A funny thing happened during the Covid-pocalypse: we started working on the film again.
Many folks took up new hobbies while stuck at home during the pandemic. Some folks learned to bake, some learned a new language, and others became insane anti-vaxxers.
We decided it was time to finish this fucking film.
So over Memorial Day weekend in 2020, editing resumed on In-World War. We worked on a major re-edit -- completely re-structuring the film based on some initial feedback to the most recent edit.
So, to catch you up: the road got bumpy after that edit was completed in 2015 -- and things stalled out for a while. That year, our director had his second child. Turns out, very young kids are quite time-consuming, especially in bulk, so this sucked up most his available energy for the following few years. Then we encountered ANOTHER major technical snafu with our video project library that effectively locked us out of the edit completely. Yay. We won't go into the gory details but this resulted in over a year lost in getting it fixed. Happily it did not require us to re-build the edit this time. But it meant no progress in the meantime.
With the project library back online, everything was ready to go by the end of 2019, just in time for the pandemic to upend everything in early 2020. After those first few crazy rona months, we realized it would be far more productive to get back to work on the movie, rather than self-medicate with Hulu to avoid the next round of panic attacks.
So in late May 2020, we went back to work on the movie.
Here's the timeline since then:
- Memorial day weekend 2020 (May 2020): Completed the new rough cut, reorganizing the story and taking somewhat of a Rashomon approach. It was a major re-edit. It's looking great.
- Summer 2022 (through Labor day September 2020): Completed the locked edit. We went through every scene and every shot to trim and select the right performances, given this new storytelling approach. It's tight.
- Fall 2022: Design direction and "look books" for all VFX animation groups, as well as a proof-of-concept for the first VFX animation shot. Seeing the first shot with full animation composited was awesome, even if it was only a test.
- January 2021: Full audit of all shots that need VFX animation and/or clean-up. ~220 shots total. Holy shite.
- February 2021: Started working with animators on some initial shots, to test out the right animation approach.
- Spring 2021: The first set of finished animations were delivered.
- Summer 2021: Continued animation exploration, both with 2D and even stop motion.
Where do we from here? The next steps are:
- Expanding the animation team so we can get more of the animations in the can (200+ shots is a LOT).
- Also, we will be doing the last couple final pick-up shots (all pretty simple thankfully).
- Then, more animation work until we work our way through all the remaining shots.
Thanks to everyone for their patience with this crazy project. Literally hundreds of people have contributed since the early days, across multiple countries and through all the phases of production and post-production.
We're on the way again.