Since I have several days while the surround sound audio is being remixed, I decided to add another bit of animation at the start of the film. This scene, set in a dark theater already has a man in an n95 mask turning to look at the camera. I decided the rhinos on either side of him might turn their heads to look at him.
The real trick of this scene will be to get the heads painted so that they blend well with the existing rhino art work. If the paint flickers and crawls too much it will be distracting. I am going to spent the entire day working on these 15 or so cells to try and get them to blend in. The bodies will remain as held cells.
I will need to re-render the film when the surround sound audio mix comes in. There are literally thousands of choices that need to be made to get a render to work. It is not as simple as pressing a button. I wrote down all the settings that worked to get the last several renders of the mp4 movie file. Yesterday I added the credit for the sound designer who is doing the surround sound work. I tried to render the film but the render failed. Vertical lines appeared on the scenes and randomly some scenes would crop incorrectly.
I am not going to worry about it right now. I will tackle that technical issue tonight. I am hoping that my shutting down the computer last night might have corrected the issue. If not, I have lots of research to do and lots of experimenting with new settings.
The only thing different about the movie right now is that cations were added. Perhaps I will need to render the movie without captions. When sending the movie off to the lab to make the Digital Cinema Projection file, it is possible to send the captions as a separate file. That might be what I need to do. The captions can be distracting when each shot is less than a second in duration anyway. People can either read the captions, or watch the film. They can’t do both. Captions only make sense after repeated viewings.
Today is going to be nerve wracking. I hope the audio works and everything falls in place in time.