Freekstorm VFX Blog

After several weeks of filming, including two marathon eleven-hour-straight-shoots, we’ve finally finished the shooting part of the movie. Hurrah! Our young thespian actors performed magnificently! Indeed, they acted their little socks off, and we’re mighty proud of both of them!

Looking good so far....so over to the Visual Effects Department for a week or so of planned and prepared CGI and hey presto, the movie is finished!

Aren’t theories grand?

Of course it all went horribly wrong. This time the scriptwriter is DEFINITELY NOT to blame, thank goodness. Let’s just say we hit a few technical issues...

Well it all started with the release of Softimage 2010, which Rich had been wittering on about for months. He was really excited because not only would the new version of Softimage be smoother, faster, cooler and whizzier than the old version 7.5 that he was using before, but it also included the apparently-totally-amazing Autodesk Face Robot...free of charge. Yep....thousands of pounds-worth of cutting-edge software, totally FREE!

Woo hoo! Finally Rich could animate Mervyn The Monster so that Merv could do something other than just sit there and look handsome. We even delayed the start of production until mid-September so we could wait for the release of the latest version. So it was with no small amount of anticipation that our trusty director loaded Mervyn into the new software and began the horribly complicated task of rigging and animation.

As my daughter likes to say, “Oh disaster! Oh calamity!” (we’re a tad dramatic in this house I’m afraid.) To cut a very long (and incredibly technical) story short, the new 2010 version of Softimage has proved to be totally unstable. Several weeks' work has been lost, and for a horrible couple of days, we actually thought we would have to abandon the movie altogether.

The first problem became apparent when Rich discovered that the new 2010 file format was incompatible with the old version 7.5. Apparently the new 2010 version could load the old v7.5 files, but it saved them in an updated format so that you could not load them again in 7.5. Upgrading was a one-way trip. The second problem was that the 2010 version was completely unstable. So many things caused it to crash that it rapidly became totally unusable.

Face Robot was also totally useless. Mervyn’s mesh was so complicated that it just crashed the software all the time, resulting in huge amounts of frustration (and that’s an understatement, by the way.) Rich has now scrubbed the whole lot and has been forced to go back to version 7.5 and the original Mervyn he designed a few weeks ago.

This Producer estimates we have lost around two weeks' solid work and a great deal of money has been wasted because of this truly crappy software, and production has been severely delayed. We will be lucky to make the 30th October deadline.

The Director and Producer were sitting contemplating their woes over coffee this morning. They remembered that movie-making was supposed to be an enjoyable and relaxing hobby.

Whoever thought having fun could be so darn stressful?

Labels: autodesk, visual effects