Pug’s Place

Yesterday was my last day at the office for this summer, and once this morning is over with I’m done. See, I’m playing golf with my boss and a co-worker. Considering how golf and I are not friends, I’m counting this as work and not pleasure.

I had a good 8 hours of sleep last night. Mmm, sleep.

Movie can be downloaded. No lightsaber roto-scoping in this edition.

Link: http://pug.ibu02.com/pdj/

Feel free to share the link with people you know, but let’s keep the fanfare for when the lightsabers are edited in.

I’ll have the movie online here tomorrow. Probably in DivX format since the DivX encodings I’m doing are better-looking than Sorenson 3 from Quicktime.

Make sure you’ve got DivX…

I’m gonna hold off on burning more DVDs until I get the rotoscoping done. Let me know if you want one of these non-rotoscoped ones. Theresa, for example (since I know these 45 meg movie downloads are harsh…)

I just watched the movie. In the family room with the sound system cranked up. On DVD. I’m done. I can’t believe it, it’s done. All that’s left is the rotoscoping. It’s … very good. All the sound is good. I’m happy with all of it. Katie at least will see it tomorrow after work, and hopefully she won’t notice anything glaring wrong - and then I say “Okay.” and copy it to miniDV, encode it to QuickTime in a couple qualties, burn more things to DVD and then hand the computer back to Mrs. Ross on Tuesday.

I can’t believe it. Stephen - I’ll FedEx you a DVD this week. You leave on the 4th, so you’ll get it before then. That way you can take the DVD to school and say “Look at this. I’m a JEDI KNIGHT.” In a bit when I get the rotoscoping done (Which might be before I go back to school), I’ll have the real finished version. Is that not seriously cool beyond all recognition? Well, you shouldn’t answer that yet since you have not seen the final cut. But you will answer it. And you will answer it correctly, or Tanya is gonna get Sith on your ass.

Bow down.

I now know the exact number of frames I must rotoscope to complete the movie — 3,206. Assuming 15 seconds per image, that’s 13 hours of work. Yay!

I’ve made the decision to release Pizza Delivery Jedi under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, with the exception of the music since I don’t own the copyright on that. However, I think I own the copyright on everything else in this movie… So cool!

There might not be much for Katie to do tomorrow other than give the movie a final thumbs up (she’s gonna come over and help me finish things in time to give all the equipment back on Tuesday).

It’s amazing how tightly edited the movie is becoming. Jay stopped over for a few hours to help me edit the movie and provided the voice of Narrator. It’s now weighing in at 6 minutes 56 seconds, and it’s sharp. I’m rendering some higher-contrast scrolling text right now, and then going to try and shave a few more seconds off in spots, but it’s really, really good.

Tomorrow I’m gonna enlist Katie in helping me tighten the audio down, since it appears the editing is gonna be mostly done! I’m even going to try and do a test screening (without background music) at my cousin’s house tonight to get their comments on the storyline.

This is coming along so wonderfully I can’t wholly understand it.

Awesome.

I need to shave off 30 seconds more and rig a shot of Yoda in the beginning with all of his hair since, like a RETARD I never took any VIDEO of him with all his hair in the Jedi Pie Company storage room.

But it’s coming along quite finely. Katie seemed to have a good birthday, too. So that’s very well! =O)

Must talk to Theresa about when her test is on the 6th. When is it, Theresa? I (or perhaps Katie and I) can probably come pick you up after that exam.

Happy Sunday!

It’s time for the final cut of our movie. And the littlest member of the CSC has turned 20 today.

Here’s to working like a madman 18 hours a day.

The director’s cut is now done, weighing in at 8 minutes 54 seconds without counting the credits but counting the introduction. Rotoscoping is not done, and voice overs for Crumu (Stephen) were faked once by me - to absolutely no success. Congratulations Stephen, your voice is unique.

I have about 5 days to finish a final cut of the movie and print the sucker. If I finish early I’ll try to get scene 25 rotoscoped and in the first burn of the final cut, but no guarantees. It’s probable that I’ll call this “done” and we’ll have a few DVDs of the movie without any lightsaber glows, and around Christmastime everyone will get the gift of a rotoscope-inclusive DVD.

Parts of this movie make me laugh real hard. Parts of this movie drag. It’s nevertheless going to be painful to slice and dice it down to a tight comedy fest. Not only does using a razor-blade on hours of hard work suck, but I’ve got to try and keep the story-line coherent while being unwilling and mostly unable to order reshoots. As-is in the director’s cut the story gets across - there’s a bump going from scene 10 to scene 11, but scene 11 is going to be the first thing I look at vaporizing from the final cut.

I already had a lot of respect for movie editors. Now I have a whole lot more, I’ll tell you that…

On top of doing all of this, these 5 remaining days to finish the movie are busy! Going to see Camelot, performed by OWC tomorrow night with Liz and Elf. Saturday is Katie’s birthday, Sunday is Leigh Anne’s birthday. My Grandma Miller just had a hip replacement surgery this morning, and I need to put the clear coat on my car’s new paint soon so that I can rub it mid-next-week.

Yo ho, yo ho…