2012 – where it all ends

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.

The teaser released about one year ago, stated a release date for the final film of 2011, but well, that was a bit optimistic ( again ).

What I can say now, is, that visually I am nearing completion. Shot production is down to 6 shots left, all of them relatively straight forward. Nothing in comparison to the latest vfx heavy shots I had to fight with.

After that, I have a small todo list of fixes for some shots. Parallel to that I will do the final edit on the movie, which will result in a time locked ( if this is a correct term) version of Ara’s Tale. A perfect base for Phil and Mikkel to start working on the score and the sound fx and final mix.

But to complicate things a bit, I have enrolled in an 8 week cgworkshop course on creature texturing with Mari. 2 weeks are now almost done and its a huge fun and learning experience for me. And as I want to make the best out of this course I will invest quite some time into it. That will call for some balancing of my available free time, but it works quite well so far.

With all that said, I expect the time locked version to be ready by end of february. This will certainly be worth an extra post.

I have no real clue how demanding the audio work will be, but from a CG point of view, I see the time after february a bit more relaxing, as then everything should be in place ( minus some fixes ). The rendering of the 1080p shots can be done easily while working with Phil and Mikkel on the sound. Current estimates predict a rendertime of 28 days. This does not include the managing overhead of tackling the 3TB of data …

So from a visual standpoint the movie in full resolution will be finished by the end of april. That lets one hope, that it might be possible to have a finished movie at its 3rd anniversary at the end of July.

But I guess its safe to say it will be ready in 2012.

Otherwise it would be its own kind of apocalypse.