Modeled by Jill M, Tony B and Tyee

Producer Confession

I wanted to lay out a confession that I have fallen grossly behind in most the administrative aspects of the film since the beginning of the new year.  The public website as well as the Story Reel Development site are in need of update and many of our members are still waiting for a copy of the Story Reel Version 0.2 draft on DVD.  My excuse is two fold.  First I’m in my busy season at the day job.  Second, we are making good progress on the next version of the Story Reel, but I have been putting time into that at the expense of routine business. 

3D Modeling Adventures

Five of us are meeting once a week to collaborate on 3D modeling and animation being used for the next version of the animatics.  The usual suspects, Wally, Jill, Jason, Tony and myself.  We are takling the 3D animatic process one scene at a time and have chosen Scene 2A to start with.  The scene is a flashback to Dominic shaking down Brothus in his nightclub.  The storyboards depicting the action were done by a talented artist, Dave J, over a year ago.  The production design for the sets were developed by Jill M, Christy S. and myself.  Concepts for the warddrobe were developed by Jill and the color scheme came from Tony B. 

The storyboards as they are block out some key concept frames but the detail blocking and camera angles for all the shots in the scene are missing and will need to be re-worked.  I’m contemplating trying this on the fly once we have the 3D assets complete rather then going back and sketching in more 2D boards, but we will see how it goes.  Armed with the other assets, production designs, wardrobe concepts and color schemes we have been modeling the set, set dressing and related props.

We are near completion with having basic low polygon models for the set pieces and will next focus on getting 3D puppets with wardrobe that is a likeness or has the look of our official wardrobe designs.  We aren’t going to spend time on making our puppets look exactly like we expect in the final film, because they will be replaced with live action actors anyway.

After that we will apply basic, fast rendering materials/textures to the models that utilize the color scheme for the scene.  Then we will Layout all the models and block the shots.  Each shot will be animated seperately.  Each shot will also be seperately lit, the camera angles set and then rendered.  Finally the shots are edited together to create the scene.