Ahh, we’re finally down to the nitty-gritty, the real work…

Welcome to the staging/blocking production loop:

• Type some code
• Render the frames
• Grab a snack
• Look at the rendered results
• Type some more code in
• Repeat as necessary

I’m about two weeks into it; how long it will take, I have no clue. With my hand-drawn animations, I usually know how many individual drawings I need to produce, and can create schedules & deadlines based on a daily image count. No such luck with the computer-generated stuff — it’s always a W.A.G., and it’s never right. Meh. What are ya gonna do…

I probably won’t post anything more about the film until I finish staging & blocking and move to the initial edit.

The spectre of spending two whole weeks trying to map out dialog syllables for the bee jokes short scared the crud out of me enough to blast through the whole thing in only two days. Awesome sauce! I’m always in a good mood whenever I get that particular monkey off my back — it’s a stinky monkey, and it likes to bite and throw… things. I don’t think I need to tell you what kinds of “things”. Yeah…

Anyways, we’re moving on to the last little bit of pre-production, and that’s going through the various models of our characters and props, and making sure everything is up to snuff. There shouldn’t be any extra coding work involved since I updated these models last year; rather, it’s a matter of refamiliarizing myself with how these stupid bees actually work… if you can call what they do “work”…

I plan to start blocking and staging the first scene around August 7th. It won’t take that long to get everything ready — in fact, I could probably start staging as early as tomorrow, if I wanted — but I want to use any extra time between now and then to work on the doodle reload. I won’t have much time to draw anything else once cameras start rolling, and I’m still not happy with the number of doodles I have on hand. Guess this means I should stop yakkin’ and start drawin’, huh? I think so, too…

I finally got the DanBee’s Doodles reload on track this past week, going from zero drawings to having enough for three whole weeks. Yayy! That said, I’m putting out sketch reruns this week. Booo! Sorry, Charlie, I’ve got my hands full trying to revamp both the DanBee’s Doodles site and this one, so no fresh stuff ’til next week. You understand, right? Right??? Yeah…

In other news, the initial draft of the animatics reel for the bee jokes short is finished. For now, the film is clocking in a few seconds shy of three minutes, and that’s minus titles and credits. I say “for now” because after listening to the audio and watching the animatics unfold, I’m thinking this thing is waaay too long. I could safely cut thirty seconds worth of bee blabbering and you’d never miss it. So, that’s what I get to do now. I was hoping to get dialog mapped out syllable by syllable this weekend, but I’ll probably push that back til the following weekend. Just as well — mapping out dialog is far and away my least favorite part of filmmaking, so any chance to dodge it for a week or month or two is fine by me. I wonder if that’s what studio interns get stuck with in Hollywood. Hmmmm…