2_03: Scarecrow (Part 1) and 2_04: Waterfall are now online. No foley yet.
http://www.holmesbryant.com/files/video/scarecrow_of_oz/

Ken, I want to apologize for butchering your scene when Trot and Capn Bill cross the rope bridge. It all started when I did a final shaded render to check for issues. About 100 frames in, Trot jumped about 2000cm off her path and then gradually drifted back to the path over the next 200 or so frames. I tried adjusting the path offsets but nothing was working. I couln't figure out what was going on, so I deleted her path constraint, adjusted the path a little, and reapplied the path constraint. But then, you must have continued to use path constraint offsets to get her across the bridge, because when she got to the end of her path, she just stood in place while the bone animation suggested she was actually on the bridge. So I manually keyframed the model bone across the bridge. Then at the end, I tried to match the movement of the model bone with her bone animation when she jumps into Bill's arms. I tried to keep it close to what you did, but I'm sure its different. Also, some of the camera angles are meant to hide some of the rougher parts of the "fixes" I did. I still think you did a wonderful job on that scene though.

I might try to adjust SC's movement across the bridge after everything else is done. His model bone doesn't seem to be moving in correspondance with the bone animation.

Also, the Waterfall set was a real challenge to render. The test renders (every 100th frame) came out fine. But when I final rendered it, every frame had a saturated blue tint over the whole image. I checked the render server logs and apparently the slaves where running out of memory while trying to process all the many thousands of sprites and hairs in this scene. So I cut the number of waterfall particles in half and it rendered, but the mist sprites were "popping" - like the transparency channel was on Hold interpolation instead on Zero Slope. So as a last attempt, I rendered with multipass OFF (using the A-Buffer renderer) and everything rendered fine. It also cut the render times down from about 40min per frame to about 11min per frame. I might try rendering other scenes with multipass off.

These things happen. It's looking good!

This is looking better and better. Well done!

A suggestion: When Scarecrow surfaces near the waterfall it might be more intense to have Trot call out, There he is!", before cutting back to Scarecrow vanishing again. Trot and Capt. Bill don't seem to react much when he finally surfaces near them. Maybe a quick close up of surprise on Trots face before they pull Scarecrow out?

Impressive work.

Any observations I'd add are of the obvious nature and will be negated in the editing and refinement. The music and the foley (lots of water FX) is really going to make these work.

There are a few times when I think the dialogue could be exaggerated/words and pitch emphasized more. Trot for instance is amazingly calm in some pretty exciting moments.


I will add this piddly observation as it might be fairly easy to adjust (even if in post).
When Scarecrow makes his splash into the water after falling off the rope bridge, after the splash has had time to register, the water/splash should proceed a little down stream in the direction of the flow. Yeah I'm nitpicking this one a little but with a purpose. Its an important movement that literally and figuratively moves our titular character and the story forward. Its obvious I know but I'd hate to see this little detail get missed in the refinement of it all. (Note to self for the final/FX pass)

Yes. That one caught my eye too.

I think I can fix that one without too much trouble. I have it written down in my notes.

Also, in editing, I wonder if there's a scene we could cut away to (Tinman?) after they run to help scarecrow so that the viewer will be left wondering about SCs fate for a while.

If George finishes animating the last two Pessim scenes, that would be a possibility. But at the moment, we don't have any Tinman material to cut to.