The Finale (for realsies)

Goodbye everyone.

This project is the last thing I will have done before becoming an adult (legally, not mentally). It's a really weird feeling. I don't want to say I'm very attached to it, but I've been working on it for over a month, and working on this blog for even longer. I love this shithole of a website.

My CCR itself is pretty crap; I really only cared about the opening (sorry). I only used two sources (again, oopsie).

“What Is Science Fiction Writing? Definition and Characteristics of Science Fiction Literature - 2024.” MasterClass, 1 Sept. 2021, www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-science-fiction-writing-definition-and-characteristics-of-science-fiction-literature.

Menadue, Christopher Benjamin, and Susan Jacups. Who Reads Science Fiction and Fantasy, and How Do They ..., James Cook University, 2018, researchonline.jcu.edu.au/54351/1/WhoReadsSFnF.pdf.

Regardless of how bad the CCR is, I'm so proud of how much I tried on the opening, even if I did procrastinate editing it and started like two days ago...

And finally, I made a promise in a blog post about a month or so ago regarding what I'd say for my final post. 

I have no fuckin' idea

The Finale (film finale not post finale)

INCANDESCENCE

Reflection (not creative nor critical (nor creative and critical))

Well. Shit.

There's so much I can say about this project, but there's even more I already have said. It's been such a deranged journey for me. When I started, I decided I only had two goals: to try my absolute best, and to actually enjoy the process of making it.

There's been times where I struggled to fulfill either, but now that I'm almost at the end, I can finally say, without a shadow of a doubt: I am not cut out for this shit.

I don't know if I enjoyed it. I think just having a due date is enough to stress me the hell out, even if it is over a month's worth of time. Also, I lost a week of being able to work on this due to STN, but even then I'm not sure if I would've made adequate use of that extra time.

I absolutely did try, though. Even if I procrastinated at some points, I worked my ass off when it counted, and I hope anyone who sees the opening, regardless of whether or not they enjoyed it, can tell that I put all my effort in.

To wrap it all up like a chicken wrap

My next two blogs will be the Opening and CCR, so in a sense this is my last "real" blog post. And there's only one person whose image I can put on here that will truly do the honors of closing this year out.

Love ya, cousin

:)

I'm going insane again

As I write this I'm fixing some last-minute shit with the spaceship. My computer is currently crashing while trying to combine about 36,000 vertices into one object because I messed up the materials at some point. I don't even know anymore I'm just tired.

This all happened because I wanted to add a little thruster trail behind the thingamabob and realized the solar panels were transparent. I don't know what happened or why but I solved it to the best of my ability, which is saying very little.

If this fixes it I'm going to re-add the trail; if that ruins it again then I will say [F-WORD] the trail and leave it out. And then I will begin to sob profusely. I hate this project.

I want to graduate. Now.

I fixed it. The solar panel texture is stretched out for some reason but I don't give a shit about that. I have many, many words that describe how I feel about Blender, but I will keep them to myself. On the bright side it only takes four seconds to render a frame for the spaceship, meaning I won't have to pay some render farm for that. Hooray.

I'm gonna get all the rendering done tonight so that I can just finish editing tomorrow; hopefully before I film my CCR tomorrow night.

It's possible that I don't blog about any of the editing process. If I do, hooray! If not, I probably took a well-deserved nap.

uhhhhh what else

I don't [F-WORD]ing know. I'm sick of school. I'm sick of this project. I'm sick of sick.

back at it like a crack addict

The Devil works hard. I don't.

I've been Blender-ing my ass off recently. First thing I did was fix the animation for the black hole; when I DM'ed the creator he mentioned adding a copy rotation modifier to the accretion disc, which was something I did when following the tutorial. At least, I thought I did. Turns out I didn't see the Apply button so it never actually went into affect. Whatever, though. It's fixed now.

After I finished that, I tried using this tutorial to add a realistic star background to the animation. I didn't think it'd be possible, though, because the black hole itself uses a shitload of math to bend the light within Blender.

Unfortunately my guess was correct; since the stars are all different light sources, the ones around the perimeter of the black hole bend weirdly. It's not super easy to see in the photo, but if you look closely it's noticeable. If anything I'll add a background in post if it's not too much of a hassle, but otherwise I'm fine with there being no stars in the background.

