So where did the blog go?

I still hadn't finished the animation and though the end was in sight, it wasn't just around the corner. So I decided to cut myself some slack, take a few days to rethink my direction. But having entered that tunnel, I didn't come out the other side.

There was another project that I had planned to do: a competition for the University of London Students and Alumni. They were looking for work (mainly programming, but I think animation would have been good too) that took about a minute to make its impact. I thought that would get me going again, being a much smaller task. But though I put an entry in, it wasn't something I was particularly happy with or proud of.

Then came the real Sacramento Film and Music Festival 10x10. I thought the blog had been more of a handicap than spurring me on, so I decided to do that quietly. But the results were not much more effective. I spent a lot of time not really having a clear direction and fretting over it. I experimented, hoping something would develop out of that, but then it became even more difficult to glue the various unrelated experiments together in some cohesive way. This last weekend, it started to come together, I had a passable way to connect things and had the possibility of making something passable. But the time just wasn't there. I worked furiously and fairly efficiently during this weekend and I managed to turn in a disc by the deadline. But it is severely flawed. It has no sound and though I hope some of the ideas show through, to call it amateurish would be paying it a compliment.

So what for the future? I think I need to do something for me now. Something now so ambitious in terms of scale, but something where I can really work the quality up. And I need to do it quietly, without deadlines and without the world watching.

Sorry.

You can't handle the truth

The last few evenings have been somewhat disappointing personally, as I made minimal progress, but also didn't feel as though I took a break and I'm ready to come back refreshed. I dithered around with things that only had peripheral influence on this project; animated perlin noise and a new (to me) program, context free art. While I think both will be useful in future animations, I really need to get some movement on this project. I look forward to the weekend, where I intend to have an ani-fest and concentrate on actual animation: movement of parts and setting key-frames.

Round up the usual suspects

Another evening of marginal progress. Another scene started, some research into texture animation. It seems I just don't get much done during the week. I was thinking this mornning, a good target would be to complete the animation this weekend. That's still a big target, but I think it's achievable. In order to do that, I think I need to clear everything else out of the way, so I can concentrate only on animation.

All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up

Didn't do that much last night, but did learn more about camera mapping, which I think would give me a quick way to move from concept art to 3d model in future projects. Also added a logo with UV projection, which helped get the anchor into the story in this project and again should help my workflow in future projects.

I think tomorrow I need to concentrate on working out the missing blocks so I can really put all the animation pieces together.

Play it, Sam

I had expected this weekend to do some hard thinking and come up with a new plan. But instead, I just plodded on, adding some extra complexity, coming up with an alternate way to introduce one of the props and reduce the complexity, but most of all did some learning and managed to overcome an obstacle that had been blocking me for a while.

The problem was that I was trying to co-ordinate two animated events by hand, one of which was directly dependent on the other. It was the judge jumping in the bouncy castle and the castle movement in response to that. I realized that I needed to make the castle's movement automatically depend on the bouncing, as hand keying the animation was not flexible enough. This took me a huge amount of time, as I just couldn't get my head around the transform constraint, but I think I have something that works and a much better understanding of how the constraint works.

Also, I'm making strides understanding the non-linear editor, but I still need to go back and fix some things in my animation there.

The complexity I added was with some boid particles and for the screen time that they'll allow me to add, I think the complexity is probably worth it.

As for a grand plan ... I'm not sure, I think I'll just carry on like this for a while and see if I can make progress towards a finish.

I'm a bit stuck on an opening title too. I did some tests on something that looked quite satisfying, but doesn't really fit the mood of the rest, so back to the drawing board.

Go ahead, make my day

It's rather fitting that on the second deadline of 20 days, I did nothing in the evening. Instead, I headed out to the Sacramento Drink and Draw, which as always was refreshing and interesting.

So where do I go from here? I could just run on without deadline and complete it when it is done. But that sounds rather dangerous. Perhaps the best thing is to take stock after this weekend and figure out a new plan, since weekends are key. While I inch forward during the week, the weekend is the time I make real progress. So far I've had 3 (plus an extra day for memorial day).

There a couple of things I feel sure of:

1. I feel a drive to complete this and I believe I will complete it in the near future

2. I still believe it is feasible to do a short in 10 days, though I would like to complete a project in something a lot closer to 10 days to make sure I have the right approach and ingredients.

