25th of November, 2011 - I was wrong

Not one page, one and a half. I wrote the second teaser today, and I think there's a nice flow between The Robber's Rose, the teasers, then the feature. I just realized it's a month until Christmas! Hooray! Recently I've been having ideas on how to do things like villages, towns and castles, but designing them will be a challenge. Hopefully a friend will be able to help with that. As for how it'd work, here in New Zealand, we don't exactly have medieval-ish-era villages, towns and castles lying all around the place, despite what you might think because of LotR. (Which I need to get the extended versions of.) Things like that either need to be contracted for real as sets... which frankly isn't in our budget... which is basically non existant. So we must improvise! Whip out that green-screen/blue-screen, and put it to work. It's well and good to find a nice landscape that you think: "Oh, wouldn't it be lovely if there were a castle there." But it's another to actually do it.

If you I were to merely show a far off distant castle that I won't need any other angles of, then I could probably get away with motion tracking and matte painting a single image. But I'd kinda like to have more than one angle, so that means the two above, plus making the places in 3D, basically at least. Easiest way for me I think would be to make it in real life- scale of course. (Wishful thinking for anything more, haha.) Then have that model on a green screen and take pictures from the angles I need to put into places. This could also be used for set extension if walls and buildings are removable to get the camera in. Then add the footage with actors and props, (Masked and/or Keyed appropriately, of course.) But even so, a fake environment is no substitute for the real thing, so I'd like to keep locations real as much as I can. Anyway, that was just an idea on a way to do a few things I had the other day... I'm sure there's loads of refining to do and trouble shooting before it were to work, haha. Anyway, Good night.

-Icey

Mountains of Parchment

16th of November, 2011 - How's it going?

Twenty-two. Hooray! The Robber's Rose, first draft, has come out at twenty-two pages, including title page. I've sent it through to my Mum to read, before I send it to a few other people. (You know who you are.) So now that that part is done, it's the minor-ish tweaking stage! Easier to get other things done at this stage. But yeah, big relief that The Robber's Rose didn't grow so rapidly like The Archer's Fable did. I believe I've said before how TAF was planned to be a short, but kinda grew in page count until it was feature-lengh. TRR thankfully has pretty much landed exactly on my word goal. The ending came out fairly nicely, leading onto the teaser I wrote for The Archer's Fable. Next, I'll write the second teaser, as that'll only be about a page.

So, less roles required for the short, by far; eight with dialog, and some of which are very minor. John, Mendel, Cassian, Bernard, Argento, Darren, Village Boy, Shady Man. Hopefully we'll be able to have a few people interested. In other news: I watched Lord of the Rings, Hooray! Awesomeness. MORE other news: Gonna start going through ha bunch of tutorials and stuff, learning after effects and playing around. Hoorah! Short update, but an update.

-Icey

Mountains of Parchment