Finally Finished!!

Its now friday night and we have handed in our film for marking. I am so relieved after working so hard to complete the film. it is even more of an achevement when a few weeks ago we were considering canceling the film due to she sheer amound of work ahed of us to complete the film. the amount of work me and john especialy have gotten through in an effort to finish the film is more than i ever thought possible! My sleeping pattern is so off now that 5 in the morning seems normal time to be working untill, i honestly can say that me and John could not have phisicaly worked harder towords the completion of this film.
That said in the last 4 days scince Tuesday i have been working on:

• Rendering scene 3 with John and the 51 shots it consists of.

• comunication with wan though email, who was busy working on the smoke effects for two scenes in the film. also tring to contact Raphael, to check that our final piece of animation was going to be completed.

• creating updated animatics in premiere for the currently rendered frames so Ben could create the music and sound effects more acuratley than with the playblasts of the blocked charaters.
• made folder system to store all of the render shots so that we could place them organised into composition layers-added all the rendered shots to this folder.
• Rendered sky and some backround composite shots for scenes 3 and four with John
  
• Me and John created the premier file and imported all renders composite shots added extra sound effects, transitions and intergrated james PDA animations and i created Credits.

Me and John spent Tuesday rendering out scene 3 which was a big job as it was over 2 minutes of the film. To ensure we could get this done we had 14 computers rendering all at the same time with our files loaded onto each computer so that we could just collect the renders at the end of each day. we had to be at college all day to look after and render new shots each time one had finished, it was quite a task to work out which shots had been rendered and which ones need to be done. it involved alot of coordination between me and john to make sure all shots were rendered. i was suprised when james came in later on these days and left at about 4ish to do his PDA animations as getting all the renders done was a big task and he really should have been acting as a team and working together more so we can communicate ideas and problems. it is difficullt to communicate when we are not all together.
Raphael finaly showed up tuesday afternoon with half the animation for the old guy who has a heart attack, i was releived to here that he was going to stay with us and finish the animation so we could have it by the end of the day. (not having this would have meant a huge part of the film being cut) i was pleased with the animation he finaly gave me as all the instructions i gave him to help him create the animation seemed to go for making an animation which worked within the tight timings we had given the shots in the film. despite the instructions i still had a problem when i went to collect the animations as Raph had animated each shot in a seperate scene file. This caused great problems for me as i ideally wanted the whole sequence in one file so i could just import it in. whiat we decided in the end is that i would just have to import each animation one at a time each time i have to render a new shot of the old man. :(
i felt it was very hard to communicate with Raph and actually know if the animation would get done as it was a good few weeks after i first gave him the work and i had heard nothing from him. it was hard to know if i needed to get someone else more contactable to animate for us as it was nearing the end of the film. we had to hold back our rendering as we didnt have the animation. even being able to see some of the animation in progress would have helped so that i could tell if it would work in the film.
we encountered lots of problems during rendering over the three days , lots were caused by slow files, just because of the sheer amount of characters in the scene, we also had problems with rendering not always completing and computers crashing alot.
we were in contact with Ben Wheatley who was doing our music alot this week as we knew that he was finding it hard to create music to rough playblasts.
much of Wednesday morning was wasted for me by trying to fix the problem of a texture not loading on the heart attack man, after we narrowed it down to it being a problem wit the texture files stoped working on the model, i still dont know why this happens. i fixed the problem in end by saving them as tiffs.




Me and john went to collect the music for our film from Ben on Wednesday. I thought he had done a very good job with the music considering he had been working with areas of the film only rendered out as playblasts and at very short notice. Me and John decided that Ben should have to do the sound effects as it seemed as if the sound guy James had lined up would not be avalible to do what we wanted in the short time left as james had not bothered to contact him until the last week dispite many reminders from me and John as Ben was already working on the music for the film scince the creation of the fist animatic.
i spent thursday morning organising the many render shots we had collected into my folders so we could easily import into premiere later.
Today i recieved the PDA animations from James, just as me and John were about to leave to go and create the final premiere files. when we got back to work on it , we descovered that the files he has given us are not to the right legnth so they do not fit with the timings of the film, although he does have all the exact shot timings for the shots. as he had rendered them out as an AVI file rather than an image sequence there was nothing we could further do to extend the footage to fit. To further the problems with these PDA animations james had rendered out the movie files with backrounds rendered to them, some of these shots were to be composited and so rendering them out as video files meant that we could no longer composite for these particular shots. a little more thought and communication would have meant that these problems would never have happened, especialy when there is such little precious time left to produce a finished film. this left me and john struggling that night to do what we could to get the film looking finished. Thursdsay night before hand in was a mad rush to add in as many remaining sound effects as we could to the film i also relised late into the morning that there were no credits for the film as i thought james was doing them along with the titles, so i decided to take this on and do the credits in time for the film to be rendered. I felt i did the best i could with the fifteen minuites or so i had to work on them as we desperatly needed to start to render the final film. i knew that we would be making a better version for the degree show when credits will actually matter.