Well, after a year and not much to show for it, here I am again. I took a brief detour to do some steam-punk, but I ran into a problem. I have a fundamental problem with keeping a project small! Men-At-Arms just kept ballooning as a story, and I found that I suck as a organic modeller. I do fine with tech, but organic body meshes and rigging still elude me.
After reading through “Foundation Blender Compositing” by Roger D. Wickes, I realized what mistakes I was making with the original live action shoots. The first was shooting it with a 1080i camcorder as the combing effect made greenscreen composting look pretty bad. The second mistake was allowing the number and complexity of the models to keep climbing, finally taking more time than I had. The third was trying to do this part time with an ensemble cast, whom I would then loose track of.
So recently a series of fortuitous events occured. First, an actor and artist that worked with me on the failed “Covenant of Shadows” project contacted me about working on a project. The second was that my film partner contacted me about starting to film again. The third was when I talked to a distubution group about what films were selling on the open market, and how they didn’t have enough sci-fi for their portfolio.
So I figure that if life is knocking, you best listen!
Drawing from those lessons, and the backgound of the Marie, I decided to do a story on one of the principle characters of the Marie, Simon the deckhand. The story can be boiled down to two main actors, some extras, a truck, and some barren landscapes. Things I can control.
I have my artist off doing concept art, I’m working on the script-ment and some compositing exercises, and my partner is build cranes and dollies.
Speaking of truck, here is some early work on Simon’s truck.
I work a couple of hours this weekend with Spacegoti, my writer, and we managed to consolidate the original 15 episodes in the first arc to 10. This helps stream line the story, and gives us the first 4 episodes planned out.
I also worked on a space station design from my production designer. Her initial drawing sort of looked like an over-sized jack, and when I stretched it out, it has a very 1950’s feel to it. With overlapping hexagons and triangles, the superstructure is very strong with a large interior for ore smelting. The panels in between the superstructure are made from waste slag, providing radiation and micrometeorite protection. I haven’t worked out how big it is yet, but the small ports are big enough to accept the Marie with room to spare.
The weekend prior I worked on an alien fighter design for the Songmaster race. It is supposed to look like a aquatic crustacean from their planet.
Gawd, Has it been almost 2 years since I last posted? Hum… Well, I didn’t get very far on my own projects. I purchased a Canon T2i (and loaded the Magic Lantern package) and have been doing some Unit Stills photography/videography on Indie films instead of Blender work. But now I am back, excited by the changes to Blender 2.6, and looking to get back to work on Marie.
your project is really interesting! i´m amazed by the amount of time and work you have poured into it so far. keep it up, everyone here wants to see this movie!
