Chinatown Production update
Hey, all! It’s been a couple of weeks since the Kickstarter ended, and while I took a little break from updating to recover not only from the campaign, but also a nasty cold and Thanksgiving, pre-production for the film has been humming along in the background.
First, we’re nearly finished with making all the character models! I put the finishing touches on Mike’s friend Kuan and the restaurant Hostess, and then moved on to working on creating background characters that will populate the streets and the restaurant scenes. I also got the first of our “special guests” completed—more on him soon!
To create all these background characters, I have two “universal rigs”—the same that I used to create the gang members last summer—one male, one female. While there are some generic outfits I can use, I customized these characters with clothes and hair purchased from DAZ3D and exported to Blender. There’s also a few characters that have been repurposed from previous projects and modified to suit this film.
Between all these new characters, plus the original cast, that puts the total at 20 custom characters for the film! If we had to make all these characters from scratch, that could have easily taken over half a year, but using this streamlined process, we’re able to create a bunch of characters in a week or two. Now, I’ll be the first to admit they are not as polished as the work of some of the other Blender pros at work out there, but they will more than do for the purposes of this project, and it was worth the tradeoff for the speed of creation. Perhaps in the next project we’ll be able to make use of some of those pros out there!
In addition to making characters, I’ve also proceeded in setting up the layouts for the film, starting with the restaurant scene. “Layout” refers to process of setting up the files in Blender with all the sets, props, characters, lights, and special effects that will be needed for the scene, and then determining the basic posing of characters and finding camera angles for each of the shots. I also use this process to create test renders from a few key shots to decide on the look of scene, especially the lighting.
Here’s what that looks like:
