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.