Back to business...

Hi everyone,

Hope everyone had a pleasant and productive Christmas. We are back into Hey Negrita full swing now so lets make the last final push to the finish line.

In terms of footage we are not dreadfully far off completion. I'm sure some of us will be able to animate some more shots before we start back at uni on the 4th. Dave, if you want I will be able to come round tomorrow afternoon, and Saturday and Sunday evening (after 5pm) to animate some more shots, but while you have access to the set it would be obviously be worth you doing some more yourself.

Grace, your shot looks very good, although the jump is quite evident in the middle, but that can be easily fixed. I think you just need to shift the image down in After Effects so it is aligned with the frames either side.

Myself, I have been finessing shots that we have completed so far, by which I mean adding eyeballs, eyelids, and where necessary freezing backgrounds to stop the trees falling over. I'm not doing any colour correction for the moment because we can do the lot in one batch near the very end of the project to get a consistancy. Please could this apply to anyone who is working on their shots at home, do everything to it that it needs, but leave the colour correction for later.

Talking of eyeballs, we have a lot to add. Most shots are filmed without the physical drawn on eyes, so this means we'll have to add them all in post production, some frames involving 5 characters. This is a time consuming but key step, and after a little research me and Dave discovered that tracking a black dot to characters' eyes in After Effecs is the quickest and easiest method for doing this. Hopefuly one of us'll get a step by step tutorial of how to do this up on the blog, for everyone's use.

So not much else needs to be said... apart from let's all be in Monday morning at 9am (you may have all got the same e-mail from Jordan telling you this), and it will be very important so we can collate all our shots and have a looks at where we are and what needs to be done. Basically we'll have a week after we start back to have the film all but finished.

Let's keep going, I salute you all and trust our finished film wil be excellent.

- James