Slowly but surely, Orson's world is taking shape.
This prop is courtesy of my indecision.
I initially thought of this short with Orson sitting on a bear rug in front of a fireplace. However, due to the finicky nature of ideas in development, I decided to put him up on a fainting couch (still in front of a fire). It's made of scrap wood, covered in plasticine -- My father was gracious enough to sculpt the detail while I worked my day job -- then I painted and finished it with gloss polyurethane.
What's interesting, is that this single prop, though time-consuming to make, will end up saving me a ton of time in the long run. The reason? Well, with lil' Orson sitting above floor level, it allows me to get away with having only a green screen behind him -- No need to construct a fireplace! --
Or a bookcase.... not even a single wall will have to be built! A major time saver.
Also, I finally nailed down a script for this. It's four pages, so that equals about 3 minutes (with faster action). That will make this short my longest yet.
Lastly, this will be the first short done on my new iMac!
It's hard to believe that I've been working off outdated software & hardware this whole time.
My computer is nine years old and runs After Effects on just 3GB of RAM -- and speaking of After Effects, it's still in "CS4". YIKES!
Everything's so worn-out that it crashes/freezes/freaks-out about every 10 minutes.... so today, I finally said 'enough is enough,' and I laid down some cash. What will be coming in the mail – hopefully by this time next week – will be a 21in. iMac with 16GB of RAM and a lightning fast hard drive.
That means no more waiting 9 hours for an 11 second video to render. No more crashes, no more freezing, no more weird error messages!
It will be grand.
