it at that…

Have a great St. Patty’s Day.  But don’t drink any of that green beer.  That’s just nasty…