Not quite there yet

People who make films are supposed to like David Cronenberg, so it should come as no surprise that I praise him.  Having done a hard day's editing, I turned on the television to escape from films for an hour or two, and when Channel 4 suggested I watch "History of Violence" I have to say I wasn't keen.  But what a film!  It is moving, vicious, funny, harrowing, sensitive and so so beautiful that I was captivated before the first cut.  I mean, HOW does he do that?! I guess the answer to that lies somewhere in the 35 industry awards that the film gathered, but I know it got me going before he'd even put a pair of scissors to the thing.
 

If you could only see the workings under all this

I suppose that demonstrates the power of a good establishing shot.  Today has been spent, appropriately, on finalising my own establishing shot. It has been a big effort, three interacting layers; two of animation and one motion  background and it all took a surprising amount of time. Remember, I've already shot everything here!

  It's actually a pretty satisfactory result to my eye and not far off the original storyboard but it left me wondering if it wouldn't be better just to build bigger sets in future and get it all in one take.

For the rest of it, the film exists as a rough cut right now, rendered at 9pm today  - I guess that makes the deadline in a manner of speaking.  All the time, I'm learning new things about the process. I have assembled and disassembled shots so often and I've filed frames into so many different folders that the chapter I wrote on data wrangling six months ago is starting to sound naive and blindly optimistic. 

The management of data is such a crucial thing on a project even this small.  It's all very well your frame-grabber knowing where it saved the raw file for frame no 172 of that sequence you did last May where the woman turns and smiles, but if you need to get into that file yourself to rub out a bit of rigging or a fragment of registration mark using some other software, it could take you so long searching through stack after stack of "dot ORFs" that when you find it you've totally forgotten what you wanted it for.

"Poppylands" exposure charts:  now mercifully redundant

All the time you're editing and manipulating frames you're trying to keep the quality and resolution as high as you can - so much will be lost to compressors downstream that it will make you cry!  I had a moment of concern when I watched an assembly and two of the shots appeared to be out of focus.  This was because I'd accidentally asked for Mpeg quality in an early generation long before I imported the clips into the editor.

One day there will be a full featured stop motion management package that will take care of everything for me in all circumstances, but I haven't found it yet.  (Things are getting better - I once had to write a very complicated spreadsheet to keep track of a production)  However,  I'm still depending on eight - yes eight - separate software packages for this post production, so it's vigilance, diligence and an anally-retentive attention to detail for me for now.