Hothouse
Between March and May 2011, this space will feature posts by our 6 Hothouse 7 participants. We’ll share snapshots from each filmmaker’s creative process as they work remotely across the country. Watch as they make 6 awesome short films in 12 weeks – starting now!
Hothouse 7: Why animate when you can sandbag?
Here's a little video I shot the other day. Due to impending floods in the valley, the past week has been a balance of filling sandbags, hauling sandbags, tossing sandbags and ... oh yeah, and working on my animation.
http://vimeo.com/22686416
Hothouse 7: Photoshop vs Hand Drawn
I've been working a lot in Flash over these past few weeks, but I thought you might be curious to know what my film is actually going to look like! In the early stages of production I did a bunch of fiddling with Photoshop brushes to find something...
Hothouse 7: Things We Do For Our Films…
They finally convinced me to put this on the blog, it's visual references for my Guy's facial expressions of enamored awkwardness. So there you have it, things we do for our films...
http://vimeo.com/22654870
Hothouse 7: Animating Some Animating
I did finally get my lights in the morning after the online test segment was due. I ended up submitting a test segment that unfortunately couldn’t tell me too much of what I wanted to know. Oh well.
It is good to finally have all my equipment. I set...
Hothouse 7: Lights, Camera, Action!
All the pieces I have been working on over the past few weeks have finally come together. Not without a fair number of mistakes and do-overs mind you, but that is all part of the process. Now, it appears I am ready to start shooting. Here are a...
Hothouse 7: Moving Sky
I finished shooting my under camera background sequences this week, holed up in a bedroom at the cabin while flocks of pelicans and other birds made their way up and down the valley.
There are three separate background sections to my film: A moving sky, a landscape, and what...
Hothouse 7: Animating…..
I've been away from blogging for a while now because I was working HARD! But I'll try and make up for it.
We had a deadline today for our "online test", for which we're exporting a very short segment of the film, that looks as close to the final...
Hothouse 7: Soap Operas and Battlestar
Here is a clip from a Skype screen share meeting Jelena Popovick and I had regarding my first animatic.
http://vimeo.com/22356651
Jelena, our super editor, goes through the animatic with fresh eyes and tells us what she interprets from the animatic. About 50 minutes in, we can't help but touch on...
Hothouse 7: Knitting With Acid
Yesterday’s meeting with Jelena (Hothouse Editor) went really well. She had some fantastic advice which will be really helpful in structuring the layout of the film. We are so lucky to be able to work with such great people at the NFB!
Today I’m going to be working on...
Hothouse 7: Rough Animation
At this point in production I'm juggling several things at once. I've started to roughly animate my locked scenes in Flash while I also continue to work on editing the Leica! This isn't typical for a regular animation pipeline, but in Hothouse we need to be clever with...
Hothouse 7: Sculpting, mixing, pouring, peeling
For the past couple of weeks I have spent almost every waking hour shut in the basement studio/laboratory of my home conducting many both successful and unsuccessful experiments in puppet making. In the end I have come out victorious with two silicone bodies that I can use for...
Hothouse 7: Take That, Fat Cat!
Today Jelena (editor) put together a presentation for the group on her role in our films. It was impressive to see how she transforms a story from something inexplicable to an ascertainable narrative that relays itself from start to finish.
I was supposed to meet with her at some...
