Today was really encouraging, I shot about 24.75 seconds of animation! I need a few more days like this if I am going to finish the shooting this month, but this week is looking hopeful. A lot of the stuff I did was pretty easy, it included some background plates for the green screened monster which I didn't previously count toward my animation total as only part of the shots had been finished. I also got a lot of the final masking done on the green screened monster so all I need is the other cloud tank footage composited in which will be a snap.

I actually have a reason besides going back to work to finish before August is over, the building where I have my art space was sold to a bunch of fancy developers who are going to kick all of us scummy artists out and gut the whole building and turn it into 'fancy' art spaces where you get a 1/4 of the space at twice the price. Even though the space has not been perfect for animation the amount of space I have has allowed me to do shots I would have never been able to do at home, I will miss it, and I really need to finish shooting in August so I have enough time to move my stuff back home.

In addition to the 24 seconds I animated I got the studio logo more or less done and animated, which is about 3 seconds long (not counting that towards the total of the 24 seconds), thanks for all the input guys, this is what I've gone with:

...and I get to start the day with impossibly complicated lighting setups:

I get hotter then the set, most of those are just 150W lights, they are far enough away that it's not really an issue. Also most of the heat goes up

I love it when people apologize for their 'messy' work spaces, most of you don't seem to even know what a mess is.

Yeah, it's to bad, I'll be in a much more confined area soon
mm.
Today I finished 22 seconds and 11 frames, the climax is finished it's 1 minuet 50 seconds and 14 frames long, here is the whole thing:

I have two sequences left to do, both of which I added to the script this year, the first is to resolve a scene in a less anti-climatic way and the second hopefully makes the story a bit more clear, if for some reason I couldn't animate anything else I could make a cut of the film that would seem complete, however I should be able to get these last two sequences done within the next week and have a much better film.

That looks awesome!  I can't wait to see this.

So this ended up taking way to long to build, I was worred about running out of blue, but I ended up running out of green 1x1 (light and dark) and then nearly running out of yellow for the boarder. This maps started as a flat map but I thought it would look so much cooler to make it 3-D. It is wildly inaccurate but that is fine, it gets the point across and I did make Australia slightly more accurate, hopefully that makes you happy Cooked Cat.

If you are wondering how big it is, it is 6 32x32 base plates.

I still think the liberties I took with South America are worse then Australia, I took my source map and twisted and re-sized continents, shrunk the Pacific Ocean by about half and a bunch of other minor things, I just assigned colors a height and stuck with that.

Edit:

Also this is my chibi blimp

If I wasn't trying to wrap shooting this week I would have added a shark or kraken, but alas, sometimes progress is more inportant then perfection, at least this is way better then using a still image with an animated path. My goal was to not spend money and get it shot by today, and that I did, 18 more seconds in the can.

I've got about 20-25 seconds left which I should be able to do in the next three days.