A relaxing post-SharkBoy day

Well, almost. Since we've delivered Sharkboy, and everything has slowed down quite a bit, we're back to doing some R&D and cleaning up the shots and archiving everything.

Yesterday was pretty exciting. As the show neared it's official end, we had some minor cleanups and internal notes to fix that would make our work that much sweeter. I don't know if you'd actually notice while watching the movie, because it will be in glorious 3D. And that crazy red/cyan 3D, not that cool polarized 3D.

I was going to wait until next week to discuss some of the trials and tribulations of the show, but I'm going to do that now while it's fresh in my mind.

We had approximately six weeks to accomplish 38 shots. Given our tight production pipeline, we really had to hit the ground running. Luckily most of the crew are studio veterans, with a couple animators hired on to complete the tight animation deadline. Given this, we were able to do minimal training. During the first couple of weeks, animation had a hugh task or blocking and creating animation for most of the 38 shots. While they were doing that, TD was doing look development on an accelerated scale, texture and model artists were busy painting and creating props, and comp was busy at work cleaning and pulling greenscreen keys for use later in the show. We had six compositors on the show, which eventually blossomed to six full time, two part time. The part-timers were brought on at the last week, and were internally TD/comper trained. They also lit several shots. A couple of the compositors, myself included, had been trained in our TD pipeline earlier in the year, and it helped tremendously during these tight deadlines when all available TDs were busy on shots.

During the beginning, every compositor was pulling greenscreens for shots that they eventually may or may not comp. This proved difficult in adjusting our keys since what the background would become is an integral part of keying a foreground. We really started picking up speed around week three, with compers working closely with TDs and matchmovers to get the stereoscopic nature of the shots down. We relied heavily on the matchmovers for this show, particularly because it was entirely greenscreen! There was a lot of cross pollination of shots between comp artists since there were so many looks to be created. One comper would pull a greenscreen, another would do the background effects, and yet another would comp the final shot. One of my shots near the end of the show had all the compers touch upon it!

Luckily we had an excellent production team, which really made it wonderful to get the shots done in a timely manner. I didn't have to work extreme overtime until the last week of the show. At other houses and shows I've been on, the production wasn't nearly as well planned.