beauty takes some love

sometimes as im going about my work days it takes me trying to explain what im doing, whether that be verbally or perhaps just in my head as i dig through my comps trying to make right from wrong, that i realize man it takes a crap ton of layers to get something that looks pretty in the end. What are you talking about James? - you might ask.. let's say oh trying to dig through 230 layers figuring out which one is causing some wierd bugged out issue because a layer of footage is at 23.96 instead of being at 24 FPS - thats something along the lines of what i'm talking about. Or perhaps let me try to illustrate this through a simple exmaple........
Lets say we have mr.scientist:
:we take mr green screen footage and get rid of it so we can make some cool colors happen right? i mean who wants that in this animation? so i guess the next step is to get some things rotoscoped (separated from the rest basiclly) so we need his pipe, his board, him, his fingers, his thumb, the pen, the leaves, the paper. I think thats it... hey if you want some good detail this is a must.. so this is roughly about 11 layers because i forgot to say pen... anyways we runs these through the mk12-pretty-machine and they come out pretty.. yippie! now to just color these, so we multiple the 11 layers we had by 4 because each need their own individual special care!! so now what? we're at 44 layers? well yeah i guess soo.........


so this is where headache ensues!!! unless its just me... but anyways coloring stuff that goes together helps alot, or at least in my head it also makes more colors for you to stare at and get headaches too though.. but in the end i think it helps us hunt down who is on what and why and where and what time..


well after all that trouble and mess i think we are to a good starting point. starting point!!! you yell.... we'll you see thats just the base layer to the big master plan as to where the magic starts. So if this is just one layer in a bigger slot of magic and mayhem then how many layers must we have? ok imagine the separation that happened to that footage and how fast it got mulitpled and then reduced to 1, that has to happen to the background, and the foreground, and the colors, and the environment... and the AUDIO! hehehehe its fun i love it but sometimes when you're at like 50 pre compositions and 50 inside each of those it gets deep.. and naming and organization kick it, and usually i get beat by te whole organziation part, thats where my headaches come from. But im getting better I promise. and working as a collective is always the hardest.. sure you know in your mess where something is, but making it so that everyone knows where something is in your mess.. now thats the art :) enjoy your night. i'll enjoy mine.
james