It’s October and the film is still not done. I apologize for keeping you waiting so long for a new update. And for this unforeseen delay in finishing the film! We are much closer to done, thanks to slow, steady progress all summer long. And we now have only one scene left to get ready for a final bundling. But even then, when all the edited scenes are rendered together, I will still want us to tweak the transitions and make some global edits to smoothe out the overall visual and aural experience before burning it to DVD.
This final editing we’ve been doing hasn’t only been the kind where you cut things away. It has to do with adding a zoom here or a particular crop there in support of the narrative flow. It has to do with making sure there are no signs of a string or bit of putty or a smudge left behind. Abbott Imaging certainly has had their hands full refining the many animation effects and polishing up 35,000 images. For example, where a string crosses in front of another egg’s pattern, that thin path through the pattern has to be restored painstakingly by hand so the egg looks like it would have had there never been that gap. Since we had to leave some sections out of the premiere version, putting them in now has meant also doing those myriad small edits on thousands of frames. It has been incredibly time consuming, mind numbing, eye pulverizing, and shoulder tightening work.
And of course this isn’t the only project any of us is working on, so here we are still at it after all these months. But I have to say, after reviewing the film’s scenes hundreds of times, I’ve never once been bored, never once felt sick of watching, never once wanted to call it a day or cut a corner. I’ve provided my feedback to Abbott Imaging, and then reviewed the next versions until, after many iterations, each scene looks like something I can imagine an audience will love.
It turns out that in a film showing the adventures of a bunch of decorated eggs there is always something to notice or be surprised by, even after multiple viewings. It’s a richly textured story, for one. And each egg has patterns for you to look at. When multiple decorated eggs are in motion together on the screen, the patterns can play off each other in cool ways. With each viewing, there’s more to see. This is what keeps me pushing along, however slowly.
After inching along so slowly for so long, I won’t now speculate when the film will be completely finished or when I can get all of the rest of the Kickstarter rewards fulfilled. I’ll just hope this last bit of work we are doing doesn’t take too much longer, our schedules permitting.
Thank you for your patience. I am totally convinced it’ll be worth the wait!