Coming into the home-stretch!

The past few weeks have flown by and everyone is suddenly facing the terrifying prospect that--10 whole days remain until films are due! Time to break out the IV's of caffeine, kiss sleep goodbye, and hunker down for this last stretch! Probably have "Final Countdown" on a constant loop as well. :P

Last weekend was my final pass on animation. The one aspect I'm very happy about is how much I've been able to refine the animation. It has been really nice being able to finish large segments of the film, receive tons of great feedback from classmates/teachers, and then go back and actually have the time to address the changes. However, with the deadline coming up fast I had to put my foot down at some point and "lock" all animation/camera work---still need to tweak a few things, but the latest version of my film is leagues stronger then 4 weeks ago. Presently, I'm getting ready for post-production and getting all of my scenes ready for the magical realm of After Effects. I should be finished with compositing by Thursday/Friday and next weekend is all about the sound effects/soundtrack---and that Monday, I turn-in the finished product by 4pm(omg. Sooooo close!)!Knock on wood though. While some areas of this film have gone rather smoothly, I've certainly hit some obstacles and encountered some just plain weird events that have probably taken a few years off my life---like file corruption, computers crashing, losing several hours of work(happened last Saturday!), etc. Being this close to the finish line, I'm very paranoid, but at the same time, numb to the whole computer crashing on me biz. But overall, this year's Crunch-time is an improvement over the craziness of last year. Not having an epic film has certainly helped reduce the chaos. Any who, here's a photo from my day:

So how does this relate to a 2d film? Well, it kind of doesn't. Some major changes occurred over Winter Break--and the number one change is, this year it's a 3D film for me. Not a hybrid like last year. 98% of it is all Maya--some of the special effects were done in Flash(the final 2%). Most of my classmates know about the change, but I haven't posted too much, so I'll just announce it now and get into more details about what brought about this change after April 26th. Anyways, the above image is how I spent my morning--- I took over 4 computers(yep. PC lab) and for the good part of today, rendered out the majority of my film. Okay, back to work, still have a couple hours left before I go to bed.