We currently have two actors attached to the film:

• Steve Speirs as ‘Ryan’

• and Laura Bridgwater as ‘Jean’.

I’ve already recorded Steve’s dialogue which went great. My current plans for the casting/recording of the remaining parts: to be focused on later in the year.

The past few months my main focus has been on learning as much as I can to do with the technical side of the film: the 3D software. I’ve in particular spent most time my learning through books, tutorials and tests how to model and rig characters ready for animation.

This is really the crux of it all in my mind as once the characters are digitally created and set up ready to go, I feel, in a way, the hardest job will be done and although the animation and modelling of other assets will be a much longer task, it will also be a much easier and more enjoyable task.

With modelling, I now have the first set created. Today I’ve been playing around with the look and feel for the film (or that set at least) I’ve lately been leaning towards a black and white look but that could change in time. I’ve also tested and defined what render settings and workflow I’m using with the film and finding out alternative routes for time-intensive render options like DOF and Motion Blur which I need, but don’t want to waste time doing natively if I can get them as-good in post in a tenth of the time.

Anyway time for me to return to isolation. No resolutions for me, I just want to keep on the same track going forward.

Happy New Year!

Qemic Films Ident (draft) from Krystian Morgan on Vimeo.

Had a play around with an ident this weekend. Made it in 2K and added it to the film’s timeline. I figured there’s certain things although not of the highest importance can be experimented with at this early point, so why not get at them whilst waiting for certain out-of-hand matters? I want the Qemic Films ident to be really different from the other indents you see preceding films. I’m hoping to also harp back to my old frenetic abstract and dark – and using footage for it. It was fun doing this, but I have ideas to really make it awesome. So will wait to do music for it until then. Maybe next weekend if I get chance, but I have a lot of other more urgent film-stuff to do already planned so may not get chance. Enjoy!

I wrote about getting one of these before. I went for a better mic and a lesser reflection studio (booth) and am really happy with the ease of use and results I’ve gotten from recent tests. All dialogue will be recorded through this mic, a sound-card and a laptop enabling me to record where I’m based or also take it with me to record elsewhere. I also plan on tracking much of the soundtrack using it and my acoustic. The sound of the guitar (raw) sounds exact to how it sounds in the room which I was really impressed with.

Regarding the film, it’s more a-go than ever. Things are developing faster than ever. I’m currently in talks with a few people regarding parts and have booked two weeks at the end of August/start of September to fully complete the animatic animation with demo voices.

If you’re having trouble or have commonly found yourself having trouble thinking of names for your characters in new writing projects, Scrivener has an awesome tool to help you out.

Simply go to EDIT – WRITING TOOLS and select NAME GENERATOR.

This will pop up a simple window below which will populate with names that you can use or mix and match with each other once you hit the ‘Generate Names’ button.

If you click on the little cog icon on the bottom right of the pop-up a few more options will appear for you to fine tune your results. Here you can select whether you need male only, female only or a mixture of both and also an obscurity level of the actual names produced. These are the two I’ve been playing with most lately.

In a recent project I’ve attempted to write a little differently than the script for Porbeagle. I’ve decided to go more situation based and without an outline to see how I like it. I find myself constantly hitting a little wall where I need to introduce a character which has not been all planned out before so this little tool is really indispensable to quickly give a realistic name to that character and move forward with the story.

If you haven’t tried Scrivener, check my other post which goes over some of my favourite writing features and why I use it: Using Scrivener to Write Screenplays.

Or check out the Scrivener home page to get a trial.

I had spent a lot of this following week down my caravan in the Gower, my dog had been unwell so it was a bit back and forth more than I would have liked but it was out of concern for the little guy. My birthday was on the fourth and after seeing the vet I went back down the van to finally get some work done on this fourth draft of the script. It had been a while since I’d last worked on it through other commitments that have been taking up my time, but on that notion, I’m all freed up now on the time front to work on the film (after my full-time job’s hours of course).

Anyway I managed to print off the current state of the third draft, as I much prefer to read on paper when I can and I re-read the whole thing making notes and little storyboards on the pages when inspiration struck to do so. I had this nagging feeling that a lot of the middle-story was somewhat superfluous – which is something that I didn’t want (both having filler and/or taking it out). So I reworked a lot of that stuff making it more key to the plot, driving it forward and making each scene important to the overall story. I also added some more tension throughout and ambiguity too. I like ambiguity in stories as it allows multiple interpretations, even if I as the writer know the hard facts about the reality of what happened or what is. I think because with ambiguity you have to

think

, it makes a story last, as it stays with you after watching/reading. But it can be a balancing act as too many questions and who cares?

