"Time and Time Again" Production Blog

Those barn doors, screens, flags and bounce cards really help out. For shots where I need to see the desk and can't have a big angled bounce card filling in Galt's face, I use a smaller bounce card, or a prop to bounce the light off the desk while that screen cuts the light going directly on Galt's head. Evens out the key/fill pretty well. I'm going for something close to a 1:1 key/fill ratio.


The aluminum foil is covering a regular household light bulb that I turn on every other frame to fill in the green painted on a prop "photo" in Mr. Galt's hands.

The Track o' Rama gets ahead.



A pan/tilt head that is! I'm very excited to see the tracking rig get some more axes. (plural of axis!) The head came from an old tripod that was acting as a stand for a clamp-light in the animation lab.

The big obstacle: this screw holding the head onto the tripod was ridiculously hard to get off!



Fortunately, thanks to Mr. Moto in the woodshop, we got it to come off. Just needed a vice, a big screwdriver and a crescent wrench.

Then a little hole-drilling and the purchase of another screw...





Voilà!

Galt, as usual, is not impressed.



(He's just cranky because his replacement mouth is not smoothed over. There was a file folder to cover it up, as seen in last week's photo.)

View from the Canon. (larger size)

Just this week, the fence (put in place to build the building on the right) blocking the ramp was removed! Hooray! Now I can move sets/equipment in and out easier, and they even put back the dumpster at the bottom of the ramp. Yay trash access!

Galt gets a little help.



The third hand was brought in because I had an extreme close-up on Galt's eyes peering over his file.

Speaking of keeping things in place, here is how limit how much those tiny objects jump around unintentionally: floral wire!



That match was made in, like, fifteen minutes with a toothpick, an x-acto knife and a sharpie! Also, it's fun to draw Galt's hole-eyes before I animate. It's been a pretty accurate way to tell what they're going to look like before I start sculpting them in their tiny quarter-inch spaces!

A little fab before the next scene.


Pipes.


A new hand.

Ch-ch-ch-changes....

Yes, as was foretold on the main page for ages, the old trailer is temporarily retired. (Possibly saved for another life on some DVD?) That trailer was created from a older version of the short which was scrapped for story and quality reasons. So in order to keep things current there is now a synopsis page of sorts put in its place! Hopefully someday soon there will be a trailer using the current footage! Won't that be fun? Ah, but I've got to shoot the thing first! :) So, stay tuned folks!