Today in the Machine

Today is "plot all the post-production out on a calendar" day for Android Insurrection. Which is kind of a pain because so much of the picture edit is dependent on visual effects. Which means we have to do one of two things:

1. Cut the picture and put a text-slug in that says "insert effect of [robots shooting] here" and hope that the timing is right or
2. Pre-build the visual effects so that the editor can cut them into the edit.

We end up doing both of those things and pre-building some effects which have to be changed and inserting effects the picture editor wanted and finding they change the timing of a whole sequence.
And all of that means we keep locking and unlocking the picture. Which is a hassle because it means we can't get started on the audio mix.

A Steve Burg painting. There's a link to his site in the sidebar, right?

One answer to all of this is to deliberately do some sloppy animation. Well, maybe not "deliberately" as much as "incompetently". Essentially that work in the big-budget world is called creating an "animatic". But we're doing animatics only because the least-capable animator (me) is doing the work. In any case, we do some crap-tastic animation and at least we can see how things time out. Then hopefully we can get Maduka in there to make the animations better.
I have a month and a week to finish this picture (by my own self-imposed deadline).
Also, today is the last day of the AFM. Which means that tomorrow I'm sending an email to our sales rep and saying "What kind of movie should we make?"