I shot an elephant in my pajamas

Not much progress in the early part of this evening, but it was moving forward. When I started the animating phase, I'd do a whole bunch of movements keyframes, and curve tweaks, and it would get better and better until I did something that had unintended consequences and I couldn't fix it without adding a load of corrective keyframes, which I could never get smooth. This evening, even though I was moving slowly, I seemed to be getting the hang of it, and anything that did go wrong I could track down the source fairly quickly and correct it. But it was still very slow. It seems in all other areas, you can cut corners, fake things, but the animation part it just seems it takes as long as it takes. I hadn't realized how much time this would suck up.

So to try and be a little more effective, I went back and did some reading on the non-linear action editor and I feel a lot better about it now and I hope to move a little quicker tomorrow. I have also got over the hump I had been trying to get over for a few days with cyclic actions, but with an extra layer on top.

Maybe that 10 day period is not achievable after all, but then I did stray from my original idea of using mattes and cutouts and everything is 3d. I hope to get another shot at a dummy run (assuming I can finish this one), so maybe I can figure it out with that. Perhaps I may finish it this weekend when I have more time? Anyway, I'm on Day 19 (of 10) and there's no way it's going to be finished for 20. Once that deadline is gone, I have no other targets, I just need to make sure I'm making progress and that I actually see it through. It might even help the quality as maybe I'll tweak some more stuff before it's done. But I musn't do that until I have completed all areas. Having a section ready for render but bad is better than not having it ready for render.

I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore

Bit of a stalled night. Couldn't seem to knuckle down early on, and then when I did, I got stuck in trying to patch some cyclic actions together, so the project is essentially no further on, but I've learned a lot more in the process and I think I'm getting away from the "lots of points" problem in the graphs. Even so the actions still aren't that smooth. I mustn't either lose heart, or let getting it right take a higher priority than getting it done, because I think that's why so many animation projects fail, or never get out of the stage of having a few walk cycles.

I did put a test up on youtube last night (not publicly) of a 1-second movement cycled 8 times and that was quite pleasant. Also I realized I was missing motion blur (a la vector blur) and that made it seem much more palatable.

I will finish this, I will.

Houston we have a problem

Tonight seemed like really hard work. What should be a simple cyclical animation just seemed to take forever. First I was making lots of really horrid tweaks upon tweaks without a solid foundation, so I wiped it all and started again from scratch. It's better the second time round, but I still had to make lots of little adjustments. I hope I have something passable enough that I can move forward, but I won't know that until I've done the render that's currently churning away.

When I started, I'd pared things down to 10 seconds a render, but I'm up to 40 seconds now with all the good stuff I'm putting back in. This makes it difficult to work on animation because I need the final render to be able to see where the fixes need to be. It's difficult to concentrate too, because I'm constantly having to break for renders, so of course off I go surfing the web while I wait for that to happen.

Day 17 of 10. I'm starting to think the second deadline is under threat. At least the finish is getting closer: it's not one of those things where the more you do, the more you realize how much there really is left to do. And I think I'm better off spending more time and getting it to look better. I know I'm not fiddling with detail, I'm really making big improvements.

You know how to whistle, don't you?

Day 16 of the 10 day project and I'm still going. This is possibly the most enjoyable yet. I just had a few great ideas for the remaining shots and the section I'm on is probably the best looking. Couple that with some ideas for the next project and I feel I have momentum. I also feel I'm closing in on a goal: it may not be as cogent as I had hoped, or as pretty, but getting it done would be a stake in the ground. I think it should be easier going from here on in. Apart from the climax scene, the animation should be looser and so easier to get right without lots of tweaking.

The dark cloud on the horizon would be day 20: this is the (secondary) goal to get everything completed and although I've made a lot of progress today, it's the end of the weekend and I'm finding I don't achieve as much during the week. From here there are only weekdays, so we shall see.

Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown

A busy day. I have 30 seconds of silent, "emergency" footage as image files. This is footage that I need to add sound to, and needs a color tweak, but that can be used as final footage. That's the good news, the bad news is: it doesn't look too good, the animation is really wooden. But I think at this point, finishing up is more important than getting something that looks good. There are so many abandoned amatuer animation projects, I think finishing is an important habit to master. Especially since the task was ambitious: a finished, 10 minute short in 10 days with no budget, only a home computer, using mostly free software, by one person.

I was thinking this morning about how much I'd strayed from the original goal of making this mostly a 2d, painted animation. Perhaps I might put some of that back, but right now I need to animate, animate, animate to get to a completed project.

