it’s starting to get a little rough around here…

there are about 6 weeks of production time left. our fearless team of animators – sacha, william, nathan and our external keyframe shifters – are working hard to get the last couple of scenes of our movie animated. enrico and i am both working on “finals” – a little underated sounding description ton likes to give to the task of texturingmodelinglightingcompositinganddoeverythingelsetogetthemovierendered.

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Enrico, Andy and the technical team have been busy for a long time now to create the environment for Peach.

Here you can get an impression how it is going to look like.

It is getting somewhere, and of course it is not even finished yet!

.ogg file

It’s about time that the title of the movie is going to be announced.

Don’t you think so…

Download the .ogg file here.

Besides animating there are more things to do, like composting, lighting, the environment. Ton and Sacha made a schedule from the breakdown to have an overview of all the actions. What you see here is only 1 page. There are 7 pages like this which in the end all need to be checked off. No finals yet, but come back soon for more detailed information!

In this blog post also a short reproduction of the animating. William is animating 1 shot of 2.375 seconds. He has been busy with that for at least one day. One day within the Peachteam exists at least out of 10 working hours or even more. The script is divided in several scenes. Each scene is a certain amount of seconds. In the overview you can see how many animation seconds a shot has (not even counting prop animation!)

They are working on it!

Download the .ogg file here.

Dear mother,

how are you doing? I’m sorry you haven’t heard that much from me lately, but I’m sure you understand it’s been extremely busy here. The new week schedules Ton is putting under our noses are just insane. Even with the help of some external animators it’s gonna be incredible hard to finish the movie. Those 80 hour work weeks I had in the beginning? A joke compared to my new weeks. But please, don’t worry about me, I’m doing fine. To be honest, the first days of the week I was pretty sick. I felt horrible, enormous headache. But you know me, stubborn as always, I just went to work. Strangely enough, despite me not getting any sleep I recovered pretty good. And while I was recovering I even got so much energy, I skipped an entire night of sleep (of course I stayed in the studio).

Making this movie as good as possible is my main drive. Ton wants us to finish the movie, no matter what quality (producer’s talk). But you know that’s not good enough for me. Whatever needs to be done, I’ll do it. We can do it. Seeing all the great results gives me alot of energy, especially combined with the latest music from our composer Jan. And sometimes we get weak results, they give me even more energy: that some day soon I’ll get back to them and do it even better.

You know Andy, right? The guy who was working on the fur when you came over. You made a joke about his hair, remember? The last few weeks he’s been working on the first shots of the movie, and wow, it’s gonna look awesome! I’m so glad to have him on the team, the guy’s got skills. He’s a perfectionist, never satisfied (sounds familiar, doesn’t it? ^_^).

Check this out, it’s from one of those first shots.

We really love that bird, he looks so silly. And he’s not even a main character!

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As the schedule starts to get close, we recently realized that we are not going to be able to finish on time. We now have finished animation for less than a third of the film, and we only have about six weeks to go before all animation has to be locked, so that we can get all the final renders out on time. Weeks are going by with a few shots coming out here and there, which is not going to cut it.

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Continuing in the current series of posts about “Outsider” perspectives of the Peach project, here is eight year old Australian gal India, giving her special views and comments.

India and her mum Cathy have spent the last month in and around Amsterdam annoying Campbell and the Peach crew as much as humanly possible.

At the end of the video is a special “Hi” to India’s Connect-4 Guru Martin (aka Theeth) who spent some time down under with Campbell and family.

Download the ogg movie here

Just writing to let you know the gents at LugRadio interviewed Sacha in the last episode; “Time Gentlemen Please” (Season 5, Episode 9)

LugRadio is a Linux and free software focused podcasts, where 4 guys from the UK discuss open-source, communities and various projects

For those who follow the blog closely the interview dosnt go into details but its still worth a listen.

Download the OGG or MP3 from www.lugradio.org

Hello all. A friend of mine, Aaron, from the USA came to visit the Peach project last week. He put together a video and a blog post for all of you:

The condensed version of a week in the life of the Peach project:

.ogg video file high quality (39.6MB)

It’s a couple of months before the premier and there are lots of things to do. Not only the most obvious (finishing final animation) but also finishing scene construction and render preparation so that the first of the finished shots can be shipped off to the render farm. A simple calculation revealed that at the current animation pace the project won’t be finished in time, so four external animators have been found and hopefully with their help the timeline will become reasonable again.

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Some well known animation studios are now using approximate global illumination in feature films: Pixar used ambient occlusion in Ratatouille, Dreamworks used single bounce indirect lighting in Shrek 2, ILM used ambient occlusion in Pirates of the Carribean 2 & 3. So I looked for an ambient occlusion method that was reasonably simple to implement, and still fast enough to handle the high poly scenes we are dealing with.

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