Production Recap March 20th to 24th

Last week on Pet Projects…

Finally, the age of moving faces has come! Yes, Demeter worked really hard to rig the Dog's face, which our animation team was able to test this week. Pablo then dared to say "Everything breaks... that's my life!" - because when we say test, we obviously also mean "bug fixing", so our character TD was kept very busy. Ah, to rig or not to rig...

Meanwhile, as assets are still being designed and modelled (we are a bit behind schedule, I confess), Hjalti stills needs to mock up a lot of things for his layouts. He calls it faking it, I call it getting things done the best we can. It is not ideal, however that allows us to block some staging, decide on camera angles and work out some shot transitions while still giving more time to the assets team. Beau and Vivien have been focused on the Rocket Interior again, as the main set has many different elements to figure out and create.

Beau and I also spent some time re-organizing the assets on our SVN and on Kitsu. Indeed, many assets had been put in the Props category, which is only meant for objects that interact with the characters - this was done in the early days of the production, when the edit wasn't done and thus the breakdown didn't exist yet. We had to put all assets not pertaining to that Props category either in the Environment sub-folder/type (objects used for set dress) or inside the set file itself, locally, with no separate file of their own. It was critical to do those changes then because we now need to rely on the casting done in Kitsu to build the shots for layout and animation. And without a good organization, there can't be any automation!

During this week, our director Rik was able to jump on layout and get his hands on the CG. It's been a long time coming, and after all the back and forth on the storyboard and edit, this felt like a good step forward. He will be working on the timing of a couple of shots directly in layout, which should help figure out things more easily. Going from 2D drawings to the CG assets makes a difference in how shots look and play, thus we decided it was best to stop tweaking the 2D and solve some questions directly in CG.

Another big step: the music! Our composer Mariana Calegari delivered a first version of the soundtrack for the first half of the movie. Rik discussed what he had in mind with Mariana the week before, noting that the cartoon spirit of the short should also come from the music. We're very excited about the direction Mariana is taking us in and are looking forward to the second half of her first draft!

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Pet Projects is currently in production and the progress can be followed here on the Blender Studio website.

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