I just do eyes

Felt like I made some progress with animation this evening. Got the eyes working ... mostly. Now the eyelids follow the eyes, which makes everything better, but the eyeballs stil pop out occasionally and I'm still dealing with lots of weird rotations that seem to fly in out of nowhere and need much tracking down. Starting the animation made me think that I'm going to be nowhere near 10 minutes and I'll probably have to string it out to get to the 4 minute minimum I set myself. That includes credits, but being a one-person project, I don't have the raw material to string the credits out too long.

Oh the project after this is going to be so good. Saw some work by students of the French art school Gobelin's. It's depressing after that to come back to my effort. But I know I'll feel such a sense of achievement if/when I get it out the door.

So much to do, so little time.

I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore

Well what a frustrating evening. Spent almost all of it trying to stop eyes rolling out of sockets. Got some basic eye rigging in the end, but the lids don't automatically roll with the eyes, that would have to be done manually. That's a pity because it was working and it looked good, but unfortunately when the head rotatated ... boing the eyes would go everywhere and I couldn't think of a way round it and though I brought up a couple of models, Sintel light doesn't appear to have that and Mancandy was beyond the scope of my understanding. When all this is done, I'll have to spend some time with quality models and see how this is supposed to work.

Perhaps I'll wind down this evening with a review of Bassam Kurdali's Mancandy video - I think it said in there how he does it, I just couldn't remember.

I think what I'm doing now is the most tedious phase of the project, but it's moving on. I'm just wondering now if I can really do this within the extended deadline. But whatever I do, I must soldier on. Another go round would be good, I need to be sure that I can simplify all this.

To the bat cave.

Tomorrow is another day

No pics today :(

I've put a lot of work in this evening, but without getting much further, as most of it's been learning and repair. I've set up a new scene for animating, repaired some eyes and forearms, worked out camera changing, worked out multiple instances of models. I'm still not sure when I'll finish, but I know it isn't imminent. It's still feeling like fun though, and I still feel I'll complete it before the next self-imposed deadline.

Really, I'm itching to start the next project, though I don't know for sure what that's going to be. I think there will be another one before the actual film festival competition and I have some ideas knocking around, though nothing really specific. I should be more careful about logging these ideas, so I've got a journal of interesting stuff to fall back on. I'll probably impose another 10-day limit on the next project too, just to try and get into a routine of being able to pare everything down to 10 days.

The good news is that I'm on to the animating side, which I think is going to be fun, but time consuming, since I have to render out a few frames to see what it will really look like. Just renedered out 200 frames and it took about half an hour, so that works out at just under a day to render the whole thing, which is what I'd been budgeting.

There's no crying in baseball

The danger now that I've missed the self-imposed deadline is that I'll slacken off, especially since it's the week now and I didn't get much done during the week last week. But I hope being aware of the danger is half-way to avoiding it. There's a lot more I'd like to do, and a lot more I could do, but I need to concentrate on getting this out of the door. I think I have everything modelled now (maybe the odd extra prop could be plopped in). I have the scene's, mostly everything's textured, so the real big work left to do is the animation. Once that's done and everything's rendered, then it's sound, music maybe a few final tweaks and then that's it.

I think the animation will turn out to be a bit ropey, as I need to work quickly, but hopefully it will have a stop-motion kind of feel, aided by the 15 frames per second that it's going to be rendered at.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

It is clear now that I'm not going to get the whole thing completed in 10 days. I think the point is that I now know that I could have done and that was the point of the whole thing. I'm now operating on plan B, which is to get this out in a further 10 days, on the rationale that next time round, I'd be twice as efficient. I don't think this is unreasonable, there's been a lot of learning, some logistical problems, and for the ultimate project at the Sacramento Film and Music Festival, I'd have the pressure of a real rather than self imposed deadline. Even with this, I think I could have slapped something together in the 10 days.

I certainnly don't have a perfectionist attitude in completing this, but it seems that the project itself is telling me: this is stuff that you can cut corners on, this is stuff that we're going to do, even if it takes longer to create and render. I'm happy with this, and that I can get it completed in a few more days. How many, I'm not sure: I didn't get a lot done last week during the work week. Part of that was that I had problems with the script, but part was probably I didn't put a huge effort in after a day at work.

So the current state is that I have two scenes created and in need of animation and sound. I have a further two scenes to go, but I expect these to take less time.