That's a long-winded way of saying I'm not doing a starry background, because it will be a hassle; I hate rotoscoping.

This is not a [CENSORED]

Moving on to the next piece of my Blender tasks, I started the spacecraft. On the left is a very early stage in the development, the engine terminal.

The tutorial is easy enough to follow, my only concern is whether or not I'll be able to film the black hole together with the ship. It would save me a decent amount of money if I can.

The only reason I can think of as to why it wouldn't work is that the black hole is basically just a painting inside the bounds of a sphere and a square in Blender.

In other words, if the spaceship is coming towards the black hole in one shot, it would be clipping through the shapes that the black hole exists inside of, which would either not work at all, or would give me a very limited range that I could have the ship move through.

It looks a little phallic...

Hi Blog

I like reading through other peoples' blogs a lot. It's fun.

Or at least it was fun until I saw how many of these dickheads are already done. 

UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

i want better for you, maurice

The Political and Economic State of the World Right Now

I have not edited jack SHIT these past two days. In my defense, I'm burnt out from literally everything and I need a break. Also in my defense, editing does not take that long. I can knock out a line edit and soundscape in one night, and it's not that hard to add VFX, seeing as I'm literally just following tutorials.

Coloring might take a while if I choose to take my time with it, but also I'm lazy and want to finish this shit already.

The hardest part is going to be the spaceship. I watched the tutorial fully, and while it's possible to follow along, it relies on you to eyeball the modeling, whereas the black hole was just copying the numbers I saw on-screen.

Speaking of the black hole, I DM'ed the original creator, Alaskan FX, to ask how he animated it.

I have no damn clue what this means but. Okay. Better than nothing

It's Tuesday

I'm in New Orleans. Hooray. I also haven't done any editing. Yippee.

It's not my fault; I've been working like a dog for the past... I don't even know how long it's been. I needed a break to play Minecraft and shit.

But starting tomorrow I'm back on the grind.. I hope. I'm gonna be doing some tourism but other than that I'm gonna be grinding. If I'm not too tired I'll try and get a line edit done tonight.

Oh. I also wrote my CCR script on the flight. Trust me when I say there's a lot more than just this, in fact I might've done too much, so I might trim that in the coming days.

I don't want to show the whole script because it's not done yet, and also I don't like putting my stuff on here believe it or not. Last thing before I go into a po' boy-induced food coma, I'm gonna try and keep the "reality" scenes to 1:30 or 1:45 so that I have room for a max. of 30 seconds of the animated footage. Bye.

eh.

thank you kyrie irving

Today was filming day. It went alright.

I think I've made it very clear by now how much I dislike filming. This shoot was definitely one of my better ones, though that's not to say it went perfectly.

I asked Santi and Mateo to come at 3PM, and we'd hopefully wrap at 6PM. The filming location was my mom's house, but I'm at my dad's until my birthday, so I sped on over to my mom's practically as soon as I got up.

That gave me a couple of hours to prepare both the equipment and the set.

I decided last-second to add a bunch of sticky notes with "book notes" to the desk to increase the sense of freneticism. By last-second I mean I decided yesterday and procrastinated actually adding them. Oops?

Another thing I decided to do yesterday was print out a picture of some white dude winning an award, then cover his face with sticky notes to imply that it was Noah who won the award. Little sprinkle of worldbuilding for ya there.

The quality of the videos were alright. I'm not the best cinematographer, but I'm also not the worst. Whenever I imagine what I would consider something to be "proud" of with this project, I never really think of the visuals. I'm a writer by choice and an editor by necessity. So long as I like the story I don't personally care about anything else.

That's just a long way of saying I'll just deal with not liking it.

I need a NASA supercomputer...

At the speed my laptop can render one frame the black hole, I'd need to spend about 20 consecutive days just for 10 seconds of footage.

That's before adding any compositing effects and a space background, though. Not to mention the spaceship.

So yeah, the plan's to try and animate multiple still images in After Effects or something to make it look good and just deal with the blow to visual effect.

...or maybe not

That's what an idiot would say. A stupid, dumb idiot who doesn't know what render farms are.

