Rolling Camera

Even though principal photography of ENDINGS is over a year away, we needed to run some animation tests and also wanted a sample scene for a grant application.

So we officially rolled camera on the first tentative shots last week, and today I looked at a rough cut of the scene. Josh, the editor and animator, had composited our animated shots. They're still pre-animation at this point. We shot studio footage of the actor in the scene (uh, that would be me, since it was a test) in front of blue screen, and Josh composited me onto the background. Now he'll animate both me and the background plate separately (for distinct animation effects), and hopefully we'll have something that actually works!

There's a lot of work to be done in order to get ready to shoot, but it sure felt good to see a scene already cut together. I was underwhelmed by own direction of the scene when we shot it. We rushed because it was a test, it was really hot, etc. But it came together pretty decently through the magic of editing.

Now we just have to do that 80+ more times (i.e., for every scene, but from now own with an actual crew and all that nonsense).