Quite a quick week

It's Saturday already, and here I am, back at work. I've been here for about an hour already, and it's amazing what I can get done while the farm is free! My shots are picking up pretty quickly. I've picked up another couple of shots, and also had some taken off my plate, because, as it stands, I have 17. It was up to 20 at one time, but a couple of my simpler shots were handed off after I prepped them. I'm still running around, helping fellow compers on some of our difficult bluescreens for the show. It's fun, challenging, and rewarding at the same time. It's tough, since each and every bluescreen has to be approached in a different manner, and one method for creating a great key won't work on another shot! Luckily, the tools we have at our disposal in Nuke are extremely useful. The IBK is coming into its own, and while it doesn't work for all the shots thrown at it, it does help in the efficiency of pulling keys.

Niki is away these several weeks, so I've taken over her shots, which I mentioned earlier. Her machine is lying idle here, and it's the one with Flame 9.5 on it. While several of my jobs were rendering, I decided to sit down again with it and play around. One thing I realized that I really miss was its keying ability, specifically the modular keyer. Using that within Flame's batch system proved powerful, but equally daunting! I still, surprisingly, remember most of the hotkeys.

So far I've put in about 55 hours of work this week, not including today, which will probably put it up to around 65 or so. I'm not totally in a crunch yet, but there's just soooo much more work that needs to get done. If I can maintain the 11-12 hour days for the rest of the show, that'd be great. I have an unfortunate feeling that it will increase near crunchtime. I think it's a necessary evil though, as the show is scheduled to be released into theatres May 25th!

If you haven't already, go and check out Chris and Kenn's Mondolithic interview with CTV in Vancouver! It's a quick 4 minute interview, covering their work for various covers of magazines, from Scientific American to Wired, to almost everything in between. We had lunch with them when they were down here for a SciFi & Fantasy convention earlier in the year. They're one of the few former coworkers that we still hang out with outside of work.