When I tell you it was either stupid luck or divine intervention that I found out about these things...

It was a beautiful Friday morning when I woke up, and, like most teenagers on Spring Break do, decided to lay in bed scrolling through my phone. I was perusing the YouTube home page when I saw an interesting little video. It seemed like a cool concept so I decided to actually sit down and watch it; thank God I did.

At about 3:55 in the video, the YouTuber says "If you can't wait that long, you send your animation to a cloud rendering service."

It was literally only 5 seconds and a casual remark, but somewhere in my primitive little monkey brain it clicked that I should Google what a cloud rendering service was.

God inventing cloud rendering services (I think)

Basically, if your computer sucks balls at rendering, there's companies that have an armada of supercomputers or whatever the [F-WORD] that can render it for you for a small fee.

HALLELUJAH!!!!!

Let me tell you, my heart started POUNDING (metaphorically) so hard it caused EARTHQUAKES (metaphorically).

I was a teensy bit skeptical that I'd get a virus or get my SSN stolen or something trying to use one of these, but it wasn't too much of a hassle to figure out. A lot of companies also give you a "free trial", where you get a certain amount of "Render credits" after making your account. Render credits are just money; you put however much into your account and you can use that to render however many frames it can buy. 

After a bit of research I decided to try out Fox Render Farm; my main concern, excluding getting a virus, was the cost, but after doing a quick test run it came out to about $0.07 a frame.

I first tested it out with 10 frames, and after that I rendered 5 seconds (120 frames).

When I looked at the final render I realized, "Oh yeah. I have no clue how to animate this correctly." Watching the video, it's glaringly obvious to see the issue, but for me it's hard to pinpoint how to fix the issue, seeing as I've used Blender only a handful of times before. There seems to be some values that are moving too much and some value that isn't moving at all; I don't know what the [F-WORD] the problem is but I've got to figure it out tomorrow.

I have about $15 left of the $25 trial balance they gave me. After that I'm probably gonna try to use GarageFarm's $25 trial, and after that I'll just pay out of pocket. I usually spend money on my video projects--I bought a boomerang for a recent skit I did--so I'm not opposed to paying for cloud rendering.

I have four things left to do regarding Blender. 1) Fix the animation. 2) Add stars. 3) Model the spaceship. 4) Layer the clips.

I might DM the original creator of the video to ask what values he keyframed to animate it. Hopefully he remembers; it's been 11 months.

The Coming (cumming) Days

Editing is both enjoyable and not enjoyable for me. I have some kind of PTSD for chromakeying after spending about 30 hours in one week last year frame-by-frame masking a one-minute video because my lighting was so bad the greenscreen didn't key out.

I'm not editing tonight. Tomorrow I'm gonna finish up Blender. Basically, most (all) of my editing will be done during my trip to New Orleans, which I know my dad is gonna absolutely love. It only takes a few hours for a line edit, and from there it's mainly just building the soundscape and adding graphics (+ coloring).

I'm also gonna have to film my CCR in New Orleans. [F-WORD] [F-WORD] [F-WORD] [F-WORD].

Like I said before, the theme will be Weefle, Beefle, Shnoop! because that's probably my favorite project/character I've ever made. Mateo mentioned during filming today that he also wanted to make his CCR Weefle, Beefle, Shnoop!-themed, which I'm fine with because he edited that whole thing; it's as much his right to use it as it is mine. I just hope we don't get the same AICE Examiner...

Back to editing, I'm not sure how much of that I'm really going to talk about in the upcoming posts; I'm sure I'll have a lot to say, but I also need to cram in a shit-ton of research for my CCR because I couldn't be arsed to do it before.

There's about 9 days left for both this project and the CCR. I'm hoping for something I'm proud of.

(Also to whoever my AICE Examiner ends up being, just know my birthday is the day after this opening is due. Just keep that in mind as you grade this. Think about how hard this must be for me... just a poor little guy from South Florida...)

AND TO WHOEVER MATEO'S EXAMINER IS, JUST KNOW THIS IS THE KIND OF FREAK YOU'RE DEALING WITH!!!!!

peace and lurv y'all. Pride out.