Mikayla Fuehrer - The King and the Pawn

Well, this is it, the last blog post I will make about the creation of this film. It's certainly been a journey. I will include a syncsketch link at the bottom of this post to show the work I did this last week, but I really wanted my final post to be a bit more reflective of the overall product and experience rather than the final work I put in.  Looking back on everything, I think that the making of this film was full of so many twists and turns. I've learned a lot every step of the way though and I am so very proud of our team and what we have accomplished. I believe that there are things we could've done better, however every artist would continue to refine their work forever if they were allowed to do so, so I believe that what we've accomplished in the time we had is very good too. In this past year, we've endured a lot of things that maybe aren't always visible on the surface. We combined with another team and took on a lot of new members ver

Lighting continues to move onward. Right now a lot of the team is pitching in to help with rendering so that we will be able to meet our deadlines. We are fortunate to have a lot of team members to help out, but we have faced technical difficulties so all we can do is keep working and hope that the technology will hold out.  For me, I'm continuing to get my shots done, and help out where I can with paint-overs or trying to fix render errors (caused by technical issues) with compositing. There are some inconsistencies we are dealing with between rendering on our computers locally, rendering on the school computers remotely, and rendering with the school's renderfarm. We split this stuff up to help save time, so putting this stuff back in would not help with doing things efficiently. I have a lot of experience with adobe products so I wanted to try to step up to help see if there was some fixes we could make in aftereffects (or photoshop, I honestly found it very powerfu

And lighting is continuing, as always! For this Unit, I have taken on some additional shots as I have finaled almost all the ones from my schedule. Some of our team members are falling behind due to technical difficulties with the render farm, so I really wanted to help out where I can. I am doing more chess world shots as I have a lot of experience with those. I am both nervous and excited to be lighting my personal favorite part of the film. This part is what has always gotten me to tear up, so I really want to try my absolute best. It's still in early stages, but I feel as though I'm in a good starting place. Below the lighting videos are some images of some technical difficulties of my own. Our pillars unfortunately weren't UV'd in the best way before they were rigged. As I went shot by shot, I just adjust the UVs to give the pillars the look we want. It appeared fine in the file, and I rendered my shot to turn in. I was so startled to find that when I open

Lighting is carrying on for this next unit. I am working hard to address all the notes given to me and achieve what I can with the limitations of these methods as well as the short time. I believe that I am making progress. I have particularly spent time experimenting on sq200s120, and 140. We wanted to try incooporating glowing effects into other shots along the film to help make the chess world more imaginary and other worldly. This has come with some successes and some failures, but there was a lot of learning as always.  I'm really enjoying working in the death world, the effect is so powerful. It is also so challenging. I say that with a smile on my face of course. I find it a challenge to not have the luxury of light linking. I was taught to utilize this to attain the most control in the appearance of lighting. This allows for a lot of refinement. Without that, it takes a lot of time to position lights where a falling pillar doesn't fall towards a spotlight, as i