I AM NIGHTMARE Production Diary #6

I just animated the first shot with lip sync for the film which is the above wherein two characters (BOG and TEENEE) are talking to each other while walking. I can't say enough about how AWESOME the voice actors I got for the main characters are! I've only done one shot with dialogue but the characters are MORE alive then any I have ever done already ^_^

I'm starting off slow with these shots- with every new project you must adjust to the workflow and allow yourself time to readjust/replan the workflow lest you waste time in the long run

A new thing I'm doing with this film is that I created a bunch of background character animation like these people sitting at this table talking and drinking- they all have their own different looping animations

To populate and make the town in the film seem  more alive- I'm going to have a bunch of people standing around/talking/walking through town- NOW if they are all actual 3d geometry it can really bog down the scenes for both viewport performance and rendering time- so this is what I'm doing

I went ahead and created a bunch of different standing and walking looping animations which I rendered out using different orthogonal views with an alpha channel- the characters from the front, back and sides- I then loaded these rendered image sequences onto single polygon planes which I group like this to make super fast rendering and light background crowds and the like

Here's another new thing I'm doing- so I'm going to animated the entire film first and render the shots using the hardware renderer- then once its all locked I'll go back and do the final renders for each shot- NOW since I'm not doing real renders right now I don't have to care about the lighting BUT I'm going to animate 1500+ shots- Now if none of those shots have finished lighting setups that are ready for render than that means I'll have to create a lighting setup at the end and copy paste it into every shot 0_0 That's really dumb and a waste of time so here is what I'm doing

Inside each shot will be an XREF for the lighting setup like so

See the "xref_town_outskirts.c4d" file? Thats the lighting setup- and inside of that Xref is this

So at any time I can update/modify that lighting setup and it will automatically populate all 1500+ shots with the final lighting setup making the shots ready to render- of course I'll have to add a little additional lighting to properly frame the characters in each shot but thats no problem at all-

I've now created over an hour of new original music for the soundtrack and I must say its the BEST music I have ever made in my life 0_0 BUT I might have created TOO MUCH dark and epic music and there's not that many scenes in the film that need that much intensity- its a good problem to have though ^_^

I feel like I have been possessed lately making this music- my ear is still recovering and I had a migraine yesterday that made half of my body go numb- but I just kept making this music 0_0

During the last 3 weeks of making We Are Strange I was getting migraines daily- I still sat at my PC working, laughing at the ridiculousness of the pain- maybe a part of me went mad ^_^

It feel like all my experience with my other films- all the mistakes I've made- all the battles- its all starting to pay off in making this film fun to do- and all the years I spent making music that no one listened too- now those abilities help me make the music for this soundtrack for a film that looks and acts brighter than anything I've done before- but with this music I'm making there's definitely something  twisted and dark lurking underneath the surface... like that figure with the hat ^_^

Brought to you by professional weirdo M dot Strange.