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.

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 plan to refocus on some more basic Blender skills and give myself a break from the rigors of creating an animated short. I’ll be putting up some of the videos so you can see some of the neat concepts I’m learning. Hopefully some of them can make it into my next film and make it look even better than “Jose’s Dinner”.

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.

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 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 a little yesterday, but it turns out I’m going to have to do some upgrades for that to happen and I’ll just wait until I’m 100% done with “Jose’s Dinner”, since I already know this setup pretty much works. The animation finally looks pretty good so I think I’m done tweaking it. I might do another render next week because for some reason a bit of a twitch was introduced into the animation which wasn’t there last time. Depending upon when I get someone to do the music, this could be done by the end of June or earlier.

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.

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 and add in the soundtrack. I’m hoping to be able to tap into some musical talent to do the soundtrack, but I haven’t found anyone yet. If you want to volunteer your skills, leave a comment.

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 frames on Windows and letting the *nix boxen take care of the rest via DrQueue, but the Windows computer finished a litter earlier than I had expected (partially due to the laptop acting up). So the system wasn’t as efficient overall as it could have been. Could it have been as short as 8 hours? I’ll tell you one thing, though, it certainly is nice being able to have it finish over 9 hours. Instead of leaving it to render over night and waking up with it still going and then still going through work, it can now be done overnight. (At least for this particular animation with its level of complexity) If I can convince some more people to donate their POS computers to me, perhaps I can have myself a mini-Pixar. q;o)

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 while then suddenly couldn’t find the network anymore. That cost me about 30 minutes where the laptop wasn’t rendering - so that will skew the stats a bit. q:o(

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 I was seeing was the closed mouth of the duplicate inside. It was as though he had eaten himself! Once I fixed this, it explained some of the problem I had been having and now, he was able to open his mouth!!

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 timings correct and made the process a LOT less frustrating than it was with " Penguin Flight", where I was always trying to guess how long/how many frames an action should take. As I have no training in animation, my timings might still be a little bit off, but they are MUCH, MUCH better thanks to the animatics!