POST 34: IDEAS JUST KEEP COMING

    I  made a short test with camera movement, and like the new 3D console, though I will need to  pile a few props on top, but now, the opposite wall looks very bare when the camera pans around the room. So since I have made this pit into a storage and prop room, I built some wooden shelving all across that wall.
  Now, what to put on these shelves? I just had that crazy idea that since the theatre was right next to a full working farm with a lot of animals, and there was a need in some plays for a "Shepherdess" to have sheep to look after on stage, and a sheep dog, may be a few goats, and lambs, the stage manager and set decorator was also an amateur taxidermist... Why not? So every time they would eat lamb at the Trianon, he would skin it carefully and stuff it! Same for chicken, ducks, pigs, piglets,the occasional fox caught in the henhouse, may be a wolf or two to go with the Red Riding hood...
   He also was an odd man(like me), and came up with a few fantasy animals, Griffin and such. Furthermore, he was a friend of Fragonard, and keenly interested in anatomy.
   I am not talking about Jean Honoré Fragonard the Painter, but his less famous cousin Honoré Fragonard, a French Anatomist living at the time who was Professor of anatomy at the Veterinary School from 1765 to 1771, and came up with a method for preserving dissection specimens(they did last, and can still be seen at the Musée of the Veterinary School at Maison Alfort near Paris). He was expelled from the school in 1771, "as a mad man", but continued working in his home producing specimens for the Cabinets of Curiosity of the Aristocracy in the 1770's and 80s. His Horse of the Apocalypse based on a Durer print horseman of the apocalypse
is pretty well known:

   So the idea may be a little farfetched, but it is entirely possible that our set designer knew him and had a keen interest in anatomy, as some of the Titled Courtiers did. He could have collected specimens of various animal fetuses on the farm,snakes, lizards, and other oddities, and preserved them pickled in jars... His collection could have been somewhere in the pit under the stage...
   I am a surrealist in many ways, and have built my very own cabinet of curiosities, including pickled stillborn piglets, dogs, cats, etc... I am also an admirer of a Czeck Animator named Jan Svanmajer, who made a number of very strange animated movies, the best known being "Alice"(available on Netflix, and highly recommended).
   In this movie, the fall of Alice in the hole is representing by an elevator going by shelve after shelve of odd collections and specimens preserved in jars. So I thew in my very brief little Hommage to Svankmajer in between the two parts of the Offertories, as the camera goes down from the stage into the bowels of the theatre...

Post 33: Seems Like a Crazy Idea?

  Well, it seems like a crazy idea to spend a whole day building a 3D console, but I believe it's worth it. At this point, the Basement has very little in terms of 3D objects: doors, sets, that's it. I feel it needs a fairly good size beautiful 3D thing I can pan around.
   I had some pictures of some beautiful Yellow and Green Italian Marble Fireplace mantels, which I use in the Basement Set, but they look flat from the sides obviously, and I cannot turn the to always face the camera as I do with Paper Dolls and other small objects:

    The Green one is too ornate to build in 3D with after Effects. I need something more  like a console, with simple shapes. A Google search turned up a bunch of good stuff, two of them real possibilities. One is an Antique Faux Marble Italian wooden Console:

   The other is a Yellow Marble Mantel very similar to the one I already had, BUT with a front view and a three quarter view, which allowed me to cut it up in pieces with good image definition:

   Each piece was saved as a separate image, and put back together in 3D in After Effects.

   By late afternoon, it was assembled in 3D and looked pretty good(almost like the real hing actually):

   I dropped it into the basement, but it actually doesn't come out looking so three dimensional after all. 

   To make the best of it, I may have to use a few virtual lights to get some shadows...

 What I have done to try and lighten the load on the computer is breaking up the entire huge 3D composition for the Whole Theatre into it's major parts: the Introduction, the Theatre, the Stage, and the Basement. Inseams to make things easier.

Post 32: Basement taking shape

  I rendered the Dies Irae one more time last night after more corrections and adjustments, and thought I had the final version, but then there is still a split second glitch at the end! It never ends...
  In the last couple of days, I have been putting together the basement of the theatre. I made a mistake sizing the walls, that ended up too long, so I added an extra small room to it, and am now considering bringing a staircase down from the stage...
  I am debating whether it would look better to take the camera down a staircase, or just lower it vertically down though a trap in the floor(which would also save me having to build said staircase...).
   I applied an adjustment layer with curves to darken the mood and increase the contrast, in order to create the illusion of low candlelight without actually using multiple points of light in After Effects, and it sort of works pretty well. So much so that I am going to try the same thing upstairs in the theatre.
   The final camera view is going to be  5760 x 1080 pixels, but to see what I am doing better building the basement, I am working on a 5760 x 5000 canvas, which explains the near square image:

  It is beginning to look pretty good though  and so totally different in mood and look from the pretty blue and gold theatre decor that it will come as a nice counterpoint in the second part of the Offertories.

