It has been a tiring weekend of working non-stop on our DVD we plan to break the news with. I’ve spent ump-teen hours animating Heidi’s illustrations of hearts, veins, and embryos. Hopefully we can make our deadline of mailing them this Saturday (02/03) and telling our families on Sunday (in time for Heidi’s dad’s birthday party).
The process is very time consuming because of the steps involved for each “family tree” animation:
- I print out a draft layout of the comp
- Heidi draws her illustrations on tracing paper of the draft
- I scan her illustrations
- I overlay the illustrations on the draft and line things up
- I import the comp’s layers into a video editing program
- I then trace each illustration on the computer to animate it
- Take the animations and time them up with the photos of the family members
- Add the zooms & pans
- Render the first draft (20-30 minutes)
- Watch the rendered draft and then repeat steps 6 & 7 until I have a final version with good timings
- Then I take that final version and throw it on the timeline of another video editing program to be editing with the other “family trees” for the final video
<%image(gallery/thumb_zyxcliHauns-to-Roger-Lines.jpg|46|80|Haun family heart comps)%>I’ve finished 5 of the 7 that need to be done. Once they are all done I still need to edit the final version and author the DVD along with all the “extra features” we plan on including.
We always work best under pressure!!
