[NOTE: Video starts at about the 20 seconds mark]
What you are seeing here is the work-in-progress Teaser for Episode 1 of SEED (the part that will show before the Opening Title Credits leading into Act 1). Please keep in mind, this is a Pilot Episode, only meant to serve as a “proof of concept” for how I intend to move forward with SEED. In other words, this is the bar we’ve set for our MINIMUM level of quality. Thus, it will only get significantly better moving forward – when we have a much larger budget and I can afford to hire a lot more people to work on the future projects.
For now, we finally have a “picture lock” on the animation side of this first project. Of course there is a LOT more tweaking that could be done – such as creating animation of the dials on the plane’s dashboard, giving movement to the foliage, fine tuning textures, fixing of minor continuity errors in a few places, etc. – but all of that would be well outside of the budget I had to work with for this. I now very much understand what other famous filmmakers have stated: “Movies are never finished. They are abandoned.” Every filmmaker desires to tweak and tweak and tweak to get things exactly the way they envisioned their baby in their mind. But there comes a time to move on. And by the end of last year (2020), we had reached that point.
That said, I’m still very, very happy with the animation results we were able to achieve given the budget and all of the crazy 2020 circumstances within which we had to work. All things considered, I think my South African team did a FANTASTIC job! I’m very proud of all of them and thank them for their dedication and hard work. GREAT JOB GUYS!!
Now we are moving onto the next phase in the process. That being sound design, composition of the musical score and the final audio mix… the icing on the cake as it were. For me, sound design and music are what really make a project like this come alive. Thus, this is actually the part I really enjoy the most in the process of filmmaking. But unfortunately, thanks to all the insanity going on in the world right now, I won’t be able to be there in person to oversee and experience it as I had originally planned. I do however have “boots on the ground” in South Africa who will be documenting the Behind the Scenes stuff. So stay tuned for more on that.
You might also enjoy the Behind the Scenes video I did regarding the motion capture process: https://youtu.be/8-c6SjhEtR4
PLEASE NOTE: We are doing this completely independent of the “Hollywood system,” which means it has to be crowdfunded. If you like what you see here, and wish to get behind what we are doing, please consider supporting the project:
https://seedtheseries.com/sow
And finally… a big huge THANK YOU!!! to all have supported us this far. For those of you who have been following my work, you know how hard it’s been and how long it has taken to get to this point. It is not an understatement to say, we couldn’t have done it without you. So, thank you! Thank you! THANK YOU! 🙂
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