t-minus 1,922,440 seconds until I'm done (at the time of writing this title)

Image of the Day

God bless Michelle Yeoh

It's been a busy week. I definitely bombed my blog schedule, and in approximately 203,526,000,000,000 nanoseconds (at the time of Googling how many seconds until I leave) I'll be on a plane to compete at STN. Whoopty-[F-WORD]ing doo.

Due to the hectic nature of the rest of this week for me, my blog posts will be far more brief, mainly just updating you (my beautiful, wonderful readers) on any progress I've made.

First off, I finished the storyboard. You can view every image in their glorious splendor here.

But more importantly, I finished rendering the black hole.

TA-DA

Ain't she a 'beaut?

Shits and gigs aside, I did actually complete it. I'm not exactly sure what went wrong the last time I made it; my running theory is that I was in the wrong view mode. But this time I watched the tutorial like a hawk, making sure I did every step exactly as he did.

The "texture" of the light looks a lot grainier than the tutorial's, though, which is unfortunate but tolerable. Take it as my proof that I actually followed the tutorial step-by-step instead of downloading some file from the Internet. Let the record also show though that I 100% would've done that if I knew it wouldn't get my project invalidated for plagiarism or some shit like that.

The only thing I have left to figure out regarding Blender is how to render an animation. One of my roommates at STN knows Blender pretty well, though, so I'll just wait until Thursday or Friday night to ask him for help. Hopefully I get around to making the spaceship before then.

In terms of filming, I'm fairly confident about being able to secure equipment. I just have to look for a typewriter; I can just use a laptop instead, but it doesn't have that vicious tear sound. I want to practically rip people's attention away from the Blender scenes. Also, Noah is very detached from reality and other people, hence why I think using an outdated piece of equipment is very symbolic of his character.

Also, this past Wednesday I went out and watched Dune II, which reminded me about the cool vibrating armor they had in the first movie. I want to have the world kinda vibrate when the voice start surrounding Noah, so I thought I could just apply that armor effect to that scene. It took some time to find a decent tutorial, but I eventually did. I feel a lot more confident in After Effects than something like Blender, because I have a solid understand of the fundamentals of After Effects.

The last effect I need to find a tutorial for is the "window". I was thinking something like Dr. Strange's mirror dimension VFX, but I can't seem to find any decent videos on that. I'll figure something out, and worst-case scenario I just mask out the ceiling, feather the mask, then add a texture to the black hole to make it look decent.