Final Eight Scenes! (Sort of.)

I'm one page (well, and a scene) away from being done with the rough draft!  Woot!

Let's factor that out a bit more scientifically, however.

I have eight more scenes to go.

Today, I worked for about eight almost-consecutive hours on the animation.  I'm very good at not getting distracted by emails, the internet, etc.  I just turn all that stuff off.  

Today, I got five scenes done during those eight-almost consecutive hours.  

Argh.

Really, it's not that horrible though.  I ended up spending a huge chunk of time in Photoshop re-creating the bodies for the Deer and coloring and texturing the sarcophagus prop.  So, actually, it was about an hour a scene, probably, not too horrible. 

Basically, I'm pretty sure I'll complete this 1st draft of the animations this week, even with all the preperations for the Digitally Inclined 2 exhibition.   But the part I still have to figure out is if I should try to record my my character's "talking" first, put it in and keyframe to it, or do rough mouth motions and then record my audio to try and match the mouth motions.

Typically, this is a no-brainer: record audio FIRST, then animate.  In fact, typically I wouldn't even dream of starting the animation without an audio track layed down.  But the characters in this don't "talk", they just sort of chirp, growl, caw and grunt, and I realized while trying to record audio for the first scene, that I would have better dramatic timing if I animated the over-all character gestures first and then fit the sounds in afterwards.

But this is going to be a real pain.  I'm already having a horrible time trying to do draft renders to check timing and, of course, there's no "Voice Over" option in After Effects.  So there's going to be some experimentation with early scenes to figure out the fastest workflow to get the base audio in.  Honestly, if I felt confident enough to just render it all and mix <all> the audio in final cut, I would do that...and I'm certainly going to try that.  But I really want to avoid doing any unnecessary renders.  I already have a sinking feeling that the clean-up work for this is going to be as hefty as the original draft animation.

Anyway, here's a very short, very compressed segment from a penultimate scene.  Here, you can just barely see the sisters transformed into deer, the wolf and the bunny surgeons.  

Okay, I don't know why I even bothered posting that, it's so hard to see what's happening all compressed.  Just think to yourself, "1080p, 1080p...."

Recent revelation:  I think I may have to kill off the deer at the end.