It has been a while since I have updated, but I have been veeerrrry busy!
I have been in university all last week sorting out the editing in the morning and afternoon and animating the last few of my shots in the evening so that I could send it to Rowland as soon as possible. With a bank holiday friday 22nd and monday24th, if I didn't complete the film by Thursday then I would have to wait a whole weekend before I could send it to Rowland, and obviously I wanted to get it done as soon as possible so he would have plenty of time to send it back to me. Otherwise I would get stressed as we approach my deadline.
Over this week, I had worked harder than I have ever done to get all animation complete AND rendered in a quality that is suitable to call complete. There are still many scenes that aren't exactly finished, for example, some of the beginning scenes do not have rain in them and others need more background characters or little edits to them. However, overall, the timing of the whole film is what was important for Rowlands sound edit, so I concentrated on getting the main animation complete and having everything rendered.
I pulled an all nighter to animate on Tuesday, spending most of that morning rendering many shots. With no sleep, I went into uni at 10am on Wednesday and stayed til 5pm, getting more work done. With the intention of going home and sleeping, I actually went home and stayed up until 4am attempting to finish the last few bits of work and get them rendered for Thursday, my very last day. I went to bed extremely tired at half four. Then I woke up at 8am so I could get to uni on Thursday, where I spent the entire day in uni finishing off my film. Jud advised me that there was too much of a jump between a shot where they were standing still, to suddenly walking towards the dome, to suddenly standing outisde it. It didn't follow, so I had to reanimate the walking so that it showed them stopping outside the dome so the shots made sense. Then I had to render it again, and even without rain it still took two hours.
Long story short, by the time I had finished all the scenes and was ready to put it all together, it was quite late at night. At 7.20pm, I only had one more shot to render, and then I could export the film from Premiere and I was done! A security guard came and knocked on my door and told me I had until 7.45, and then I would have to leave, and I told him I would try my best to adhere to that. Panicking, because I only had twenty minutes, I took the rendered shot and put it into premiere, and clicked export. It estimated five minutes to export, which was perfect. Then it went up to ten minutes. And it continued to estimate between 8 to 10 minutes for the next half an hour, which was infuriating. For the entire time it was exporting, my attention kept shifting from the little blue bar that represented it's progress, to the time which was ticking away. It was 8pm now, and the guard guy still hadn't come back, so I assumed he was running a bit late on his closing down of the building, which worked out fine for me because I still needed a little more time. It finally finished exporting, and I had to save it to my hardrive, panicking because the guard could come in at any moment and boot me out, and I was SO close! But I did it! It was saved and ready to go, on my hardrive. And I wasn’t kicked out or anything. He never came back. So I counted my blessings and packed my stuff up and left, at about 8.25ish. Admittedly, it was half an hour later than the man told me, but I thought it was okay because I was able to finish before he came back for me.
Unfortunately, as I left, the doors were locked and the alarms started going off. I was locked in, and couldn’t get out. Turns out that he was obviously not going to come back for me, even though he knew I was there and should probably have checked. After about ten minutes of not really knowing what to do, I finally found a number to call on the uclan website and phoned security, and the guard who originally told me to leave an hour ago appeared at the door to let me in, and he was furious. He yelled at me a bit for not leaving at quarter to and told me that he was going to report me and the police were involved and all sorts. I am kinda assuming he was referring to the police because I had Wensdi call them on my behalf.
I don’t know what is going to happen in regards to the report he is going to write up. I hope it isn’t something too severe. I hope you understand why it was so important to me that, after all the work I had put in this week, I had to get this finished that Thursday.
But I am close to finishing now. Admittedly I have lots of shots to rerender before the final draft, and I need to animate lots of cartoon background characters which I have plenty of time to do now, because my deadline has been pushed back to the 19th May. Better get cracking...
