Hey friends, God has allowed me to gather a majority of the programs needed to create a film, I plan to jump right into it. Is there anyone here experienced in animation who would like to join in the effort of creating a full length feature film? I've seen some DVD creation software, that also allows you to copy tapes onto DVD's, and vice versa. I might take a look at that once the film is finished, so perhaps we could sell it. My only thing is that I would not want anything blasphemous of sexually oriented in the film. Perhaps along a fantasy genre. In any case, these are the programs I have: Poser 4, Poser 5 (soon) Bryce 5 (would purchase NaturalPose if it is compatible with P5) Lightwave 6.5b JASC PaintShop Pro 7, with animation shop Micrografx Picture Publisher 8 Pinnacle Studio 8 Acid 3.0 XenoDream (can you create animations with Xenodream? Hmmm...) Mimic I would like to start thinking about the characters, then move into the story outline, then to the complete story, and then move into storyboard sketches, and begin animating and sound editing one by one. I can composite the animations together in Pinnacle Studio, and add theatrical music, complete with Title and Credit screens, transitions, etc. Perhaps an epic, inspiring, mystical adventure filled with neat characters, creatures, animals, and an underlying symbolism beneath it. IM me if you're interested, or post to this thread with ideas. God bless! Ben

Hey Ben! First off, good luck with the project. I might be able to help out some on the sound. FX & music, unless you've got those covered. I would say from experience, after you have your script and storyboards - record the dialog before you start ANY animating of the characters. I just scrapped about three months of animation work for that reason. (I chose to start animating scenes, and well, I'm currently in the middle of dialog recording, thought I could make it match up. Isn't working for me, even with re-timing clips and stuff.) IM me and we can talk more about it. --silver

If you got afterFX you would be complete.

Attached Link: http://www.asciipr0n.com/4096/rocketmen/index.html

It took me a little over a year and a half to create a 30 minute masterpiece using these little tricks that I wish I had known from the start: (1) Write a script first, and by this I mean a SHOT BY SHOT script describing exactly what you want to occur. This will save you a lot of time when doing dialog and you won't wast time re-rendering scenes over and over again (2) when you write your script, number the scenes in increments of 5 or 10, this will allow you to insert scenes into your script and still have the clips on your harddrive in a meaningful order. Use trailing zeros "scene0001" "scene0010" etc so that your files always show up in the right order in your directories (3) if you have a really important action scene, render a few 'animatics' in wireframe before you commit to a full render. (4) get adobe after effects, and render in layers with targa output of frames, using alpha channels to composite. This way you render the background once, and "actors" , that is anything that's moving, in a separate layer. Renderers dont have to spend as much time drwaing blank pixels, if you are rendering your background for each frame then you are wasting CPU time. This does not work for scenes with complicated camera movement. You can get away with panning across a larger packground plate though. (5) rendering in layers also allows you to add in extra detail by simply adding the part later and rendering it as a separate layer. Handy for re-rendering something that's screwed up without having to re-do full frames (6) animate when awake, render when asleep. Get a bunch of scenes ready to go overnight, and then set them to go while you are asleep and/or at work.

Hi! Did you ever get your film shot? I, too, will be using my skills for Jesus. I am still in school, a junior in college. I am studying computer art & animation, 3D style. Hope to hear from you. Gabrielle

Hey, Ben. Why not animate the book Pilgrim's Progress? I've always thought it would make a great movie (well, there IS a live action movie of it, I believe, that I have yet to see. it's rather dated). But it fits your description almost exactly. If you haven't read it, you MUST. At least do a google on it and consider reading it. :) I plan on attempting to animate some scenes from it, once I'm at Southern Adventist University, studying character animation. But I'm getting ahead of myself... still have to get out of highschool and through the first year of college! :D