omgitsover

So, yesterday was technically my last day on The Mummy 3, although I haven't done any work on the film since 1 am Wednesday morning. The rest of the week has been spent busting my ass trying to get a character ready for Land of the Lost. Oh yeah, so I'm on Land of the Lost
(LOL) now.

I was supposed to take 3 weeks off, but I had to shave a week because LOL is expected to deliver a trailer this coming week. So, out of the one miserable thing, into the thing that's just as bad if not worse cliche....

Anyhow, Mummy 3 has been the most challenging project I've ever been a part of in my life, ever. More challenging than school ever was and more challenging than any other film before it that I've worked on. I'm very grateful that I had an amazing team to work with. A lot of them were fairly new, and had to learn a lot of standard techAnim methods and brand new techAnim tools. They all did great. That was the saving grace of this film for me - the team. I've never had a team of people who were all so pleasant and willing to work so hard. If I didn't have those guys, I don't know that I could have been able to deal with 5 months of 70-80 hour average work weeks.

I kept saying "I can't believe I'm using my brain SO much for something SO stupid". By stupid I mean, it's 'The Mummy' franchise. I just find it funny how much energy goes into what ultimately will be written off as "mindless summer fun!!" The greatest challenge we had in our department was to create a system that simulates cracking and healing skin for characters made of bronze and terra cotta. The problem was rooted in the fact that we shared this show with another FX house - Digital Domain(DD). Initially, DD was supposed to build a system that allowed for surface cracking and healing for a character, in the effects package program Houdini. Well, they built it, but they only had to use it in 3 shots. We had to use it in over 90. The system they built took almost week to simulate one shot, so one can imagine the hell that would create for 90+ shots, not to mention attempting to art direct those shots after they've been simmed once. Therefore, we built our own system to do it in our proprietary software. It worked! It took almost 3 months for the programmers to build it, have me test it and say what was needed and what was working, and it's very calculation heavy on it's own, but it reduced simulation time to about 45 minutes for an average length shot. That's much better than a week..... Also, the Siggraph people asked us to submit some new tech as a possible 'sketch' topic for the convention this year. One of the programmers, Dr. Ari Shapiro, submitted the cracking technology and it was accepted. That makes me happy to see the work recognized in an academic sense at least. because I'm sure the internet will be full of the inevitable 'THE CGI SUCKS!' from the unpleasable fanboy crowd.

LOL has a longer schedule and very professional production team, so this will be a different experience. I'm guessing it's not going to be as much 'fun' but the workload will be more efficiently managed. The Visual Effects supervisor on Mummy was great in my opinion. He is a sci fi geek, and especially a huge Battlestar Galactica fan and ALL of the supervisors of the other departments on the show were really cool and fun people.

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to being a normal work week type of person again, and possibly using this blog more than once every six months.....