Right now as it stands, I’m so much more happy with the script as a whole, it feels more of a whole piece too, not just sections as I felt it once did.

In between writing I bought a book on storyboarding after giving it an amazon quick look. Originally I was quite close-minded about the subject of needing a book about storyboarding as I’ve focused on composition for years now and feel like my grasp of it is pretty strong. But this book: ‘The Art of the Storyboard‘ even through the quick look gave me some great ideas, and I even storyboarded certain shots which have gotten me really excited about actually creating them. I think this book which has a lot of theory (which I love more than practical, which it does have too) will really take the film’s visual style forward. I’ve already through reading through the script again been watching it in my mind differently, the shots, the edits are much better this time around – I just need to get them into the boards and into the animatic to solidify that. Which is what I’ll be working on next.

HEART STRING MARIONETTE teaser trailer #1 from M dot Strange on Vimeo.

I posted one of this guy’s youtube videos a few months back. I found his site through searching for 3D tutorials on youtube/google. M dot Strange has almost finished his 2nd feature 3D animated film and has published his first teaser trailer for the new film online today. Check it out.

You can also watch his previous film, ‘We are the Strange‘, in it’s entirety on youtube. Impressive.

This is from another project not Porbeagle as there’s no guns in the script. This was created by creating a path in Illustrator then using the lathe tool in 3D and texturing using only the built in gradients and noise for bumps which I’m pretty happy with. I copied from a photo and think I’m definitely getting better at texturing from playing around a lot, which is a bit of a relief.

So I started a new Youtube account the other day. I’ve made a start uploading some of my videos from Qemic.com (just looking for all the big files on other hard drives). i’ve always had a scepticism of youtube, and a hypocritical one too because I regularly watch videos there, but a scepticism about publishing videos there. I never thought that the sort of abstract video experiments I had been making were a bit too out there for 14 year old myspace kids, and really couldn’t be bothered with the hassle. I’m trying to broaden my mind as suspend judgement before using it for a while as there is some great content on youtube and great content that is solely on youtube.

Here’s my channel, please subscribe or friend me: Qemic Youtube

Also earlier in the week on the train home from work I had a story idea that I liked and scripted 9 pages of that story upon arriving home. I think it’s quite good, very different from Porbeagle, it’s more of a black comedy and the dialogue’s a bit snappier. It’s been good practice for the first week of May which is my writing retreat week (and birthday) at my caravan to tune up everything.

This weekend I’ve also been keeping up with more 3D tutorials and putting into practice some of the things I’ve learned, mainly modelling and concepts to do with modelling, getting comfortable with starting with a primitive shape such as a cube and turning it in to a set piece, or anything imaginable. There’s this tool called Zbrush which is a modelling application that I’ve seen a lot of lately, it allows for really easily creating characters, props and so on that can be imported into your 3D program of choice. I saw this cool mini tutorial which shows how you can set up different facial expressions inside of Zbrush and then link them to sliders inside of Cinema 4D. Now as a workflow of creating expressions and phonemes. It really looks achievable with a little bit of upfront effort and basic learning of Zbrush. I think I’m getting to the stage where I put the lessons into practice and create from scratch a simple 3D character that can do basic things such as walk and talk and render out a short 30 second test clip. I think I need that exploration and practice as a jumping off point. Things can be made gradually and in an ‘as they’re needed’ situation, when a scene calls for a prop or an ancillary characters (not that there’s too many of each) they can be made when needed and a lot of animation can be produced beforehand with what is already at hand. It’s cool to learn about cheating too, for instance, I’m not gonna waste time modelling  an entire object if I only ever see the said object from one angle, this can really cut down a lot of wasted time and detail on something that is never seen by someone other than myself.

Most other items on the shopping list are now software based, such as plug-ins, some which are function based, others are purely for visual tricks which aren’t as important at this current juncture. Have spent this weekend following more 3D tutorials, I find a lot of the theory as well as the technical applications of the software really help from certain videos. Something I heard which I though was particularly insightful, is to initially build the bare essentials in terms of rigging and then add controls as needed. This little bit of advice was really helpful as I always looked at it from the point of making a finished prop to be used throughout. This way takes a lot of the pressure off and allows to not learn everything all at once, but instead in more easily digestible chunks.