Wow nothing like just seeing this, found it cause I was looking for something else related.. I wanted to touch on your comments with sound design, the main thing being that we just ran out of time. There is a remixed version of the audio that already probably was a significant improvement, namely I just spent another hour or so just remixing it with the final music pieces. I wanted to keep the feel of the 48 hours, but yes the overall mix still bugged me. I was looking around to see if I could find a version with it available, but it doesn’t seem to be up on the internets.

In as far as vocal recordings, yes this was an intentional design choice, one which I questioned again later on, but by that point was to late to change it. The reason was I wanted this to feel in many ways like one of the 1960s cartoons (Thor, Captain Maerica, etc.) so I took what were great recordings done by Althea, and then modified them to match the sound, both via EQ as well as introducing a not insignificant amount of tape saturation to it. I decided not to take it all the way, and as a result you still end up with a cleaner sound than those cartoons had, but still carrying the feel. The ‘Hero’ voice I never did quite get to what I wanted but overall I think on the announcer especially this helps to carry the ‘image’.

In as far as the music, I actually really like the music Derek composed. It was severely hurt primarily by the overall mix(My responsibility) but I was a big fan of it, especially as it had its own voice and character that distinguished itself from what I would consider typical fare for action cartoons, listening to it I am more drawn back to 1950s film noir detective movies than anything, which I realize not everyone will like, it is just something I do like in this context as it implies more is going on than is given away in this short 4 minute animation.

So in essense, you and I agree that the overall mix can be improved, but we disagree with design choices:) Such is life, of course being that I am responding many months after the fact, who knows if you are even going to get to see this;)

Seablade

Let anyone say that Blender is the wrong tool and they can go back to digging coal. Blender is here to stay.

The people who did this effort have great futures in store for them.

Bravo!

@Billrey – Most of the side shots were animated by Jarred de Beer. We spent an enormous amount of time laughing each time he committed a new one to SVN.

@Whimsy Collective – Thanks for dropping in and watching us work/become insane. Regarding the rigs, everything from the neck down on the characters was done with Meta-Rig. The rest of the face was actually a basic bone-based arrangement that I like to use. We didn’t have a huge need for Etch-a-ton, but were I to do it over again, I might actually skip the Meta-Rig templates and rig the whole character myself. Meta-Rig still needs a bit of polish before it’s ready for mass consumption. More importantly, I lost a bit of time because I didn’t always know how all of the templates were set up… so when the rigs broke or behaved unexpectedly, I had to reverse engineer the templates and see how they work before I could actually get to resolve the issue. That said, Meta-Rig is definitely a powerful concept and I look forward to using/extending it when it’s done.

@Everyone – Thanks so much for taking the time to watch our short (and your kind words)! It was an incredibly fun challenge to work on. As a slight update, our film made the cut to be shown with 11 others in the ‘Best of Richmond’ screening, which happens this Sunday, 1 August (tomorrow). If you’re in or near Richmond, Virginia, you should *totally* come out to the Byrd Theatre and watch it. Details are on the Richmond 48 Hour Film Project website (http://www.48hourfilm.com/richmond). Who knows? Maybe we’ll win an award?

@To_the_team Thank you guys for the experience to sit in on your irc, redmine, and tinyroom session. It reminded me of Chase Jarvis live stream sessions of his photo shoots.

Did you guys use Meta-Rig and/or Skeleton Sketching in 2.5?