Activities for October 2023, as a 60X Timelapse (1 min = 1 hour), with music (no commentary).

Highlights:

Music for this Month:

Lee Rosevere - "Face of the Clock"

Absolut-2 -

The James Quintet -

This is a screencast of Lunatics and Film Freedom Project work from September 2023

If you want to support our project, we have options:

This month, I did a lot of production work, which accounts for most of this video:

First experiments with manually setting up compositing from rendered EXR-stream animation.

Worked on reconstruction of TR-Train shot. This is to undo accidentally link breakage that happened years ago, as well as revising the external shot to use an alpha-transparency to be composited with TR-3 animation from the train interior (no longer trying to animate Georgiana separately in TR-2.

I also installed Blender on the Dell PowerEdge R720 server, copied the Lunatics source and Render folders to it, and started rendering shots there. I purchased this server to use for colocation of our web resources, replacing the current Cloud-based configuration. But I realized that while I have the server on site, I should use it to do rendering. It's much faster than my workstation, and I'm not ready to deploy it as a web server yet.

HIGHLIGHTS

00:00 Title Card

JULY 2023 Project Report

This month, I finished the pod-staging animation. I also needed to re-render

Started work on repairing the Western Kazakhstan Railway set and the exterior

Upgraded Inkscape 1.3, which includes a new feature I've been asking for for

During an internet outage, I decided I really should have a way to write,

So far, all the easy-to-install options on Debian/Ubuntu have trouble formatting

Installed outlets and a light on my workbench.

HIGHLIGHTS

JUNE 2023 Project Report

In June, I continued working on the Soyuz Pod-Staging animation,

Building on the work from last month, I got the LunaGen "Series/Episode"

I learned a lot more about how YunoHost servers work, and in particular how

I successfully moved my Pixelfed server to the main YunoHost cloud server (I had

Unfortunately, the attempt to migrate Misskey to Calckey in-place was a failure,

We also made the first concrete steps towards moving to co-location: I purchased an

I added face-in-box commentary on the Space Bunny Ragdoll Rig screencast that I finished

I received a few purchases: a lamp I want to try using for additional commentary videos

HIGHLIGHTS

MAY 2023 Project Report

In May, I got back to working on shots for "Lunatics!"

As a warm-up, I created some of the billboard crowd panels that

These were also among the files that I had to recover from Git

I started work on the (re-)animation of the Soyuz pod-staging

The Soyuz also has decal and texture detailing now.

This is always stressful for me, because I liked the old shot, so

I discovered a new collection of film and television stock sound effects

There are a couple of anticipated uses of a brief "national anthem"

I made further edits to the "New Contributor Guide" on the website, including

My previous video-embedding tests for LunaGen used 3rd party videos which have

It's the first time I've uploaded videos to Vimeo in over a year, and the first

Using Git and Git LFS for storing and versioning production files has turned out

Fortunately, it's not too hard to unwind this damage, but I needed to write a script

This month was our deadline for principle photography on "Field Trip", due to student

So "Field Trip" is on hiatus until we can make new filming plans with new crew. That

And as usual, I had some construction and maintenance work to do.

HIGHLIGHTS:

APRIL 2023 Project Report

This month, I finished the ragdoll rig for the "Space Bunny"

I also made a lot of small practical fixes on the project

Also wrote a general "contributor guide" that covers project goals

We started work on a small live-action film project with some

I decided to add some LED lighting strips for indirect lighting

And finally, I needed to do some handyman work.

HIGHLIGHTS:

00:00 Summary

A 10-minute overview of the production and development work I did for "Lunatics!" and related projects in 2021.

Happy New Year!

Screencast logs of April, sorted out by project:

38.6 hrs on "Lunatics!" Production: mainly the "LA-Launch" and "SF-SoyuzFlight" sequences, and then constructing a new whole-episode animatic.

25.3 hrs on Anansi Blender Extensions add-on (ABX): this month, I extensively modified the "Copy NLA" feature which has now become "Copy Animation"; and I expanded the "L.Ink Compos" feature into "Ink/Paint Config", with options for handling transparency, billboard objects, and fixing the sky background compositing.

15.1 hrs on Lib-Ray media format: setting up unit and functional tests and creating a small test article video to use in more tests. Also came up with a plan for how to integrate visual testing (I had some visual testing working a long time back, but I got the test code muddled up with the application code pretty badly -- a lot of my current reorganization is just trying to sort that out).

3.0 hrs on collecting the codes for automating the robotics on a Primera Bravo II disk publisher that I purchased recently. I put this under a new project "Bunsen", which is very experimental right now, but I might be writing about it -- it's a studio utility to run disk burning on my file server through a web interface from my workstation. It's sort of a learning project, but I also hope to put it to use publishing short runs of M-Disc DVDs or other optical disk archives.

This is topical summary of my worklog screencasts for the entire process of creating the Sky Rig for the "timelapse" sequences in the "Lunatics!" pilot. This includes a lot of missteps, but doesn't include research or tutorial training time, although I had to do some of that.

Set to CC By licensed music by Kressof from the album "Turn". (No voiceover).

I plan to record an instructional screencast on how to use the rig and sky model.