Category: Jose’s Dinner

  • Revisiting the Experiment

    Almost a year ago, I mentioned that I had discovered the site www.mytoons.com. In that blog post I mentioned that I felt my animation wasn’t really getting the amount of views I hoped they would get. So I put my animation on mytoons and when the results weren’t immediately different, I completely forgot about my…

  • A brief respite from computer animation

    I’ve spent a pretty good amount of my free time to try and finish Jose’s Dinner. Now that I’m done, I am taking a bit of a break from animation to do some of the other things I like to do, such as play civ4. The new expansion pack is coming out and I’m extremely…

  • Jose’s Dinner is finally complete!!

    Thanks to my wife, Danielle, and my brother, Danny, for providing voice talents for the film. What are you waiting for? Go see it here. And check back over the next few days, I have some stuff I’ll be adding there.

  • Virtually Done

    Alright, all of the video portion of “Jose’s Dinner” is now complete! All I’m missing now is the soundtrack. I’m currently emailing some people I think would be interested in providing the musical accompaniment. Once I get that in, it’s just a Cinelerra render command away from becoming my first animated short. Yay! I now…

  • The End is Near [for Jose’s Dinner] (Part 7)

    YAY! Finally! The jittery frames have been re-rendered and everything is now A-OK. I now start production on the credits (opening and closing), the music, and possibly the sound effects – depending on how the music comes out.

  • The End is Near [for Jose’s Dinner] (Part 6)

    I figured out the reason for the stuttering video – one of my render nodes in the farm had Blender 2.43, while the others had 2.42. Something changed between the two versions that caused the camera to be at a slightly different place. So, don’t mix Blender versions!

  • The End is Near [for Jose’s Dinner] (Part 5)

    The render took about 6 hours this time, thanks to the laptop participating in most of it and the fact that I gave the Windows computer even more frames to render. It still finished about 30 minutes before the *nix boxen, so I really need to get it integrated into drqueue. I worked on that…

  • The End is Near [for Jose’s Dinner] (Part 4)

    Ok, I’m about to start what I hope is this time the final render of “Jose’s Dinner”. After this it’s off to post-production.

  • The End is Near [for Jose’s Dinner] (Part 3)

    I reviewed last night’s render today and I found a few little gaffes here and there. I made a list and fixed them up. I’m pretty confident that the next time I will be rendering the definitive version of the film. I’m pretty psyched. All that’s left now is to start up on the credits…

  • The End is Near [for Jose’s Dinner] (Part 2)

    Well, the rendering is now done for “Jose’s Dinner”! Quite an improvement over 25 hours! Thanks to DrQueue, it only took 9 hours and 36 minutes! That is quite impressive! And, it would have been even better if my Windows computer had actually had DrQueue installed. I did a calculation that had me rendering 283…

  • The End is Near [for Jose’s Dinner] (Part 1)

    Well, today I finished up all the animation details on “Jose’s Dinner” and set it to render. I’m excited to see how long the render will take. I started it at 1438 today. However, it hasn’t been without hitch. Due, I think, to the wireless card trying to kick in, the laptop rendered for a…

  • I think I’m a clone now….

    While cleaning up the animation for “Jose’s Dinner”, I was having a bit of trouble with the character’s mouth. I told it to open, but it still appeared closed. It turns out that when I duplicated him and didn’t use the duplicate, I forgot to erase it. So there was a duplicate right underneath. What…

  • A little more benchmarking

    I set “Jose’s Dinner” to render from beginning to end to test the eye and mouth movements I’ve done so far. It’s almost done, but it’ll probably need another hour. So it took around 25 or so hours to render on one computer. Now I have a benchmark against which to see how fast the…

  • Excitement!

    Last night around 2300 I finished up the preliminary 3D render of Jose’s Dinner. Now I just need to tweak up the animation with the fine details such as blinking and mouth movements. After that I just need to create the soundtrack and credits and the short film will be completed. I’m excited about debuting…

  • Jose’s Dinner

    Jose’s Dinner is what I am calling my first true animated short film. Unlike “Penguin Flight“, it actually has a plot! A lot a books I’ve read on animation have influenced the production of this short film. Most importantly, I created a 2D animatic – or animated storyboard. It REALLY helped me to get the…