As always, time has flown, and deadlines are getting closer and closer. In a perfect world, we’d like to have everything completed by next Friday 7th. Whether or not we’ll be able to complete that deadline, well, only time will tell. Everything seems to be going pretty well. Colour grading is currently being tackled, and most of the visual effects are now completed – we’ve only got a few of the more tricky ones to go. The biggest worry we have currently is whether or not we’ll have the score completed by then. But fingers crossed! Another, more subjective problem is working out what we actually do with the soundtrack! To voice over or not to voice over, that is the question.

The whole post production process has certainly been an exciting and challenging one! We’ve definitely spent a fair bit of time hanging around at the Red User forum, trying to work out the best workflow with our limited resources and budget (you can read one of our threads here). But, so far, so good, and we’ve been able to develop a nice little pipeline that seems to be working. At some stage in the future we’ll explain everything in nitty-gritty technical detail.

I’ve unfortunately got to get back to work – so this is just a very quick little update. But rest assured, we’ll be posting more and more stuff in the lead up to 2009. How scary is that? The year is rapidly coming to an end.

Until next time…

Zap! One minute it’s September, and the next it’s all of a sudden October. It’s certainly been an incredible year and it’s rapidly disappearing. So what’s been happening since my last post – well, like always, lots! This week we successfully locked down the picture edit. It certainly wasn’t easy, and our Final Cut Pro project file has so many different edits and versions within it, it’s ridiculous, but we made it in the end! But, even though this is a big step in the right direction, there is still a very long way to go, and we don’t have much time to do it all. The musical score is under way, as are the many visual effects – but even after we complete these things, we still need to do the final colour grade, the sound design, edit and mastering, plus get the final product onto all the various media and formats for distribution. Although we’re not in a bad position, we’ve basically got three or so weeks to wrap everything up, so the pressure is definitely on! So with that said, I’ve got to get back to work. Eventually (probably next month in all honestly), we will get around to uploading all the things we’ve been promising for months, like some more production stills, video blogs, camera tests, etc. But in the meantime, here are some happy snaps from a recent green screen shoot for the Sakooz trailer. We had to shoot some character pick-ups for some of the visual effects. To save money, we only build one alien character (Pinky), but for the purposes of the trailer, we’re shooting some material of the Pinky character against a green screen, then grading the costume to a different character (i.e. blue) and then digitally inserting the shots into the scenes, so that there’s more than one creature. Because the additional character only appear very small in frame, we can shoot these elements on a HVX202 (as opposed to a RED, which we used for principle photography). We also used a different cast and crew for these pick-ups. A big thank you to Julia for jumping in the costume! Judging by the photos though – it looks like she had at least a little bit of fun…