I am big! It's the pictures that got small

Spent pretty much all today and really made some progress. I have no idea how long this movie will be, whether it will make the "hurdle" time of 4 minutes. I have no idea how much work is left: I think I could finish it by the deadline, but it could be that I don't finish it in the 10 day extension that I've allowed myself, but I don't think that's very likely. What I do know is that I will shortly have some sort of animated film and there are some small touches that I really like.

Today I went to the open day at Studio 24 in Sacramento as I knew the people from the Sacramento International Film and Music Festival would be there and that you could pre-register. I think all preregistering did was get you on their mailing list, and everything happens on August 4th, but at least I'm on that. I also got a chance to ask them about the output format as that has been worrying me and they basically accept anything, so I think my 640x260 @ 15 fps, rerecorded to 29.97 fps should work. I just uploaded an avi, x264, mp3 audio, 15 fts to youtube and that works fine. I was quite pleasantly surprised at the quality.

Big day tomorrow. Two more scenes to do, all of the animating, sound, and music, ready for a big render and composite on Monday.

The stuff that dreams are made of

It's all back on track (at last, phew!). I have a new, much simpler, much more visual idea for the story. I think it can carry me all the way to the finish line. Plenty of work to do, but all still do-able and I can't wait to get started.

The idea is a kind of non-story, but I have it pretty much mapped out in my head, including the sound, the deliberately limited script, the visuals, how I'm going to work in all the required components (the line, the bouncy castle, the anchor). There are still some details to be fleshed out, but the format is not restrictive, so I have some flexibility as to how to complete these.

A few changes to the style I had planned too. I was originally wanting a black and white film-noire kind of vibe, with lots of cut-outs for props and scenery ("Doctor Caligari's Cabinet" meets Guy Madden). Now I'm thinking more Magic Roundabout/Clangers and fantasy (aimed at adults, but without any particularly "adult" themes).

Today I'm planning to pop out to the open day on Studio 24 in Sacramento, where apparently you can pre-register for the Sacramento International Film Festival 10x10 competition, but I still expect to get a lot done.

I must remember to do a backup and commit to the change control before I start.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning

The lack of story still is in issue I can't resolve. So I decided to sidestep it and just add some stuff to make a courtroom and maybe everything will work itself out tomorrow. I've had a few ideas, but nothing you could hang your hat on for four minutes. This is going against the initial idea of painting everything and the black and white, but I figure I can always go back to that. If I have a courtroom to play with and two characters, then I have what I need when the story does come.

I just today noticed that the dates are now up for the real 10x10 event at the Sacramento International Film Festival this year: August 4th is when it kicks off (not sure if that's day 1 of the filmmaking, since the festival itself runs from August 17th-21st). I am definitely going in for this: even if I can't make this short work, I know it can be done.

I feel the need. The need for speed!

I started writing out a script. My plan was just to keep writing, if I got stuck, then just move to a later point in the story. I wanted to avoid stopping and thinking or judging what I'd written. Then I'd go back and make corrections, make it better. But it got to a point where I thought "this is all just dialogue": I'm writing 12 angry men. And while I still like the original idea, I wonder how it can be made without stuffing it full of words, with no supporting action. It was too ambitious for what I was doing here.

I need to take a step back and simplify, even if that means chucking the whole idea out. I need to tell the story visually. I need it to be simple. I knew writing would be the hard part. I thought I had a head start with a pretty good idea and the rest would just flow, but I think the idea is too complex for this format. The real challenge is getting a courtroom drama that doesn't rely on dialogue exchanges, that can be told simply and visually.

I'm starting to get a little concerned over the lack of progress over the past few days, but I think the end is still achievable. If I can just get a simple story hashed out ... maybe if I'm desperate, just abandon story and go for something surreal. Then I have the weekend to flesh that out into an animation.

Sound affects

So yesterday was spent on sound. I didn't get much done, but then I didn't have much time, so I felt happy enough with what I'd done. The quality seems acceptable to me - using the mic from a Zoom PS-04, recording it dry and slapping some reverb and compression on in FLStudio. Not sure what I'm going to use to chop up the audio - either audacity or the Edison editor in FLStudio. I think Edison is probably the best choice, but it might take some time to learn how to use it effectively. From trying to do the animatic and realizing I needed sound, I tried the sound and realized I needed a script. Or at least I'm going to write down some dialogue on index cards.

