First festival ready cut ready

Hi all,
I'm not sure if anyone is still following this, but I dropped off for a long while trying to sort out the best merging of all four storylines into a single short that kept the right tone. It's done now and about to start heading out to festivals. You can take a look here:
http://www.westerray.com/boxworld/etc/h264_9_11small.mov
I know that a lot of material was cut from what we shot, but it was necessary for the strength of the whole piece. Once it starts getting attention, I plan on bringing out each of the four shorts to support it. As this starts to go to festivals, I'll post any news here on what happens. And for all the people who were a part of this so many summers ago, thank you so much. We made something much larger than most people dream of trying and while it took forever, it looks and feels awesome!
Wes

Current status

Hi everybody and merry upcoming Christmas,
So, not so much on the blog lately. With the visuals done, there hasn't been too much to comment on. Right now there's still a hunt on for just the right sound designer/musician to do the scoring. And there's also a lot of work in creating different lengths of the shorts to either go to festivals or to run on the web. SO bear with me and I'll et you know as soon as this finally lifts off the ground. In the meantime, if you're curious, this is Mailman with a temp soundtrack (RJD2, which is fun, but too expensive to buy the rights to unfortunately): (if you have trouble seeing this, you can go out to http://blip.tv/file/1437241 to see this and the others)

Opening credits redo

So the original idea for the opening credits (a long opening with voiceover to explain the concept) was a bit too much. It was overload with a narrator describing things as well as all the visuals. And who wants a long opening? Nobody! So it's been shortened to a fast 20 second shot that will only have music to get these rolling. In case you're wondering, here's the timed animatic that's the blueprint for the cutout animation (that part is staying):

Sound design and visual effects finished!

It's finally come to this! After a blaze of sound effects work, the visuals and sound are a lock. I know quite a few of you are really itching to see how they turned out, but now I need to be a little careful about putting them out on the web in full form before trying to get distribution. There's still a bit of work prior to the finish line - opening credits and music, but the hard part is done. I'll put up sections that really shine here over the next week so you can see. And everyone who was involved will still get a dvd once this is all locked up, no worries about this. I just need to focus on getting it out into the world here in the next month or so. Alright, back to work..

Opening credit design

Opening credits are under full steam. Click below for a very rough version of the aesthetic. It may seem at odds with the actual footage, but that's the only realistic way to heap more ideas into the credit footage without a considerable amount of shooting and cg work. It's a bit too speedy right now, but it should smooth out just fine..

Intro to Chamber 2 of Surveyors

A minor cg addition to the transition to chamber 2 while sound work continues:

ID Card falling

Hi everyone.. while I've been off the cg for a bit working on different opening credit ideas, I've come back to one of the last cg effects that's needed. A shot looking down from the elevator as Chris drops his ID badge down the shaft. Here's the first pass at it (minus the foreground image of Chris' hand on the elevator railing). It isn't too pretty, but can only get better.. It's pretty tough to create these fully cg shots since there's no real part of the image that can help sell the illusion.