Vacations Over, Back to Work...

 

Vacation 2023 was wonderful with lots of empty beaches and beautiful blue water.  I worked a bit to develop two story ideas while staring at the beach.  The first idea, "Vacation Dick", is a fun silly detective story set on an island featuring a couple I've used before in another vacation themed story ("Staycation" - first draft written but that's all).  This one needs a lot of fleshing out just to get to the basic outline but there are lots of fun characters and locations from my time in the sun.

The second idea, "Maiden", is much further along as I managed to develop a scene to scene outline with bits and pieces of dialog and several key highlight scenes that make me want to push this one as my next potential project (2024).  True to the vacation theme this one involves a lot of the ocean.  The next step for me would be to start working on 3D characters and sets to see super early drafts of what's going on in my mind.  I'll discuss more of this one if it moves forward.  However...

Now I'm back on to Gunderson.  Four big scenes to shoot before the end of September.  Lots to do.  Time to get busy.

     

Gunderson Update #1: Ready Steady Go!

Its the end of June and I've reached my first checkpoint towards a December completion of "Gunderson; An Xmas Noir".  (Should I keep calling this thing by the full name?  Seems a little long winded.)  Three sequences were on my schedule and I finished two and a half.  

Sequence #1 had 3 sets/scenes (Warehouse Lobby to the Warehouse to the Warehouse office), one large scale establishing shot with 10 extras and one big dialog scene.  XXX's voice over work here is really strong.  These scenes are complete though I may check back in a month or two to fix some minor quibbles.  Overall pretty happy with this sequence.  

Santa's Supply Chain Warehouse

Miss Brenda Lee!

Sequence #2 takes place on one set (the bar/nightclub), has 16 extras with 2 dialog scenes separated by a singing performance.  Overall I'm super happy with this one.  The performance worked out well and the set looks good (mishmash of Daz assets and Blender bits).  I used CC4 to create my extras all at less than 8K each.  This is a much better solution (though another export step in the character creation) than the old animated billboard one.

The one still in progress in the opening scene which takes place on a tram.  The script originally had the tram running through a lovely north pole exterior which then fades away when the tram power goes out.  Turns out the exterior is just a projection in the tram windows.  All of my north pole is underground and the tram is running through a dark tunnel.  I shot the exterior scene and it looked fine but found the fade to the tunnel was just unnecessarily confusing and decided to just scrap all the exterior shots and have the tram running through the tunnel from the start.  This part looks fine but I still need to figure out how to get the tram into a station...a work in progress that I'll come back to...

Generally I would say that I am on schedule but there are a few things I'm worried about.  First off I got the new Zelda game for my bday and I'm fully aware of the time sink involved there but I'm resigned to play the game.  Secondly my next set of work (3 more scenes due by end of September) involves the one action sequence in the project and I haven't even looked at available animations yet.  This is the only scene that really worries me.  But for now things are going well.  

Just a bit more work this week before I'm off on vacation.