There is still a key plot point to be defined and I've hit a block on how to do it. I think this is where having someone else on the project would be useful, but I'm trying to attack it obliquely by thinking of exactly what is required, what this element is for, what it achieves as far as the story, what it means to the characters. I'm hoping that all of this will unravel in the shower and the answer will become apparent.

One of the nice things about doing this is that I'm seeing lots of possibilities for things that I could do on a new project that would be fairly simple to do and would give great results, like having the riggify limbs to animate lots of models and the possibilities opened up by sound.

Despite the fact that I'm quite a way in to the project and I don't seem to have much to show, I still feel upbeat. Record the audio, cut a first animation, and from there it's just a matter of attending to all the fixes so that I can make it better.

We're going to need a bigger boat

Yesterday I got down to the animatic and knocked out 1,000 frames of it (whole movie should be 9,000). But then disaster struck. Well, in a mild form anyway. I was cleaning up some files I had littered around the place when I accidentally deleted the animatic file and lost the evenings work. Not quite as bad as it sounds: having done it once it would be easier to do it a second time round.

It made me realize two things though: the enormity of the task ahead and that I need to do the narration first to pin the script down and get the timings.

The render time was quite troubling too: I worked out it would take about 4 hours to do a complete animatic: that's not too bad for the animatic, but I had a lot of things turned off for that, so I don't have much headroom to turn things back on for the final render.

On to the animatic

Worked on animatic, but got distracted along the way with issues when splitting the models and rigs into different files. Tried blenderaid, but I was on a different version of python when I last used it and the binaries don't install on 3.2. I could install from source, or maybe try and use one of the different versions of python I have lying around, but decided to go ahead without blenderaid and come back to it later, if necessary. I have been taking daily backups of the files and I have been using fossil for version control. There isn't that much to use it for at the moment, but I have a habit of not naming things and letting them take the defaults. Naming as I go would be neater and probably the larger the project, the more this would be an issue.

Other than that, did a bit of compositor twiddling - that was fun and didn't spend too much time on it, but I really need to focus on getting that animatic done.

Questions answered

 
I'm now on to my second (and final) character, both are rigged to some extent using riggify. This was the first time using riggify and I was quite pleasantly surprised. It's simple and straightforward (to use anyway) and I think I could complete further rigs in much faster time.  In fact it's so straightforward, I'm wondering whether to add another character. There's still facial rigging to do, but I think I'll concentrate on getting the first animatic done, because that will tell me so much about what still needs doing.

I think I've reached an important milestone though. With the characters in their current states, I think I could at least do a series of static dioramas with characters in posed positions, like statues, and use these to tell the story. That's great to know because even if this is the minimum I should aim for in the real 10x10 project, I think that's still enough to be able to tell an interesting story with arresting visuals (it just puts more pressure on the story to be interesting and the visuals to be arresting). And after all, that was the question I was trying to answer in doing this project, so I think that's an Epic Win.

I'm a bit worried about facial rigging at this point. I'm thinking that with the animatic, I might forego facial rigging and just use shape keys.

To the batcave ....

First day over and not that much to show for it. I had some logistical problems: since I'm hogging the main computer, the idea was to get the old computer running to allow everyone else some internet time, but alas the old computer is more severely injured than I'd first thought. So I didn't get started until late, and then spent a lot of time futzing with rigging and not really making much progress. The theory was sound: I was using blenrig, which means that there's a cage already rigged and you just tailor it to your character. In practice, I was finding I needed to move the cage around a lot (my fault: my characters body dimensions weren't so good).

I decided that I was getting mired, so I switched from rigging a base character to try and get the basic animatic down, to modelling the base character before the rigging. If rigging is going to be a huge amount of time, I might as well do it once, on the final character. That seemed to go a lot better, both in terms of progress and lifting my enthusiasm and resulted in the picture I'm posting.

The evening we went out for my "Birthday Tea" and though I tried working after, I was so tired I just flopped to bed at 9. So a mixed day, which is probably ok for a first day.

The timing of the days doesn't really work out that great - in order to squeeze two weekends into the ten days, they have to be at either end. Ideally, I'd have these days in the middle, so I'd have a chance to work out where the big time sinks are first, then have the huge time chunk, then have less time doing things and just leaving the computer rendering. But it is what it is and that's why I'm doing the dummy run: to work out how to adapt to the conditions.

