It’s almost 6am and I’m dead. We have to stop doing this when we know we have boarding to do later in the day. Freelance work in the mornings + boarding at night + editing until the wee hours is starting to kill me. Even though it’s totally worth it.

There’s been a section in the animatic for about a week now, where the maintainers come to accost the Kahlis family and confiscate the baby Gehn and it’s been one of the biggest sections of struggle. As it’s right on the heels of the introduction of A’Gaeris, there’s a treachery and dark tone that we’re trying to convey without going over the top. The number of boards necessary to clearly depict what’s going on is hard to manage in its own right, and we’ve found that the simple method of soft-pushing on the board isn’t working for this section.

As much as we’ve wanted to complete this sequence, and pushed hard to get the boards done that were necessary for assembly - we’ve been shuffling around tweaking behind it and building more after it instead of actually getting it done. The expectation was that through this we would brainstorm a solution without having to stare at it for hours at a time and completely lose the curve of our productivity.

Adrian came up with a plan tonight that I never believed would work. With actual material, maybe - but definitely not with static drawings. He’s been studying trailers for quite some time now, renting DVDs just to watch the trailers included on the special features, and watching MTV obsessively see the latest in music videos. I think it’s paid off. Tonight he said what I feel will become the cardinal rule in the assembly if something is too low energy or not working at all: “throw a flash frame at it.”

Originally when he brought this up, I sat clueless on how to introduce a film style burn out to a static shot and twiddled with key frames absentmindedly just to serve respect to his suggestion. He got pretty frustrated at my lack of enthusiasm, so we took a break for a little while. When I sat back down I started playing with a level effect that would quickly ramp to a white out and then gave it a reddish-hue so it would look a little more organic. After one or two of these and the feedback I was getting from Adrian sitting next to me, we finally landed some options that were of the quality to actually consider - but something was still missing.

Enter sound. Back in a corner of my brain I was getting pecked at by everything that I’d ever read on composition or editing and after a few moments I was able to gather all of that pecking and aggregate it into a suggestion. Adrian and I immediately dove into our music library because we knew that any purely synthetic drone, thump or other effect would just be ridiculous. And then we found it, nestled in the end percussion of one of the tracks we’d been pulling from.

We worked on the effect with the video tracks off, not wanting to sour ourselves or be influenced by seeing things out of sync. After some reverb applied, and a couple of tries with the EQ to bring the bass out and silence the highs - we finally had something that sounded pretty cool. I positioned it right under every flash frame burn thing that we’d put together and then we sat back and played it through.

It was fantastic - and I’d even screwed up. Premiere had corrupted the view of the timeline so a couple places where there wasn’t a flash it looked like there was and I had followed the cue. The result was a couple of preemptive bass thumps right under the first frames of A’Gaeris and it served as a precursor to what was to come with the Maintainers barging into the Kahlis’s.

It’s always a great thing to see something you’ve been trying to pull together actually come to life. It’s even better when a little surprise occurs that you weren’t even suspecting. Adrian and I have always thought that the creation of media like this rips a little away from the creators because they don’t get to see it the first time with a clean slate. So, it was nice to find something unexpected.

Now, we just have to hope this looks as good tomorrow.

7:14 am

tags: a'gaeris, after effects, animatic, assembly, editing, film burn, flash frames, gehn, kahlis, music, premiere, storyboarding