I finally finished the animation for the penguin short. It looks to be about 2 minutes long. (Not including opening and closing credits) I will now begin rendering and we shall see just how long it takes to render. I was originally going to do an HD render, but I’m afraid it will take much longer than NTSC. Also, I had been using 25 frames/sec and NTSC is 30. Since I’m going to edit it later to add sound, I guess I’ll do with 30 frames per second. So it may move a bit faster than I thought. Actually, I think the biggest lesson I will have from this animation will be timing. It’s been hard trying to think about how long things take. What should happen after one second? What happens in a half-second?

Well, this animated short has mostly been a learning experience for me. I learned a lot about how the animation process works in Blender as well as certain rendering techniques to make a better model for animating. After I’m done with this animation I’ll probably take a break for a few weeks and work on some other stuff before beginning the process for my next animated short.

For the next one I expect to have a script written by my good friend Andrew Laine. I also want to spend a little more time working on both the set and the characters. It may take me a lot longer to complete, but hopefully it will look better than the Penguin Short. My goal in that one was to get out some semblance of a short movie as quickly as I could in order to have a sense of accomplishing the animation. Additionally, I wanted to see how hard it was. It wasn’t until I got halfway through the process that I started to read about how long it takes Pixar to do animation as well as all the processes they go through. Of course, I don’t compare myself directly to them, but if it takes them x amount of time for a beautiful quality movie, it should give me an idea of how long it should be taking me.

Well, I started Blender on the command line so I can see the process as it creates my movie. It looks like, on average, it is taking 41 seconds per frame being rendered. I have 3449 frames so it should take … 39.28 hours or 1.6 days. Wow, actually, that’s not as bad as I thought. But then again, I’m basing it on the first 14 frames. It’s possible that future frames will take more time. Also, when I go to sleep now and the screen saver kicks on it may slow it down. I’ll have to see if I can turn it off.