Helooooooooooo dear friends!!!!!!
So for the last month we've been editing the film on and off.
By now everything we filmed is thrown on the timeline and we have the rough cut (minus the sfx miniature shots of course as they are not filmed yet). So now the plan is to further polish the scenes, trim the unnecessary stuff, start working on the sound, and our composer Tim will be soon coming for preliminary music sessions.
Dino is actually editing most of the time, I find it waaaay too boring. We just consult and review what he did every few hours. And in the meantime I work on much cooler and exciting stuff!!! :cool For example:
BAM! This baby arrived a week ago! I introduce to you
Ditogear Motion Control Evolution slider. It has 3 axis of movement: slide, pan and tilt, and also a separate servo that can be used for zoom or focus ( that's the one on the lens). It comes with a program through which you can control it, precisely record all movement, and it can then replay it for you as many times as you want.
Here's a test I did to find out just how precise it is and will the footage match after many passes:
I must say it works surprisingly well, and the best thing is we can now make AMAZING CAMERA MOVES like that one! This just blows my old "Redneck Motion Control" out of the water! :lol (if you spotted occasional "jumps", that's due to the wrong framerate I had on the camera, not the sliders fault)
OK, the other toy we bought is the 3d printer! Now, I was veeeery suspicious of 3d printers as the last time I checked they were all pretty expensive and the print quality was not that impressive to me. Turned out I wasn't checking them that often. The prices dropped insanely and I found the printer called
Ender 3d for just 160$. That's not a bad price at all, and the print quality is actually pretty good for that price.
Since I'm going to use it to detail the miniature buildings I began to model all kinds of air conditioning units and other "rooftop" assets. Here's four different AC units I built:
No need for them to be very detailed as the printer couldn't handle the resolution at the scale I need. It's a half-inch grid behind these printed units, so you can guess the size (around 1cm):
I print them in batches to produce many of them quickly, and I vary the sizes a bit to give it some diversity. Around 1hr printing time for a batch like this:
Here's some huge fans. I actually googled building rooftops and drew inspiration from there. There's all kinds of beautiful shapes on the rooftops! :lol
And so I'm slowly building an archive of assets, and if I'll need some more during miniature making I can easily just print another batch.
So after all these years of prehistoric work conditions we finally arrived to the future, hahaha! 3d printers, motion control sliders, and oh... CNC machine is also on the way and it will help me cut millions of tiny windows on the next and final set of buildings that we'll make prior to filming.
I was thinking.. is the 3d printer kinda lazy? It it all going to just lose it's charm now??? And then, after thinking reeealy hard, I realized: WHO CARES!?! JUST GET THIS FILM OVER AND DONE WITH!
lol:lol