Blender Minutes

This weekend we managed to do the recording with Julia for Ara’s Song.

Thanks to my friend Michael Raich, who generously offered his small multimedia room for this purpose.

The whole recording took about 2 hours for the 1 minute song.

The image above show Julia and me discussing some rhythmically demanding parts.

I have now about 10 full takes of this song and will clean it up a bit before putting it forward to Mikkel and Phil for further processing

What I have now to do is the still missing lip syncing for Ara’s Song. After this I will power up the render machine for a (hopefully) last time for this movie.

I declare the visual development for Ara’s Tale as finished.

This is not 100% true, but I declare it nonetheless. Actually I still have to do the lipsyncing for two shots. This will be done after Ara’s Song is recorded, which will happen this very weekend.

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Finally all render/compositing jobs are done and I have now the full 1080p footage ready.

I still do have the intermediate multilayer renderpasses for each shot, in case there is the need to revisit some compositing tasks. The storage demand is quite huge for these (a single frame typically has ~140MB) , but it already saved me a lot of time and trouble. I guess I will only delete them once the movie is eventually released

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This is one of the rare shots from our shooting during production

The render machine is running and purring and I already have 80% of the movie in 1080p rendered out. As of this writing the remaining render time will be ~48hrs.

During the course of this final rendering, all sorts of little nasty and quite unexpected problems surfaced, which forced me to tweak and investigate to force the render to be what I wanted it to be.

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Now that my render machine is spitting out frame by frame, I had some time to work on the movie poster for Ara’s Tale.

Enjoy and spread it !

UPDATE (15.3.2012): I have now added a link to the high res version of the poster.

Movie Poster high resolution

Finally I have (virtually) pressed the big RENDER button on my render machine and with this I have started the last part of the visual voyage for Ara’s Tale.

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Finally the long awaited major milestone is here !

All major visual development is done and I have edited the movie to a final cut. This is not yet a picture lock, but what I call a timelock. Now the path is clear for Mikkel and Phil to do their magic and add sound and music to this movie.

And to all visitors from Inzing, a deeply heartfelt ‘Hello’ to you

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I am talking about Ara’s Tale of course. For any other visions, apocalyptic and otherwise, I just refer to here.

And that does not imply that there is any apocalypse waiting regarding Ara’s Tale, quite on the contrary.
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With this post I want to summarize and share my experiences I had using the particle system in current blender 2.61.

The current production phase calls for a lot of vfx, mostly to be done using dynamic particles. I will not go into detail as to what exactly the shots are, but I think just describing the overall concepts and approaches will give you an enough complete picture.

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