Post 31: Where am I ?

   Up bright and early as usual, and the computer still has at least an hour to go churning out the rendering of the Agnus Dei, which ends the Program, with its long list of credits going back to Louis XIII...
  Last night while I was doing my 3 required hours of daily reading, I rendered what I hope to be the final corrected version of the Graduate.
  Since that prevents me from using After Effects, but the 16 processors are not quite going full blast,

I can answer some emails, and write the Blog until it finishes.

   I was a little desperate for a while when the computer slowed down to a crawl working on the second part of the Offertories, but I seem to have found the issue, and am back working as normal.

  It is the 15 minutes movement in two parts for which I rebuilt Marie Antoinette's little Theatre at Trianon.

   In the first part, the camera flies around a near empty theatre, from the backstage the balconies and back. I have struggled with the second part, and tried to figure out what to do, I have no inspiration from the music, as it it my least favorite part of the Requiem.

   My first intention was to turn Virtual Lights and Shadows on in after Effects, and recreate the candle lighting of the period. That would have required dozens of points of light, each creating a separate shadow.

 I started doing it, creating a big chandelier,  a ramp of stage lights, and reflector lights hanging behind each set and around the sides of the stage. First, I used images of flames, and created a sequence of a man lighting the big chandelier after it was lowered to the floor. I went as far as creating a movie of a candle flame burning so the the candles would flicker realistically if I offset the movies out of synch. It looked good, but when I got past 3 dozen lights or so, the computer started getting bogged down with all the calculations required as I added more lights and turned more and more shadows on. Also, each candle movie made it slower, and when I tried to make each of the dozens of virtual points of light flicker, it  was becoming so slow O finally realized my ambitions were too high , even for my "Uber Machine"...

   So I am going to have to use the flat even lighting, and use an adjustment layer on top with the Curves, Exposure and Hue/Saturation Effects to "fake" it and modulate the lighting. 

  The first part is still rough, but is basically done, though a lot remains to be adjusted.I considered rebuilding the attic above the stage with all the wooden wench machinery, but that would be another huge job and time is now limited...

  I finally got another idea for the second part of the piece a couple of days ago, and that requires building a full basement under the Stage.

   That is the pit into which the sets are lowered through slots in the floor of the stage:

 

  My two sets of "décors", the trees and the kitchen, are already built and fully workable. All I had to do is add a dirt  floor and four rough brick walls to complete the room. But then I started thinking it would also have been a storage place for old sets and props of all kind, and I started filling it with stuff. I modified one of my paper puppets to make him a stage worker.

   It is beginning to take shape, and I hope the limited number of objects will allow me to do the lighting I had hoped for upstairs:

POST 30: HALLELUIA

The work was still as sluggish on the old machine, so that told me the problem was with the Composition. I finally figured out that a sub Composition was at 25fps, while the rest had been restored to the original 24. Also, the candle flame movies slow things down. 
  Things seem to be back to normal, let's just hope I don't get any more Kernel Panic Shutdowns as I was getting a few days ago, that may have been the cause...
   I am busy building a basement for the theatre under the stage,where the sets are lowered through the floor, that is slowly turning into a darkish storage room with a bunch of props...

Post 29: Damn Computer

   I just bought that Accelsior PCIe super fast card and it works fine for rendering. But for the last two days, it has been painfully sluggish working on the After Effect composition of the Theatre. I can't figure out why. I am watching the processes going on using Activity Monitor and trying to figure out what that QT32 Server is that seems to be eating up so much processor power... The speed tests are good, I built the Directory with Disk Warrior, I repaire Permissions, I cleaned out everything not need to make space on the disk, I cleared the AE cache, nothing seems to help!
  So for the moment, I am back working on my slower old machine...

Post 28: Pretty much all the Work Remaining is on the Offertorium

    Six of the Sequences are now pretty much finished, except for a few minor glitches here and there. I will be rendering all night.
   The remaining one is, of course, the longest (15n) and the most complex, with the full 3D "Théatre de la Reine".The first half is well advanced, but I and having a bit of a hard time with the second half, in part because I don't like this section of the Requiem much. The voices seen too hight, shrill, and get on my nerves...
   Also, I am realizing the computer has about reached its limits, and is getting slower, so I won't be able to turn on lights as I was planning to do to get some mood lighting rather than the flat even lighting I used in the Gallery Walk for the Pie Jesus.
   At some stage, I had been toying with the idea of building the attic of the theatre with the rafters and all the drum winches and ropes, as well as the Basement where the sets go down. I had decided it would be too much, and was going to use low candlelight for the second part of the Offertories.
   Since I cannot turn on the candlelights, I  reviewed my options, and decided that since the sets already go down into the basement, I might just as well add a floor and four walls and make it another room to take the camera(and the Spectator) into the bowels of this charming little theatre...