Got some advice on rendering. Apparently for the amount of frames I did, it’s much better to render them as individual frames and then piece together the AVI from that. So I chose PNGs since they are lossless. If the last render session is any indication, it’ll be nearly Thursday before I can put the finishing touches on the animation. Darn! Hopefully this works well and is just a lesson learned.

After waiting all this time, the [penguin animatin] file is unreadable or corrupted! Gah!

The rendering of my penguin cartoon is over. Now I will review it and add a soundtrack. If everything goes right I hope to have it up by tomorrow or Wed at the latest.

Apparently showing a trailer for a movie about Christ at a Christmas festival is too much for Chicago officials. Although Fox was prepared to pay $12 000 to the festival if the trailer for “The Nativity Story” would be shown throughout the festival. Sorry, said the Political Correctness Police, we can’t appear to be endorsing any religion. Never mind the fact that there’s a menorah on display at the festival.

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?

Now that I have begun uploading my videos to Vimeo (and intend to digitize my portfolio) I have revamped my video production site to be much better organized. I will be adding new content in the next few months. A lot of it will be in my “Early Work” category as I upload videos I created during my High School years. If you haven’t seen any of my work, give it a shot. There’s stuff in every category from silly to serious!