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”.

The beat was stuck in my head for days. My youngest brother says it’s a Daft Punk song. Having done some of these on a small scale all I can say is that this must have taken them HOURS (if not days) to do!

stop mo’ studies from [[- charetteprod -]] on Vimeo

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.

A really fun mockumentary about why Asian girls are always dating non-Asian men by the team at Wong Fu Productions:

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.

If you want to see a REALLY, REALLY good animation, check out Three Legged Legs’ Samurai. It’s about 2-3 minutes long and it’s a wonderful little cartoon set in a stylized ancient japan.

A pretty interesting animation was done on Blender by an Arabic team. You can watch it here.

(all of these are pictures of Relient K, even in the sections when I’m talking about other bands)

My wife and I went to the Relient K concert yesterday in Baltimore. We were the oldest people there as I’ve been following them since their first album (which came out around 8-10 years ago), while many of these kids just started listening to them ever since they started getting airplay on Mtv. The opening act, Sherwood, was actually really good. I like them a lot. Their style sounds pretty similar to Relient K. Pretty happy music overall. Some girls in front of us knew every word and were bootlegging the performance on tiny video cameras. I’d buy their CD if I had some extra cash. The second group, Mae, was not so good. At least, I didn’t like them. Unlike the other two groups, they didn’t have the same type of sound and their singer, in my wife’s opinion, couldn’t sing. We took their set as an opportunity to go outside and get some fresh air. It was funny to see all the parents there.

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.