Visual Effects Completed!

Posted on by Thoreau

Hi all!

Well, we finally completed all the visual effects and clean-up.  Quite a process, taking almost four months.   The clean-up, which I'll share here is rather straight forward.  You see an object that shouldn't be there. Then remove it.

Adding visual effects to enhance a scene was quite an involved process.  In all, we had 41 clips that had to be rendered with these two techniques.

Sure, everyone walks around with a wireless transmitter, besides cellphones.  Several scenes where we didn't anticipate the actor to turn:

BP CGI-2 v2137

And the clean up:

CGI-2 fix

Each shot had to be rendered frame by frame and then the required digital effects applied. A shout out to Ryan "Spike" Dauner and his visual effects team for their excellent work.

So now we're on the final part of post production: Color and sound.  Almost there!

Logo for Blood Pledge

Posted on by Thoreau

It's been a while!

We've been working on post which has consumed all our time.  Yikes, it's extraordinary what is required for every facet of this film - credits, logo, sound, FX, and the list goes on...

Well, we have our logo.  It looked like this:

Blah... So, I had to shorten it to be under 8 seconds.  Apparently, unless you're a major studio, you don't get to a have 30 second logo.  Here's the final:

The Latest on Post-Production…

Posted on by Thoreau

Hey folks...

It’s been a while ~ 3 months in fact!  Just wanted to let you know what’s been happening from our end…

  1. We’ve been working with Gib, our editor to finish the edit and we’re pretty darn close. Covid really impacted us as we couldn’t meet to discuss the final edit.  Zoom just doesn’t cut it (no pun there).  Really have to sit down with the editor – but since this wasn’t a possibility, the process took much longer.
  2. We have a colorist who has agreed to do the most crucial scenes we need “timed” – the transition from day to night.
  3. We also have a composer who we really like and has agreed to work within our budget.

With the completion of the above, we should have a finished film by this summer.  When we get these people on board we’ll let you know who they are!

Thanks for your support and patience.

 

Judy, Janet and Dan

Creating Animated GIFs

Posted on by Thoreau

Animated GIFs are very popular these days, especially on Twitter.  Well, I thought it was time to learn how to create these 1 second wonders.  Of course, one can go the "online" route where you upload the video, add the text and voila! The site returns your animated GIF.

Not a chance.  Never know what happens to the uploaded data after you finish.  After some research, found out Photoshop has a feature just for this!  Of course, like all Adobe products, it requires about a dozen steps and there's always a glaring omission  which creates the following situation:

I did not intend for the text to jump around.  Looks cool, and actually adds to the meme.  I found out later the text has to be added strictly above the last image layer (if you know PS).  If you run the timeline in PS and stop to reposition the text, that's the result. Makes sense from an animation standpoint with keyframes. Of course, the procedure doesn't mention that.

A happy mistake, nonetheless.