It has a working title now: "Kangaroo Court" and I've got most of the plot worked out and I'm still happy with the idea.

To infinity and beyond ...

The game's afoot

I was going to start tomorrow, but I just couldn't wait. So 11 pm today, I learned the constraints:
Genre: Courtroom Drama
Props: A bouncy castle, an anchor
Line: I could've been a contender (Adele says from Raging Bull, but I say from On the Waterfront)

I think I already have the plot and a way to make it with only two characters and a narrator. The hard parts will be that what I'm thinking of now involves a lot of talk from the narrator and a lot of movement. I chose narration so that I'd avoid problems with lip synch. Having no speech would have solved the same problem, but then that would have put a lot of stress on the visuals. This way, I get to move the story along and I get to add the narration after the visuals have been defined. Next step: some basic modelling and working out the details for the first animatic, hopefully by tomorrow, but Sunday at the latest.

The plot I have in mind is inspired by Resevoir Dogs, Death and the Maiden, and a Play For Today about WW II bomber crews.

Day -1

The day before I start the 10x10 movie (10 minute short in 10 days). I'd set aside this day for setup and getting things organized, but now it's here, I don't think there's really a lot of setup to do.

I was going to publicize this a bit more, but I'm not so sure now - there isn't much to see; I don't have any pictures. I did look into doing some more formal planning, Gantt charts, critical paths, estimating times, but the more I think about it, the more I think maintaining these plans would add overhead. I have a loose idea in my head of how the time is going to go and I think things may change as I start work on the project, so I'd end up with a choice of junking the original plans or adding even more overhead trying to make new plans.

That's not to say I'm going to lack discipline, or constantly be aware of the deadline. I think one of the dangers when I start work is that I'll spend too much time on stuff that doesn't contribute a great deal to the final movie. For this reason, I'll probably forgo concept art, storyboards, a formal script. Instead what I plan to do is to go as quickly as possible to an animatic - a short animated "thumbnail" movie. It will look like crap, but it will give a sense of what works and what doesn't, together with timings.

I hope to have that mostly with a settled story, script, models, and rigging by the end of this weekend, then use the following week to polish it into the movie itself. The final weekend will be for final renders and fixes.

Almost time

Through one of the art events I attend (either Drink-and-Draw or Sketchbomb, I forget which) I met Ryan Cicak, who introduced me to the 10x10 event at the Sacramento International Film Festival. That's a category for 10 minute shorts, produced in 10 days. I loved the idea and resolved to enter the competition this year. Having never made a short film before, I decided to do a dummy run as soon as my exams were over, to see if I really could complete something that didn't burn your eyeballs down to the optic nerve, in just 10 days.

Well, yesterday was the last exam. My plan is that this weekend I will ask my wife for the same initial conditions they pick from a hat in the festival:
* a genre
* a famous line from a movie (like "we're going to need a bigger boat")
* two props
My movie must include all these.

My plan is to do a computer animation. The big hurdles I face are:
* I've never anything more than render tests
* I have $0 budget and only my home computer
* I still have a day job, so it's evenings and weekends only
* It's just me doing everything
* On top of the animation, I will post 1 blog entry for every day of the project

While this might sound a little crazy, I have been thinking it through and I do think it's achievable. Things I have working for me:
* I have blender (the open source 3d animation, compositing, and kitchen-sinkinator) and have been studying it for a while.
* I plan to use either monochrome or very limited palette
* I plan to use a lot of digital paintings for backgrounds/mattes and heavy use of compositing small parts rather than large renders
* The render size will be small (I'm thinking 640x480, possibly with matte's to give 16x9 aspect ratio) and if I can't make the full 10 minutes, I'll settle for anything over 4 minutes
* I have FL Studio for sound effects, vocal track and music
* I intend there to be no character dialog, but a narration track
* I have Gimp and a tablet, which I shall use for cut-outs and texturing

Though I plan to spend 10 days making the film, I'm allowing an extra day of setup and also a day of release/publicity. If I don't complete it within the 10 days, I'm going to allow myself up to another 10 day extension, with the theory that if I do it the second time around, I can be up to twice as efficient with the experience gained.

I think the hardest part though, will be the writing. Neither writing nor storytelling come naturally to me, yet writing is the one component that can trump all the others. But I'm hoping with the nervous energy and pressure of the 10 day deadline, I can come up with something.

So it all starts on Saturday. Wish me luck!