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Week update

It's been a pretty productive week. Have a good weekend ya'll.

Deadlines

22 May - Assemble work-in-progress into a new internal release. Shoot tests of new nanobat prop.
4 June - Alex is working up a new graphic design for modfilms.net

Comping
I'm slowly getting my head around Shake and got VFX 87 shots in progress (the VFX tracker has a "good" bug because it reckons there's over 100...). Lots of rotoscoping and keying left to do but as of yesterday... no more blue screen!
http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/realmedia/sanc/sanc_post_production/sanc_vfx/shot/

Nanobat props
In a barn in northern France there's a nanobat lurking. Chris has been busy developing a prop that can open it's wings. Early footage is looking promising.

Camera tracking
Jigesh has broken the ice on the shots requiring camera tracking which means I'm scouring Maya tutorials trying to work out what to do with the resulting output.
http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/CameraTracking

UI/text
Steve is investigating what our pipeline for working on text for the UI elements should be. We were hoping to use the much vaunted Final Cut Pro - Shake integration but, what would you know, no support for text nodes...
http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/FilmScript

modfilms.net
No progress directly but we're still chasing Molinare for an answer after last month's funding pitch. A stack of useful suggestions and improvements piling up in the trac though. Would be good to finish off the IA work last week soon.
http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/trac/sanctuary

Our friends at the Thames Innovation Centre are talking to the London Development Authority about an R&D grant for MOD product development. Julie and I are going to go over the figures once more for this. Wouldn't that be helpful!
http://www.thamesinnovationcentre.com/

We're waiting for first glimpse of Final Cut Pro Server for an idea of what Apple is going to market as "asset managment for production people". I'd like to update the vfxtracker, still the most useful tool out of the project to-date, to suit.
http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/tracker/vfxtracker/

As always keep the suggestions coming and any cool MODs/mixes you come across, please add them to the database.
http://modfilms.net

Net herder in London

Quick roundup of the week.

TEAM

Valiant effort hooking everyone up with Alex this week. Last minute replacement, Soren from Myspace, last night was entertaining but no substitute for the real thing! {;-) We'll get you guys together next time.

Still scouting for finance and sales stakeholders for the team so keep them leads coming.

I'm getting runner/work experience enquiries from broadcastfreelancer.com. Who posted there? Good idea!

COMMS

The message is clear. Too many systems. Too confusing. No one wants to wade through lots of places looking for updates.

A number of suggests have been made including relying more on emails and having "one place" for all uploads/sharing etc.
http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/ProjectIssues#Too_many_systems

More direct comms via email is a no-brainer. But not so clear is what "one place" we should focus on.

We've tried most approaches now for this elusive "one place" and it's clear that different folks gravitate to different ways of communicating, and also at different points in the project (e.g. concept artists and developers happy with forums, no one else!). Hence the proliferation of SMS, blogs, forums, wikis, chats, community sites, image galleries...

As always, wiki changes are a good barometer of what's going on day-to-day.
http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/WebChanges

Interested in your thoughts...

PLANS

Would like to launch a revised and reskinned (beta) of modfilms.net in two months.

We've got a stack of suggestions, bug reports, wish list items collated
http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/trac/sanctuary/report/1

Soren, I'll bring you up to speed when we catch up and let's work out some target dates. Steve, Alex, Julie and I have been mapping out the activities across all areas (Information Architecture) and discussing next steps. We'll need another session to wrap this work off ahead. Alex has volunteered to focus on the graphic redesign this month.

FUNDING

A number of leads still active awaiting follow-up. There's some work to do on the budget and biz plan to satisfy these. Aiming to prepare Enterprise R&D grant materials for Tues meeting with Costas from the Thames Innovation Centre.

FILMS

Sanctuary post prod tootles on without funding. I've been neglecting producer duties somewhat, immersing myself in Shake and Maya, but lots of promising developments. Chris's nanobat prop is taking shape (in a French country-side barn) and Jigesh is starting to send me camera tracking data. I need to get back to Soren in DK (yet another Soren) re. character animation.

NEXT STEPS

* Determine funding and team building next-steps - Michela, Soren
* Revise and circulate Information Architecture - Michela, Soren, Julie
* modfilms.net development